COPYRIGHTS AND WRONGS After writing my last post I discovered that uploads to Aussies.space are broken, so these words will hopefully flow down the Gopher hole sometime in the future. I've been gradually getting more are more lenient in my abidence by copyright law. I'm still strict about movies and other items widely available for sale, but with documentaries I've pretty much reached the point where I figure anything is fair game. I've also decided that TV shows that haven't been published on DVD/VHS for a decade or more are alright to take off a P2P service, or sometimes the Internet Archive. There are a few factors towards this. First is being able to re-encode the videos at lower resolution and bitrate on a VPS so that I can download them without paying for tons of internet data. Also the offerings on broadcast TV have got worse and worse, even though weirdly there are more free-to-air TV channels than ever. I also only watch the government-funded stations, with rare and soon regretful exceptions, because the advertising elsewhere is just unbearable. The odd thing is that I'm coming round to this at the same time as other people are apparantly going the opposite way for opposite reasons. I see references online to more people using streaming services instead of downloading videos illegally (I don't know enough real-world people to compare first-hand). That in turn is what the degeneration of TV content is attributed to, since more money is going to content for those streaming services. Also people are apparantly attracted by "high definition" resolutions/bitrates, compared to me shrinking videos down to what I feel is adequate. Actually I only recently noticed that I've been keeping stereo audio in the videos yet my TV only has mono speakers, so I'm encoding new videos with mono audio now and saving an extra 64k/s. But aside from those technical aspects, it's really the moral judgement that dictates the decision. For the sake of greedy American media companies, the copyright term in Australia (which doesn't depend on registration or renewal as in the USA) was extended in 2005 from fifty years to seventy years from the year of publication (or the death of the author for most non-photographic/sound-recording works). This change wasn't retrospective, so generally copyright expiry has simply been stopped since 2005 and won't resume until the start of 2026. Therefore films from before 1955 are pretty much fair game, although since many aren't out of copyright in the USA they might still be taken down from easily-accessed content hosts like YouTube and the Internet Archive. So for some years now I've been hitting up the archives of film noir movies, albeit often the slightly dodgy ones that nobody bothered to have taken down from public hosting. There doesn't seem to be enough interest in 1930/40s/50s cinema to find them reliably via P2P downloads either, so it can be rather frustrating if I get set on finding one particular film. Much like with the cheap second-hand VHS/DVDs I buy (which include a lot of these as well, originally put out by discount publishers), I end up seeing an odd mix of all time classics and long forgotten rubbish. Though of course that's probably a more authentic experience in a way anyway. When it comes to shows produced by the BBC, and ABC in Australia, I've long been inclined to make my own exceptions to this copyright law. Popular shows might be produced with the intention for future sale on DVD to contribute to their production costs, but often documentaries are only ever shown on TV in the first place. In my opinion, having been funded entirely by public money, these shows _should_ be in the public domain in the first place*. If I had my way it would be criminal for them to even try to restrict access like they do! This attitude of mine slowly grew to commercial documentary productions from the 1990s or earlier that were clearly never going to get re-released on DVD. Now I've got so slack that I'm including entertainment shows that aren't produced anymore, aren't for sale on DVD from any distributors anymore, and haven't been released on DVD in a decade or longer. My justification is that in the unlikely circumstance that Channel 4 in the UK did sue me for downloading the complete archive of Scrapheap Challenge episodes that's at the Internet Archive (where you'd expect their complaints to be addressed first anyway), they wouldn't actually be able to claim any loss. Mind you, this conveniently ignores what may be offered on streaming services, since I don't use any of them in the first place (it would cost me way too much in greater internet data/speed, before even getting to subscription costs). I've really gone from judging what's fair to the publisher, onto whether the publisher is fair to me. Requiring a satellite internet subscription (the only wired internet I can get here is dial-up (possibly), and my mobile broadband connection is clearly too unreliable) and $1000 smart TV, to watch a TV show from the mid 2000s, really isn't fair on someone with my income. But then of course, it's not meant to be. - The Free Thinker * I should point out that the Russians have the right idea here. They've been officially uploading many of their old state-funded movies at YouTube, surprisingly as well as newer ones from the post-communist era. Subtitles and all. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCm5U4zqpahzyNXBv5ZT51Jw