American Network Television Tanking Fast (ZOMG surprise).

[Edi]

Some form of royalty based compensation for music and books is almost inevitable due to the nature of entertainment production. Most music and most books are the work of just one person or a few people at the core. If the artist or writer did everything themselves (writing, recording, publishing, selling etc), they'd get to keep all profit coming from their work forever.

In reality, no single person has that kind of resources, which is why they turn to record companies and book publishers, who have specialized knowledge of the technical side as well as marketing things. Basically, these entities should, ideally, be paid agents for the artist. They get a cut of what the artist or writer makes from the music or book.

The way it actually works is that the publisher/distributor gets the lion's share of the money and the artist is reduced to getting scraps in the form of royalties. Depending of course on how the rights to the work have been handled in the contracts. If royalties were time-limited, this would mean the publisher/distributor made money every time a copy was sold, but the actual creator of the work would stop receiving compensation at some point. It'd be different if they could simply forbid the distributor from selling any copies after royalties end, unless he also gets a cut.

Of course, any such right to forbid should always be restricted only to the original creator, not his estate afterward. That's dealing with independent artists.

Let's then take the movie industry. Movie production is (almost) always a big affair involving huge numbers of people. Most of the time the writing and everything else is done on a commission basis, so that the people get paid once for their work. The studio then keeps all ensuing profits. Music they use, unless commissioned for the movie, would be subject to licensing agreements, which might be commission or which might be royalty based, depending on the particular agreement.

It is very difficult to justify a blanket royalty based compensation for the individuals involved in the movie production because of the nature of movie production.

The problems with the current royalty system are the excess, greed and other over the top bullshit the big entertainment companies have been pushing all these decades. The book publishing industry is still working more or less well, though the US market is, from what I've heard, still the most fucked up one in this regard.

The whole thing needs to be overhauled severely, but it's in all probability not going to happen.

With regard to the patent system, given how patents are time-limited, the royalties issue for entertainment is especially problematic. Patents have always been for concrete things, specific implementations and such, so you can go around a patent with technical differences. There is usually also a great deal of public interest related to the subjects of patents, which paradoxically makes a lifetime royalty system more difficult to justify for them than for entertainment, which does not have the same public interest angle. Of course, this particular argument is pretty weak, because it uses double standards that holds the patent system to a higher ethical standard than the entertainment industry and excuses the latter on the basis of it being unimportant to societal infrastructure. Social inertia and conventions also play a part in why this double standard is accepted so readily.

So I'm of two minds regarding royalties. I see some form of royalties as necessary for both books and music, though not movies, but the current system at least as regards music is untenable and detrimental to the entire society. So it needs change. And at the same time I get left wide open on the patent front without being able to point to anything other than "destructive greed can't be allowed for the really important things, but can be allowed for luxuries because they are strictly speaking not necessary for us. So society is able to tolerate a royalty system in entertainment."

All right, long rambling post and far too late by now, so I'm off to bed. I expect Mike will probably have shot my position full of holes by the time I manage to log in again, but such is life.

[Darth Wong]

The fundamental problem with royalties is simple: almost all workers are paid once for labour they have performed once. Anyone who gets paid multiple times for a single piece of work bears the burden of proving that this exceptional treatment is somehow justified.

Frankly, the musicians and actors and other entertainment industry people who promote this mentality simply treat it as an axiomatic truth that their work simply deserves multiple payments for a single piece of work, even though 99% of the population does not get paid this way. What makes them sooooo special?

This takes us to the purpose of copyright: the whole idea of copyright was created not because copyrights are "self-evident" as some idiots would have you believe, but because our governments decided that they should encourage the arts, because society benefits from more artistic works. This decision was made at a time when the term "starving artist" was not just a colourful term, but a legitimate factual description of many artists.

In that context, modern lifetime royalties can be seen for the farce that they are. Does anyone seriously believe that all artistic endeavours would cease if we made the entertainment industry less lucrative than it currently is? There is no inherent right to copyright. Copyright is social engineering, whereby governments created a financial incentive to produce more entertainment. Since we are in no danger of an entertainment drought, there is simply no justification for claiming that copyrights must be kept as strong as they are.

[Edi]

I don't disagree with whatyou said above. I should probably also clarify something: WRT the individual artist I talked about, the situation can be seen as analogous to manufacturing in the sense that the artist makes the prototype, refines it and the actual manufacturing is contracted out to the publisher/production company/wherever. In this instance both parties should be entitled to a portion of proceeds from the sale of each copy.

A good example of this sort of arrangement in manufacturing was Alvar Aalto and the companies Artek and Valaistustyö. Aalto designed his furniture and lamps and Artek and Valaistustyö made them. Artek made the furniture, Valaistustyö took care of the lamps and other metalwork and obviously the proceeds were shared. This arrangement was in force until Valaistustyö dissolved when the owner died suddenly. Of course, they had a partnership going.

