Once again, pirates did the work of preserving culture that the free market threw in the bin.
Understandable they don’t want to help the BBC if it will turn right around to steal their collection and throw them in jail.
Totally understandable. I hope they at least copy the tapes into the internet.
Did the “free market” throw this in the bin? This show was publicly funded. If anything the public entity threw it in the bin.
Wasn’t it the BBC that threw it away?
The BBC is publicly funded.
Come on man. We know this, we pay the TV licence. We can’t police them throwing shit away.
They would argue that as custodians, they can decide what is economical to keep and discard. I guess sci-fi wasn’t seen as something that might last 🙄
I suppose with finite storage they did have to make some tough choices though, I guess.
Storage was seemingly very limited back then.
If I remember correctly they reused the tapes to shoot other stuff so they just wrote it over.
The public participates in the free market
Exactly! Also, in a Free Market there would be no Intellectual Propery! IP is a product of the state and could have no effective enforcement in a Free Market. Yes, pirates did the work of preserving culture, but the rest of that statement is inane!
People are downvoting you, but I don’t know why they disagree.
Enforcing IP comes from courts, aka. the legal system, aka. “the state”. What are people disagreeing with??
If they’re not seeding, what good are they?
Taping and archiving for decades, silly.
You seriously expect a bunch of 80 year olds with VHS tapes to know the tracker scene?
It was a bit beyond that in many cases. BBC would send out expensive video tapes for international broadcast, and they expected them back so they could be wiped and reused, as tape was very expensive at the time.
Employees instead stole the tapes in some cases. That’s why they are afraid of the BBC. This was literally BBC property, not just taping off air.
In this particular instance that doesn’t seem to be the case. First off, the article states it is film that was recovered from bins/skips. Until at least the 90s it was extremely common for TV programs to be recorded to film and then processed onto tape for airing (hence why we were able to get star trek TNG and The West Wing in HD). The implication is that it’s the film that was discarded (which couldn’t have been reused).
The other implication, is that if it is the original film reels it will potentially be unedited footage.
The missing episodes are largely from the 60s, before home video recording was really was a thing. I believe the master tapes were destroyed in 1974, a year before Betamax came out and 2 before VHS.
I understand there were magnetic recording systems before home use. But I’m saying the story specifically says film reels. Now, journalistic accuracy is a bit of a meme I know. But, I was taking that on face value.
I looked into it a bit further. Doctor Who was initially recorded on tape, specifically 2" Quadruplex videotape. That is all the BBC saved (and ultimately chose to erase and reuse). They did transfer to 16mm film for sending elsewhere.
But the point is that these are people who actually stole BBC property, not merely people who recorded off-air. Not that I fault them for that, but that is why people are reluctant to turn it over. BBC would keep it and they very well can be charged with a crime. Really, the BBC should offer full amnesty, a guarantee that they will return videotape and/or film once they have had it copied to a more modern medium, and a significant payment per episode recovered. There is no commercial reason to go after such old cases, especially when there is so much value in getting the episodes back.
The BBC developed its own videotape system in the 1950s. But they had to record it in one take, since there was no way to edit the tapes. There was no cartridge like VHS, they were on long reels of film.
They reused the tapes, thats why many episodes of the first two doctors are missing.
When Sony U-Matic and Philips LP2000 came out in the late 1960s, they discarded the old tapes, the new formats were cheaper and had editing machines.
I think it’s also that in some cases the BBC promised to send the tapes back and never did, but at this point you would expect the scene to create digital copies for these old collectors…
It was a joke.
I expect some of them to have grandchildren who do.
Not directly related to this case as the owner probably doesn’t know the tape could be backed up in digital format but your comment made me think about the data hoarder scene and how weird it is that these people jealously keep digital content that could easily be shared infinitely…
Data hoarders (generally) don’t keep stuff to not share it, they keep it because shit disappears from the Internet all the time. Videos get removed from YouTube, websites go down, etc.
A large overarching idealogy of ‘data hoarding’ is self responsibility of archiving the internet.
This explains the issue succinctly:
Discarded TV film was secretly salvaged from bins and skips by staff and contractors who worked at the BBC between 1967 and 1978, when the corporation had a policy of throwing out old reels.
Of course, now today’s suits just see £££ signs.
Accurate.
Fact is, they’ll basically steal the reels back, which they forfeited ownership of when they threw them in the trash, throw the perpetrators in jail, remaster the episodes, and then push those episodes out in a box set so they can make a few dollars, while the people who preserved it, get nothing.
IMO, they should find a way to digitize and distribute them online to everyone. Fuck the BBC if this is how they treat people.
Heads up, these are the same ones they announced were found earlier in the month, this article is just three weeks old.
Lots of comments in this thread about all the understanding “80 year olds” need and don’t have, lol.
And every single one of them ignoring the fact that not only did some “80 year olds” develop the technology they use today and can dance rings around them, even the most technologically impaired among them have kids and grandkids, family and friends, who gladly do it all for them anyway.
Grandpa doesn’t need to know jack shit about torrenting or how scene groups work; all he needs is someone who does, if he doesn’t already grok it himself.
I didn’t know bill Maher was one of the doctors.
i think if youre an 80 year old about to die clutching the only copy of something refusing to share it, youre a piece of shit. sorry.
give it to people who can fix it, anonymously. it would be trivial and humanity would benefit rather than waiting for you to finally fucking die and we take it out of your warm, dead hands.
Alternate take: You expect 80 year olds to know how the scene groups work? You expect them to actually be able to digitize 60 year old film reels, (with film equipment that probably hasn’t been built since the 80’s,) anonymously get into contact with a scene releaser, and get the (notoriously distrustful) release group to work with them? If I were part of a scene group and someone came to me with that story, I’d be seeing red flags all over the place. I’d be suspecting that it’s a BBC employee trying to plant a mole, to catch us for piracy.
Protip you don’t need to be a scene group to upload a torrent to the internet.
But you do need to have an understanding of how torrenting works, at least on a basic level, to host your own torrent effectively.
This is indeed one of the takes of all time
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What the collectors did is not media piracy, but actual theft. According to the article, the people who have these episodes are former BBC workers who would dig through the media disposal cart and help themselves to anything that looked interesting. It is a victimless crime, but it definitely meets the definition of theft.
It has been long enough that they are likely outside of the statute of limitations, so they are not likely to face criminal consequences, but they are afraid that the BBC will send goons to trash their homes looking for more “stolen property”.
Stealing from the garbage is recycling, not theft.
I wouldn’t even use the word “stealing” in that phrase, to fully drive the point home.
Not in the eyes of the law, especially when the accuser has a large and well funded legal department and you are a working class retiree.
Then that law is stupid and can be dismissed.
Hey, did you just pick up the chewing gum I just tossed into the garbage?
THIEF!!!
This is the way.
