As you are all well aware of, way too many of our favourite TV shows (mainly defunct) have had their DVDs compromised or sunk altogether mostly by pointless, assbackward music clearance bullfuckery. Great shows like China Beach, The Wonder Years, Eye on the Prize, and Dark Skies which remain glaringly unavailable in spite of their high quality and consumer demand.

It has become such a minor crisis and is part of a much wider problem of too much ownership in America, it has become one of the less important hot topics in Michael Heller's Gridlock Economy and he also gives a lengthy lecture on this YouTube clip. It is interesting that Heller touches upon too many owners legally at each other's throats are unable to properly exploit a product or resource they jointly own, I mean Adam West Batman is a textbook example of that, with 20th Century Fox and Warner Brothers vainly squabbling over it like rats over a lump of cheese.

Of course the real emergency in too much ownership being touched upon by Micheal Heller is that America's still strong cultural, scientific, and economic potential is being uselessly pissed up the wall, with overwrought property and patent laws putting a dampener on getting anything done to build a high-speed railway link, a modern nuclear power plant, an improved Internet, or a life saving drug. This could explain why the hidously compartmentalized and stagnant music industry could not accept the groundbreaking Napster and YouTube.

Charlie's Angels Season 4 was just announced, after a 3 year hiatus. I think anything is possible now. I think eventually companies will decide to make some money, instead of none.

I totally agree. Overly restrictive copyright laws are one of the worst things to happen to American creative potential. There's no reason that a person or company should be allowed to profit pretty much forever from a creation.

You guys are all wrong. Even though Walt Disney is long dead and Mickey Mouse was created nearly 81 years ago the only the Disney corporation should be making money on that character!!!

Copyright is on principle not a bad concept, but piracy is not a good concept either, yet intellectual property protection in the United States has clearly been taken to an unbalanced extreme. Russian stores not selling anything with unlicensed kioks thriving instead is a good comparsion to out of print TV shows getting illegally downloaded instead. Copyright is a good way to protect something as intangible as music to make profit from it in the first place, but music is much like water you can't chain down water forever. This kind of delusional assumption that you can chain down water is what made the music industry widely disliked commercial pariahs in recent years

Yeah but with the "right" should come the "responsibility" to make the product available to consumers. Disney (or anyone else) should have to forfeit copyright if they withhold the product for more than "x" number of years. Or at least anyone who distributes should be immune from prosecution if the product is out of distribution for a long time.

Copyright is about control. A copyright holder has the right to withhold distribution of property. For example, the participants in a private sex tape may not want that recording distributed at all. As another example, Disney can release a movie on DVD then put it "back into the vault" as part of a marketing strategy.

That approach would allow people to reproduce and distribute limited edition items like baseball cards.

No, no, and no. Copyright is a system for balancing the financial interests of creative parties with the greater good of society.

Keeping things locked up in copyright pretty much in perpetuity is bad for the health of a society. No copyright holder should be forced to keep something in print, but neither should any copyright last longer than perhaps 20 years.

Here's an idea for reform: copyright lasts for ten years, but you can buy renewals indefinitely. The only catch is, the renewal fee doubles each time. As long as the copyright holder thinks they'll make more money from a work than it'll cost them to renew, they can keep the copyright.

Sounds like a good idea to me, so it will never be considered.

It's an interesting idea, but I don't think it's practical, simply because of the overwhelming corporate interests that are involved in the creative industry. You'd have to set the starting fee at a million dollars to even hope to curb the abuses of Disney, Warner, etc. and that wouldn't help small artists, writers, etc.

This music clearance gig with TV shows makes scant sense even from a cold hearted business point of view: why would you shut down a respectible form of promotion for your music by putting down a unnecessary thick legal net that prevents music heavy shows from getting through on to DVD? How were radio stations accepted in the first fucking place?

At the moment the entertainment industry is largely run by late middled people who are divorced from reality mainly through their insular social circle, insulated work enviroment, and dense wealth cocoon, so they cannot accurately anticipate the wants/needs of the consumers nor fully comprehend the march of technology.

The way music is heavily copyrighted and fragmented is the product of businessmen who have their brains stuck in 1979 instead of 2009, with help from overweening legal firms seeing this as a means to flex their muscles. Copyright is not doing what it's supposed to do when it hurts consumers and blocks off product, cutting off revenue and increasing piracy.