If the work (art or otherwise) was on a commission basis (such as a song commissioned for a movie or a specific design commissioned for some purpose), single payment is what should happen unless there is a profit-sharing arrangement in a partnership involved.

This is the only way I find of justifying royalties without going "just because" and I'm not sure how many holes there are in this arrangement. It just sees the artist as a business owner and the publisher/producer as a subcontractor.

[aimless]

The fundamental problem with royalties is simple: almost all workers are paid once for labour they have performed once. Anyone who gets paid multiple times for a single piece of work bears the burden of proving that this exceptional treatment is somehow justified.

Frankly, the musicians and actors and other entertainment industry people who promote this mentality simply treat it as an axiomatic truth that their work simply deserves multiple payments for a single piece of work, even though 99% of the population does not get paid this way. What makes them sooooo special?

Well let me turn this around on you: Does anyone who distributes someone elses single work for a profit many multiple times deserve the entirety of those profits, regardless of how negligible the distribution/production costs are once the system is in place (ie: music)? If you extend the 'one time payment' idea to the music company, then they get to profit from sales up until some negotiated one time value is reached?

If you say that your work is worth some percentage of the value of the final product, and that final value is variable and unpredictable, then should you seek a compensation model that accounts for that?

Of course there are a ton of things you can try to apply that to that don't and will never work that way. People who design Nike shoes don't get paid royalties per shoe sale, plenty of writers don't get paid for each mag or newspaper sold. Either a royalty model is impractical or unwanted. However that doesn't imply to me that royalties are inherently a terrible idea, just that they have a limited usefulness as a compensation model that can work out given the proper environment.

As Edi was pointing out, writer/publisher is a good example of this, where the royalty model offers benefits to both the publisher and the author, in that it insulates the publisher from risk, and allows an author who writes something particularly good to strike it big. I say it insulates publishers from risk because I'm pretty sure they don't want to gamble on paying every schmuck sending them manuscripts an hourly wage, or a lump sum before they know how many copies the book will sell.

Anyways I guess what I'm rambling on about is that if someone is trying to say that royalties are their inherent human right, yeah they're being dumb, but I don't agree that the royalty model is always a poor idea. It seems like it has its place, and though there are abuses there are abuses in every compensation system.

This takes us to the purpose of copyright: the whole idea of copyright was created not because copyrights are "self-evident" as some idiots would have you believe, but because our governments decided that they should encourage the arts, because society benefits from more artistic works. This decision was made at a time when the term "starving artist" was not just a colourful term, but a legitimate factual description of many artists.

In that context, modern lifetime royalties can be seen for the farce that they are. Does anyone seriously believe that all artistic endeavours would cease if we made the entertainment industry less lucrative than it currently is? There is no inherent right to copyright. Copyright is social engineering, whereby governments created a financial incentive to produce more entertainment. Since we are in no danger of an entertainment drought, there is simply no justification for claiming that copyrights must be kept as strong as they are.

That's interesting, hadn't heard that before. Are you saying that copyrights were extended to art or that the entire intellectual property system was motivated by social engineering? Because it seems that whether or not intellectual property is general is inherently right, in our current property respecting system it seems to be a natural fit.

As for how entertainment would change if you removed copyrights, that's an interesting question. I'm sure you're right and plenty of artistic endeavors would continue, just a question of how much budget plays into creating quality works :p

[Darth Wong]

Well let me turn this around on you: Does anyone who distributes someone elses single work for a profit many multiple times deserve the entirety of those profits, regardless of how negligible the distribution/production costs are once the system is in place (ie: music)?

What profits? If you're talking about no copyright or expired copyright, the distributor gets nothing too. Why do you think the distributor would be reaping profits from the sale of something which has become free to copy?

If you extend the 'one time payment' idea to the music company, then they get to profit from sales up until some negotiated one time value is reached?

Pretty much. Patent runs out after 17 years. Why should artistic copyright be forever? If the arts are as important to society as their backers claim they are, then society will benefit greatly from artistic works becoming public domain after 17 years. To take one practical example of the consequences of this action, all movies and music made before 1992 would be free to copy. Also, TV shows and movies which are currently in production limbo because of their use of certain music on their soundtracks could finally be released to DVD, as long as the music was also produced before 1992. We would not have certain artistic works disappearing because of copyright, which is the perverse situation now.

Of course there are a ton of things you can try to apply that to that don't and will never work that way. People who design Nike shoes don't get paid royalties per shoe sale, plenty of writers don't get paid for each mag or newspaper sold. Either a royalty model is impractical or unwanted. However that doesn't imply to me that royalties are inherently a terrible idea, just that they have a limited usefulness as a compensation model that can work out given the proper environment.

