BBC episode rescued by illegal home taper -- the sort of thing the Beeb is stamping out with DRM
Mark sez, "A nice bit of copyright hypocrisy for you. It's a story on the BBC website about an upcoming broadcast of an episode of Dad's Army that was thought to have been lost.
The original soundtrack had been erased by the BBC, but a radio presenter made his own recording of the episode and kept it for 30 years. The show's producers are thrilled to have found a good quality copy of the recording.
The irony is that, as you know, UK law only allows 'home taping' for temporary 'time shifting'. Certainly not for creating a library of recordings lasting 30 years.
With their DRM-encumbered iPlayer and other efforts to prevent 'copying', it's even less likely that there will be any duplicate discoveries 30 years from now."
'Lost' Dad's Army show back on TV (Thanks, Mark!)
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30 years is a valid amount of time to time-shift.
Excellent. I wonder if the BBC are aware of the irony?
The law can say what it wants; bbc grants you permission to their content for personal use. ... from their own web terms.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/terms/#3
Intellectual Property
4. All copyright, trade marks, design rights, patents and other intellectual property rights (registered and unregistered) in and on bbc.co.uk and all content (including all applications) located on the site shall remain vested in the BBC or its licensors (which includes other users). You may not copy, reproduce, republish, disassemble, decompile, reverse engineer, download, post, broadcast, transmit, make available to the public, or otherwise use bbc.co.uk content in any way except for your own personal, non-commercial use. You also agree not to adapt, alter or create a derivative work from any bbc.co.uk content except for your own personal, non-commercial use. Any other use of bbc.co.uk content requires the prior written permission of the BBC.
Well, I'm sure the people who are delighted and did the actual finding are aware of the irony.
I guess the people in charge making the DRM decisions just don't think about it, or consider it collateral damage. For the greater good!
@2
Probably, but denyng it, as is their wont.
The same sort of thing happened for the band King Crimson (90's incarnation.) They are notoriously against people recording their shows. One show, however, they did an improv they really liked and wanted to develop into a song, but they lost their own recording of the concert due to a technical malfunction. They put out the word through their fan website and sure enough, a fan stepped forward and supplied them with an excellent quality recording of their show.
The irony is indeed profound: home tapers have saved a fair chunk of the BBC's pre-1970s archive material after the BBC itself purged the original tapes, thereby allowing the BBC to re-release the material to the buying public. Doctor Who is a prime example:
http://www.restoration-team.co.uk/
Of course, I'm sure the BBC might argue that their current digital archive will be supported indefinitely, so they'd never find themselves in this position for anything they've released with crippleware.
Perhaps a FOI request is in order here? Has Mr Doolan been paid, is he allowed to keep his archives; does he have the episodes of "Glam Metal Detectives" I'm missing?
He should have refused to give it up and invited a court case. This would be a perfect mechanism for challenging and publicizing the BBC's stance. Require absolute immunity from all prosecution from the BBC in order to give it up, then publish the agreement.
Doctor who is the best example as Glyph said; a huge chunk of the 60's episodes are gone - most of the later William Hartnell episodes and all but a handful of the Patrick Troughton episodes.
The Beeb decided in the 70's that there would never be a market for a black and white children's show after first viewing and BBC labour contracts made it very expensive to ever repeat any show because the unions were afraid the repeats would reduce the need for new shows. Huge swaths of historical BBC shows like Doctor Who had their tapes wiped.
Over the years they've found episodes in places like Mormon jumble sales and Hong Kong TV stations that were sent 16 mm transfers to try to drum up overseas sales. But for big chunks of early Doctor Who history - the jewel in BBC crown today and unambiguously their biggest cash cow - all that exists is fragments, production photos and soundtracks recorded by enthusiastic kids holding tape recorders up to their TVs. The BBC has had a semi-official policy of not noticing the restorations combining all of these scraps.
What are we worried about? As time goes on, everything produced has less and less value to future generations. It's a darwinian thing that as societies and technology get more advanced down the civilization path, they ensure a very hard reset when they collapse.
