news:rASHG.102138$OL3....@fx41.am4...
> On Wed, 17 Jun 2020 13:01:38 +0100, tim... wrote:
>
>> I have given up waiting for them to show the B&W ones
>
> Same here, but since they won't broadcast or sell them, I
> sourced them online and downloaded them. No one lost a
> sale because there was no sale to lose. My conscience is
> clear :-)
That's how I rationalise it too: copyright should be there to protect sales.
If the work is not on sale (or is "out of print" with no prospect of more
copies being made) then there is no sale to be made. I would be quite happy
to pay a nominal royalty for copies of not-for-sale programmes (if they were
made available for download) if I was sure it would all go to the programme
makers (cast and crew) and not to the broadcaster and the financial
parasites.
It is sad to think that broadcasters' archives are full of programmes that
were shown once (maybe with a repeat) and have never been seen since - and
there is no prospect of them *ever* being seen again because of rights. It
is better to raise a small income from internet release (maybe not mastered
to the higher standards for DVD release), distributed according to a
standard formula, than to raise no income at all. Releasing them for free or
for a small royalty does not leave anyone worse off than keeping them
forever in the archive (or, horror of horrors, deleting them).
I would dearly like to see a radical shake-up in the copyright system to
prevent "scarcity value" and items lying unseen in libraries and archives:
- All copyright should date from when the work was made (or the book was
written), rather than in the case of a book, from the date of death of the
author, so all works benefit from the *same* length of protection, rather
than an author's early work being protected (and raising royalties) for
longer
- Copyright should be seen as a sales protection: a two-way contract with
responsibilities as well as rights - as long as copies are available for
sale in unlimited quantities, they will benefit from royalties for the
agreed period of time, but that when the item goes "out of print", all
copyright protection lapses and amateur copies may be made. This is
completely separate from "moral right to be identified as the author" which
should continue for ever - no-one else should be able to claim that they
were the author.
My grandpa wrote a niche-market book in the 1970s about his memories of
railways in West Yorkshire in the 1930s-1960s. A certain number of copies
were printed. About 10 years ago, my dad (as grandpa's executor) started
getting requests for copies, but found that the publisher (rather than
grandpa) held the copyright, and that company had been sold, and the new
owner had no interest in resurrecting books from the original publisher's
list. Nor would they give/sell the copyright to dad. Stalemate. Dog in
Manger. Since grandpa died in the late 1970s, and copyright runs for 75
years from death, it will be about 2055 before it lapses and copies can be
made to satisfy a small but non-zero demand, by which time most of the
people who remember that time and would want to reminisce about it will be
dead. We have his original manuscript and photos, so it would be dead easy
for us to publish it as a PDF, either for free or for a nominal cost, but we
(as grandpa's descendents) are not allowed to do this.