And they harm the interests of society, in favour of the interests of the artist. As I said, this artificial imbalance might have been a good idea when the term "starving artist" was not just a colourful exaggeration. But in an era of multi-billion dollar media companies? Please.

That's interesting, hadn't heard that before. Are you saying that copyrights were extended to art or that the entire intellectual property system was motivated by social engineering? Because it seems that whether or not intellectual property is general is inherently right, in our current property respecting system it seems to be a natural fit.

The entire intellectual property system was motivated by social engineering. It is a recent invention, and most societies throughout history did not have it. Classical music composers, for example, did not get to charge a fee every time someone played one of their works (and they still don't, because that particular form of copying existed before they invented copyright, so it got "grandfathered in"). Scientists still cannot copyright their ideas, and never could. It was invented because it was hoped that this invention would benefit society. If it is harming society, then it needs to be rethought.

As for how entertainment would change if you removed copyrights, that's an interesting question. I'm sure you're right and plenty of artistic endeavors would continue, just a question of how much budget plays into creating quality works :p

I was actually talking about putting a time limit on copyrights, but let's just run with this for the sake of argument: suppose we get rid of copyright entirely. First, scientists already function that way. Second, much of the arts would continue on a per-performance basis (indeed, even today, rock bands are sometimes known to make more money touring and merchandising than they do through album sales, since the studio takes most of the music sale money). Third, the government could fund the arts directly; since society is saved a huge amount of money by no longer being forced to observe copyright, taxpayer-supported artistic endeavours could fill the gap. The biggest problem would be big-budget movies, which carry enormous price tags.

[Big Orange]

Star Trek and its spin-offs especially could go onto DVD with no hassal since they used classical music and therefore have no damaging entanglements with greedy music companies if they used their music, and the same could apply to virtually any other sci-fi show, with the exception of Dark Skies which had a 1960s soundtrack. The CSI franchise could be published on DVD through sheer brute force, since expenses incured by using The Who's music and that of other artist's could be covered by guaranteed high sales (and Bruckheimer likely throwing his weight around with the sleazy music company representatives), but a similar show like Cold Case has not quite the corporate muscle behind it and so stays in a cul-de-sac.

Not only are the music royalties very extortionate, they also have too many representatives and artists who would not necessarily play ball in the proceedings, cacking everything up even if the expenses could be covered (petty squabbling being a side effect if there is too much ownership). The easiest solution to salvage "lost" TV shows with music content is for the production studios do what the radio stations have done to overcome the music copyright deadlock.

The patent system in America has its pitfalls too and innovation is being suppressed if certain cures are made from many patented materials, perhaps costing lives.

[Big Orange]

Los Angeles Times

TV networks are uneasy about declining advertising

One analyst forecasts a 15% decline in prime-time ad revenue, leading CBS to unleash a marketing blitz to boast that it is the most-watched network and NBC to unveil its fall lineup two weeks early.
By Meg James
May 4, 2009

The bugle call marking the start of the TV advertising sales season began a little early this year.

On Sunday, CBS Corp. unleashed a marketing blitz to tell advertisers, viewers and Wall Street that CBS stands out because it draws more viewers than any other network. This morning, rival NBC plans to unveil its fall prime-time schedule -- two weeks before the traditional kickoff of the television "upfront" season and two weeks before the other networks announce their fall lineups.

These early-bird moves underscore the uneasiness in the television industry.

Network executives are preparing in the coming weeks to negotiate sales of their commercial time to advertisers for the coming year. Executives are worried because during last year's "upfront" market, the economy wasn't in such a bad state. But the last year has been filled with bad economic news, turmoil in the auto industry (a major television sponsor) and other companies cutting advertising spending.

One prominent analyst estimated that the major broadcast networks could be down as much as 15% to $7.4 billion for prime-time advertising sales for the fall season. During the crucial upfront market, which typically takes place in late May and June, networks sell as much as 80% of their prime-time commercial inventory for the coming season.

"While network sellers remain publicly adamant that they intend to hold the line on price, we expect to see year-over-year declines," Barclays Capital analyst Anthony J. DiClemente recently wrote.

CBS faces other challenges, prompting its promotional push. And CBS is different from its rivals because it has a good prime-time story to tell -- it is the only major broadcast network to increase its ratings compared with last season.

For years, CBS has been the steady eddie of broadcasters, generating solid ratings for its signature shows, including "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation," the comedy "Two and a Half Men" and the Navy forensic drama "NCIS," but little Hollywood sizzle.

