Muppet babies will never be available on streaming due to studio copyright claim | Hacker News Reader

Muppet babies will never be available on streaming due to studio copyright claim

movieweb.com

40 pointsajdude52 comments

A healthy chunk of media from the 80s to the 2000s is hard to get released because of the copyright thicket caused by the shows sampling other media.

It sucks, and I don't know what the answer is.

The answer is abolishing copyright. Not to save these shows. For other reasons. But saving these shows would be nice.

Well, at the very least the answer would be softening copyright to the point where the kind of sampling that kind of media did is permissible again without clearing every single piece sampled. However that would effectively kill copyright because the only way those shows were able to do that was, in a way, what we now call "backroom deals".

I am not sure about abolishing, but it would already quite help if there was a clear, reasonably timed, copyright period. Like 50 years after publication.

Let’s see what the outcome of the generative AI law suits are. I am hopeful, but not very.

That's very much throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

No; a much better answer is mandatory licensing, with set, reasonable fees.

Pirating it and storing it on your own storage system. Copyright is unlikely to change materially in the next decade or two.

Quality copies make their way into long term archival systems, for when copyright is possibly less insane. 50 years? 100 years? Doesn't matter, those copies will be safe for the future. It will take time for the electorate and the representatives they elect to turn over ("progress occurs one funeral at a time").

Take to the seas!

If there is no means to legally watch something after 10 years, then it shouldn't be illegal to pirate it.

I'm a little baffled by the sampling problem. Is a few second small clip of something really representing some sea of lost income damage for the original? Or is it more like femto-dollars per viewing and they want it accounted for?

Neither. It's "the two corporations who own each half of the work want to dictate the conduct of the other half". Same reason why Nintendo and Microsoft couldn't agree on who gets Goldeneye back in the Wii/360 era.

It's more like "we could show this on TV because we had a verbal agreement with the rights owner, but our lawyers won't let us put it on streaming because we probably don't have the actual rights to display that content, and so it's a legal liability we don't need". Do the rights holders actually care? Is it clear who the rights holders actually are? Maybe not, but nobody wants to find out.

One of my favorite videos games Blur is unavailable because it came with a licensed sound-track, but the license was only for like ~10 years.

Movies wouldn't be what they'd be without good music. It sets a vibe. So I understand that even short bits of music deserve some compensation. I do wish there was some kind of Fair Reasonable and Non-discrimindatory option available, that set standard rates & would prevent these kind of availability hangups, and expand access.

I do kind of get that artists don't want their work associated with certain things though; certain notable politicians/parties for example seem to have gotten half-a-dizen artists telling them to stop using their music, saying they don't want anything to do with the politician. One could make some kind of horrible terrible slanted movie, and under (F)RAND the artist seemingly wouldn't have recourse from involuntarily becoming the title track. It's complicated. :/

What we have now is awful though. Maybe we just create some hoops to jump through for rights holders. Make it so content-owners have to renew their part of the deal or otherwise the license automatically extends. That way at least some media, rather than being lost, is released. This is vaguely like copyright pre-1976, where folks got 28 years & then could renew for another 28 years.

Usually music. They get a 5 year broadcast contract and then its gone after that. MTVs sketch comedy show The State comes to mind, now only available as vhs rips.

IMO companies should have 5 years to make money off what they produce. That should give them time for a theatrical release and a bulk of the at home sales and early streaming boost. For a TV series, maybe it’s 5 years after the show ends. After that, it enters the public domain to avoid media being lost to time and the mess we currently have.

If a studio hasn’t made enough money to recoup their costs and generate some profit in 5 years, it is unlikely they ever will.

I’m not sure how this would work with something like a soap opera that has been on air for 50+ years with no sign of stopping.

The answer is collective and compulsory licensing programs.

> I don't know what the answer is.

my answer was to stop letting media own me

i enjoy what i watch as art, and I look forward to enjoying new things as they come out (people will always be creating new things)

but I have to consciously try my best not to let marketers try to influence my emotions to purchase branded merchandise

As a result of these copyright prohibitions Muppet Babies is in much more danger of becoming lost media. A lot of the early film media we lost wasn't just the cinematic flops (though we did lose quite a lot of that) but instead films that may have been blockbusters in their time but were owned by very controlling studios. A classic example of this is 1917's Cleopatra which may have been the most expensive film ever shot.

Same with software and products from really controlling industries or research from really controlling academia.

We have lost a lot of human productions because of control, egos and misjudgements.

What's fascinating to me is the ongoing "open" movements reverse engineering old executables to make code maintainable. Stuff like openra

Indeed, and I really hope we will get better disassemblers and code interpretation tools that can make that task much easier.

All 8 seasons seem to be well seeded in torrent land.

> The lack of camaraderie among studios in the industry today makes it difficult for Muppet Babies to find a streaming platform home due to copyright royalties and trademark concerns.

Or in other words, they now have to follow the same rules as creators outside this clique and have to pay royalties if they want to use copyrighted material in their work.

EDIT: If you haven't read the article and think I'm being crass: the problem isn't that there are disputes over who holds the copyright. The problem is that the show liberally used live action clips that were in the public domain as well as live action clips that still aren't. And they only got away with it because at the times the people involved in the show were on good terms with the people involved with those movies. They could still release the show without those clips.