Middle Ages, everyone? The rediscovery of classical civilization? The dribs and drabs leftover from the burning of the Library of Alexandria? Hopefully, the more important stuff will get written down on naturally tanned vellum and get left in a cave somewhere in the deserts of the world for future generations to discover. Only in our case, it will require lots of pictures.
The story linked missed one of the geekier aspects of this - despite only having a black & white recording, the restored show has exactly the colours used in the original broadcast.
The images were recorded back then using a black & white film camera pointed at a colour telly. The film resolution was good enough that the dot patten from the crt is visible, so they can just read off the rgb values. That's a pretty neat trick.
(as reported this morning on Radio 5)
FWIW Ed Doolan is a longstanding local radio presenter for the BBC.
Culture vs. money.
I watched it. The colour reconstruction was astounding. Best I've ever seen, compared to say, early WWI footage. Of course, it's a different technique. I'm sure you could tell if you had to but otherwise, you really wouldn't know the difference.
Paul Battley is doing a sterling effort to make iPlayer content free of DRM (giyf)
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DRM? What's that?
How long is it OK to time shift?
Forever minus a day.
Making the Doctor Who restorations even more interesting is the fact that some episodes were restored with at-home tapes of AMERICAN viewers. The American NTSC tapes were used to provide the color signal, combined with the black and white archive films from the BBC.
It's worth noting that official BBC policy is that if you have any copies of missing episodes, the Beeb will digitize them for their archive and return the originals to you -- no questions asked, no sanctions, no confiscation.
Mercury transit @ 15 - it really was remarkable was't it!
Mind you, it can't have hurt that the palette mostly ranged from flesh to lovat green...
It still makes me laugh how the BBC send out scary looking letters to make people pay a TV licence, mostly because I don't own a TV and still get these letters.
The most recent one said that 'an enforcement officer has been authorised to check all computers, mobile phones and other electronic equipment'. Not authorised be me though so they won't get past my front door!! Arseholes.
This winds me up no end. This is public money; the BBC's legal department have had a decade of internet experience and yet have failed to adjust their contracts and agreements with respect to performance, repreduction and international re-tranmission royalites/costs and rights/obligations. Even their inhouse news content isn't torrented or ed2k'ed.
Seven days on iPayer, whoopee fscking doo. Where is the 4Billion squids of license fee going if they can't even seed and maintain a tracker or ed2k index site.
Necks to the chop and heads on poles please. For all their backstage/dirac/newmedia coolness is all fake. The BBC totally mis-manages the rights of new content.
Well, we can all gnash teeth all we want, but Cory said the only thing that needed to be said... He just came to the wrong conclusion
Cory, are you breathlessly implying those efforts might actually work? They never did, and they never will. All it takes is one smart individual to find a way, and it's all over (all over the internet, and bootleg media, that is...)
What are the chances those items will still be around in 30 years? Well, Google is in the archiving business, as are many others.
They only make rubbish now, so I wouldn't worry about 30 years hence.
This could only be considered hypocritical if you imagine the BBC (or any large organisation) to be a single cohesive unit with a single decision-making hierarchy.
In reality, why should the archives be forced to do their job poorly because of some short-sighted decisions made by the IT department?
Cory, Mark, surely you aren't suggesting that you think the archives should have refused this content, in order to not contradict the iPlayer's DRM policy?
@11: Yeah, I totally agree. Like all those old Roman and Grecian vases littering continental Europe. What a drag. Good thing they're all in museums where we don't have to waste time looking at them :)
@15
Such a simple but clever idea isn't it.
I remember about 10 years or so back, they were de-jittering the archive (using Dads Army as an example). Jitter from the reels, they would digitise the thing raw - then painstakingly run through putting pinpoints on static areas.
The output would give a solid image without having background objects doing the hokey kokey.
"Cory, Mark, surely you aren't suggesting that you think the archives should have refused this content, in order to not contradict the iPlayer's DRM policy?"
I'm thinking Cory is advocating the refusal based on their own policy, which would be ironic considering the desire for the content/completeness.
It could then be argued in court that the policy itself is askew and needs to be re-worked, and things like DRM should go the way of the dino.
At least, that's what I took from the write-up.