There was a time when the system worked. From the earliest days of cinema, a system of staggered worldwide releases of Hollywood movies developed. It made sense: there were only a certain number of prints and it took time to ship them across the world. Nick James, editor of the British Film Institute's magazine Sight and Sound, told me that in the 1970s you could sometimes wait two years to see a Hollywood film in the UK. And 30 years ago that was alright. The markets really were separate. How would the average person in the UK even hear about the latest movies or TV shows on the US? You could run a five-year-old US TV show, call it brand new and very few people would be any the wiser. It felt natural for the same system to extend to videos and DVDs.
But it's not alright anymore. Here's why: the markets for legitimate purchase are still separate, but the marketing is not. The web is, as the name suggests, worldwide, and if you're advertising your great new movie or TV show on the New York Times website, or Salon magazine or in Gmail banner ads, you're advertising it to the world. Advertisers are very good at their jobs. They know how to tease and persuade, to push the buttons that get us to buy things; even things that we know are bad for us. It's not that we're entirely helpless in the face of advertising. Of course it's possible to see an ad for something you really want and still not buy it. But we find it difficult; that's the whole point of advertising. And if you're advertising a movie or a TV show, but not giving people the opportunity to buy it legally, what do you think is going to happen? You're working against yourself: with one breath saying "look at this wonderful product, don't you want it?" and with the next saying "you can't have it at any price".
People who download illegally aren't people who hate the product. They're fans. Of course there are some people who would never pay a penny for it, no matter how cheaply or easily available it was. But there are many who, like me, just want to enjoy a TV show they've seen advertised.
—Naomi Alderman, The Guardian
The TGWTPRH Preservation Project is dedicated to preserving the memory and glory days of what was once [That Guy With The Prematurely Receding Hairline], my favorite website as a teenager, Sadly, the majority of the videos from this site were lost when blip.tv went offline for good. However, many people downloaded those videos and through them I am attempting to resurrect TGWTPRH for historical purposes.
The only series I am still completely missing is Angry Beefer's. I know it didn't last very long, but none of my sources have been able to find any episodes of the series. If you know of anyone who has saved Internet material from around 2011, please investigate further. I still have hope they were preserved on somebody's hard drive somewhere. Don't throw out your grandpa's old tower - there may be treasure inside!
—Keiki: "The Angry Beefer"
a few years ago someone stopped me and asked if i knew where and how they could get a copy of 'hotel ambient'. and in my ignorance i had to confess that, no, i had no idea where they could get a copy of 'hotel ambient’. and then i realized that i didn't even have a copy of 'hotel ambient', and i was the one who had made it.
"I do not have copies of these books nor can I remember the details. It must sound strange for an author but when TV and copycat books get into the mix decisions come along fast and I don't always keep track, about 20 years and many books later!"
"Why don't you try running nine seasons, and they don't even make a DVD!"
"To see this famously failed film, you'll have to go to extreme efforts: We suggest trying to find it on eBay, or watching it on some allnight/allmovie cable channel with very low standards and two and a half hours to fill at 3 a.m. "
—The Official Razzie Movie Guide on Lost Horizon (1973) - which has since received a DVD and Blu-Ray release
"I’ll tell ya, whoever decided it was okay to put a million different Crash games on a million different mobile phones that are really hard to find, I will hunt you down and get the hooves out!"
—Caddicarus, The Stupid World of Portable Crash Bandicoot Games
"The only legal way you can play a lot of games like [Kuon] right now is by paying an absurd amount of money for a disc that — lo and behold — probably doesn't even frickin' work anymore! Physical media ages — slowly, but it does age. In 200 years every disc I own, and every disc you own — it won't work anymore. So, think about that. If we don't want software like this to get lost to time, backing it up when the publishers don't give us proper access to it is, unfortunately, kind of a necessity."
"Unless you're living in a future where either of these games have been re-released, I recommend you play these through your Windows DS. That is, unless you have a measly couple hundreds of dollars lying around."
"I think it's an objective failure of human society that in order to legally experience much old media, we have to outbid each other? Like this experience on this disc has a financial worth, and should only be enjoyed by those who have enough money to blow on it."
It must be noted that not all films make it onto video. The question of clearing musical and literary rights often provides an insurmountable constraint.
—Douglas Gomery, "Shared Pleasures" (1992), p. 290.