Copyright ought to expire much much sooner than 70 years or whatever if a work is not available to reasonably (annd legally) obtain anymore. Copyrights are a balance between the public good, and allowing creators to make money from their creations, but as soon as they have obviously abandoned that, then no one is served by such an absurdly long copyright period. I suppose in this case, since it could perhaps be considered a derivative work, where the originals (Star Wars, for instance) are still available for viewing reasonably, it’s more complicated, but nonetheless this feels like a travesty, which benefits no one at all.

If no one can acquire a product legally and the copyright owners do not release (or worse, delete) the product, it seems like this wouldn’t actually change anything in those cases. The best you could hope for is contentious right holders poisoning the well for the other rights holders by releasing a copy.

There is a similar situation with The Adventures of Pete & Pete from Nickelodeon that is preventing it from being put on Paramount+. Paramount and (I think) Sony both claim some amount of ownership, and instead of hashing it out they've just canned the whole show. It goes back as far as when shows were released on DVD, the 1st and 2nd seasons were released on DVD, the 3rd was pressed and ready to go but never actually shipped

>There is a similar situation with The Adventures of Pete & Pete from Nickelodeon that is preventing it from being put on Paramount+

The upside to things being stuck in permissions-purgatory is that it's usually all available in bootleg format on Youtube (albeit in terrible quality), as there's no one directly responsible to copyright strike it. The full series has been up there for a while.

The Drew Carey Show suffers from an interesting similar-ish issue, due to music used throughout it. As a result it’s never gotten released past season 1 on DVD and a one-off compilation DVD. No streaming services.

WKRP, Beavis and Butthead (obviously), even more-recent shows like Skins (UK) have had this problem.

One of the major causes of the best version of certain things only being available for those sailing the high seas.

Seems like Beavis and Butthead would be pretty easy to cut out the music video sections

That’s how it’s been released, but that’s a huge part of the show.

I keep wondering when/if we'll see media that merely cites other work.

Why embed Nirvana in your show? Just have the video embed something citing the work, and let the viewer and maybe their player go track down & integrate the work.

or even better, if I upload a video to YouTube and it includes a Nirvana song, and if YouTube has permission from Interscope to distribute Nirvana music by virtue of an explicit license or the fact that Interscope uploaded a bunch of Nirvana videos, since it's YouTube doing the distributing shouldn't their licenses cover all? Don't even bother technically under the hood digging up the licensed copy

Obviously they don't, but they should

Not impossible, but for the case of Beavis and Butthead, you’d need tight control over the start/stop timing, the ability to choose a specific version of the video (can’t have some newer one with extra stuff added or some cut or whatever, even just blank space at the beginning or end), the ability to cut away from the video while the audio continues and mix in your own extra audio, all kinds of things like that. It’d be a lot of complexity when you could just… bake it in, which also tends to be the best way to preserve anything, simply connecting all the relevant parts together (practically) inseparably (see: link rot).

> the 1st and 2nd seasons were released on DVD, the 3rd was pressed and ready to go but never actually shipped

The Muppet Show itself had a similar issue—the show was 5 seasons, but seasons 4 & 5 never made it to DVD. I had assumed that they were gone for good, but Disney+ actually released all 5 seasons.

Maybe someday we'll also see the later versions of The Muppet Show, like "Muppets Tonight" or "the muppets.". But I'm not holding my breath.

https://archive.ph/GGrdC

This article doesn't provide any detail about what claims are made, or who makes them. It doesn't even mention who owns copyright on the show. The one quote talks about how Jim Henson was well-liked... there is no mention of copyright in the quote.

Hot take:

IMO I’m willing to accept the loss (and it is huge) of access to media if people follow this, but I truly and deeply believe that anyone who wants to tightly control some intellectual or cultural “property” should put it in a plain cardboard box and file it in the darkest corner of the most inhospitable warehouse never to be seen from (or profited off of) again.

At least then we could mourn properly before moving on and creating works freely without the chilling effects caused by the looming threat of being sued for accidentally making something similar.

Consumers deeply do not care about these quibbles. If the media is popular enough they will just pirate it.

Just as well I got the DVD boxed set then. Err...

Eventually it will be public domain

If the copies survive

All 7 seasons are well seeded on the torrents. It's hard for media to become lost these days, but if you want to see a lot of it, you aren't going to do so legally under such a ludicrous IP regime.

> It's hard for media to become lost these days

Not exactly "these days", but not the early 1900s, either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_missing_episodes

Cry Baby Lane was lost media for a decade: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cry_Baby_Lane

But well before everyone had enough data storage in their pocket to hold all those episodes and much more.

Also, before recording from tv (or streaming) was deliberately made difficult by nonsensical DRM...

Out of curiosity, is there anything currently on TV/streaming that you can't find a de-DRM'd copy of online?

Ok, but are they of the same quality as masters?

Definitely not. They appear to be SD rips of television broadcasts. Obviously it would be best if rights holders made their media available for reasonable prices on reasonable services, but until we have sane IP laws, hobbyist preservation efforts will be the predominant way that some media will be preserved for consumption at all, quality notwithstanding.

It's hard for popular media to become lost these days.

Undiscovered or not-mainstream-popular work gets lost all the time.

Assuming Jim Henson is the legal creator, it will enter the public domain in 2085.

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