I’m of a generation whose greatest music was in the 1960’s and 70’s and thereabouts. Lately I’ve found a lot of this music to be available for streaming on YouTube. Often, the clips are clearly illegal copyright infringments, being that the video is just a photo of the ablum cover, and the audio sounds like a microphone was sitting next to the record player.
But there is a different sort of clip that I’m here to ask about today. These seem to be taken straight off the television. I won’t give any links for fear of getting this thread closed. But, just as an example, the info box for a clip I just watched says “… I think this video aired between 1969 and 1970…” It is clearly some variety show, perhaps Ed Sullivan or something similar.
My question is how these clips got to YouTube. There are tons of them. It looks like someone went back in time, hooked up a cheap VCR and recorded this stuff to bring to the 21st century. Some of the high-quality clips are probably ripped from a “Best of The Tonight Show” DVD Boxed Set or similar, but there are just too many of them out there, and the quality is just too poor. Where did they come from?
Like I said, I’m not going to give any links, but just go to YouTube, and enter the name of a song or singer who was popular in the 1960s or even before that. You find loads of clips.
You can actually buy things like this at sales. I know one guy that got the original masters for the TV series “The 5 Mrs Buchanans” because no one wanted them and the studio put a copy of the masters up for sale. So he paid like just under a thousand bucks for them.
The show didn’t even last a whole season so it’s unlikely anyone would ever air it again. It’s a VERY funny show, and I’m glad he made me a copy of them
So yes a lot of people have this stuff. I know people in TV like engineers and stuff often have access to old clips from series past.
I knew one guy who worked for WHO-TV and when they ran out of space they were gonna throw away most of their “clip library” and he took it home with him.
Now stuff like this is “Iffy” because when you throw something out you generally lose your right to it. But because they didn’t throw it out, they just said “Take it we don’t care,” it could be argued they gave it to him, or it could be argued, he stole it but no one cared. So it’s complex
A LOT of this stuff is out there. A lot is still copyrighted but a lot of stuff fell through the cracks and is in public domain. This is why certain episodes of “Dick Van Dyke,” “The Beverly Hillbillies,” and “The Lucy Show,” are in public domain, simply because someone forgot to (or couldn’t be bothered with) sending in forms.
I think I had actually thought of that, but I figured the numbers of such people would be too small. But then again, this is an example of how the 'net is magnifying people’s impact in ways we couldn’t dream of before. Thanks!
I know this doesn’t prove anything, but mainstream supermarkets sell them for $1 each. At that price they’ve got to be either illegal or public domain, and I hope that Pathmark isn’t dealing in illegal goods.