Meanwhile, investors during the last nine months have punished CBS' stock. CBS shares, which closed Friday at $7.19, are down more than 50% during the last year. The company is more vulnerable in a recession than more diversified media companies because advertising makes up two-thirds of its overall revenue. CBS plans to report its financial results this week.

Despite all the financial gloom, CBS has watched its ratings climb, thanks in part to its runaway fresh hit, "The Mentalist." Its prime-time audience is up 12% compared with the previous season, with more than 20 programs posting increases in viewers. CBS also has notched gains in a key demographic group. The network boasts more prime-time viewers in the 18- to 49-year-old age group than Walt Disney Co.'s ABC or NBC Universal's NBC -- a point of pride for a place long derided as the network for geezers.

"We've been steady, dependable and confident -- but times are different," George Schweitzer, president of CBS' marketing group, said to explain why the network launched its "Only CBS" marketing campaign.

"It is important for us to stake our territory and make sure our constituents know that their investment is best placed here," Schweitzer said. "We're taking the offensive rather than waiting for people to figure it out."

In addition to buying newspaper ads, the network plans to promote itself in its news programs, golf coverage and comedies and dramas. The message will go out on CBS' other media outlets, including CBS Radio stations and the company's websites.

"We are putting our mouth where our mouth is," Schweitzer said.

It seems like advertisment revenue is the source of American network television's initial success and likely eventual destruction, much like cassette/CDs were for the now sinking music industry.

[aimless]

What profits? If you're talking about no copyright or expired copyright, the distributor gets nothing too. Why do you think the distributor would be reaping profits from the sale of something which has become free to copy?

If you extend the 'one time payment' idea to the music company, then they get to profit from sales up until some negotiated one time value is reached?

Pretty much. Patent runs out after 17 years. Why should artistic copyright be forever? If the arts are as important to society as their backers claim they are, then society will benefit greatly from artistic works becoming public domain after 17 years. To take one practical example of the consequences of this action, all movies and music made before 1992 would be free to copy. Also, TV shows and movies which are currently in production limbo because of their use of certain music on their soundtracks could finally be released to DVD, as long as the music was also produced before 1992. We would not have certain artistic works disappearing because of copyright, which is the perverse situation now.

Well if you're clarifying your argument from "no royalties" to "no lifetime royalties, they should all be of modest length" then I'm inclined to agree with you, your example of moving things pre-1992 into public domain sounds pretty good

And fair point about distributors no longer profiting when a copyright expires, I was concerned about a theoretical situation where copyright still holds but the original artist is paid a one time fee while the distributor makes a profit multiple times for many years. If the approach to limiting royalties is to change the broader system of copyrights then it makes a lot more sense.

Of course there are a ton of things you can try to apply that to that don't and will never work that way. People who design Nike shoes don't get paid royalties per shoe sale, plenty of writers don't get paid for each mag or newspaper sold. Either a royalty model is impractical or unwanted. However that doesn't imply to me that royalties are inherently a terrible idea, just that they have a limited usefulness as a compensation model that can work out given the proper environment.

And they harm the interests of society, in favour of the interests of the artist. As I said, this artificial imbalance might have been a good idea when the term "starving artist" was not just a colourful exaggeration. But in an era of multi-billion dollar media companies? Please.

I'm still not sold on this idea that royalties are so harmful just because of their nature. Wouldn't any payment method be harmful if it gave the individual producer too much? If rock stars demanded the millions they might receive from royalties up front instead of paid out over many years, that sounds as bad or worse, the problem being that they're seriously overvaluing their product, regardless of whether they get paid in royalties or per commission.

Hm I think I'm creating a dumb argument here. Musicians could never realistically demand such massive up front payments due to there being so many solid artists out there who'd be willing to work for reasonable fees. The royalty model allows the overcompensation problem to sort of sneak up on everyone.

That's interesting, hadn't heard that before. Are you saying that copyrights were extended to art or that the entire intellectual property system was motivated by social engineering? Because it seems that whether or not intellectual property is general is inherently right, in our current property respecting system it seems to be a natural fit.

The entire intellectual property system was motivated by social engineering. It is a recent invention, and most societies throughout history did not have it. Classical music composers, for example, did not get to charge a fee every time someone played one of their works (and they still don't, because that particular form of copying existed before they invented copyright, so it got "grandfathered in"). Scientists still cannot copyright their ideas, and never could. It was invented because it was hoped that this invention would benefit society. If it is harming society, then it needs to be rethought.

I think I knee jerk against the idea of not having the current IP system because it's hard to imagine the alternatives in effect. Your brain sort of jumps to "zomg someone could steal my thing and profit off of it" without realizing that it would be impossible to profit off of that IP in the age of the internet when anyone could simply get it for free after you've been paid your one time or hourly fee for the creation of it. Claiming credit would still be an issue, if you were to replace the copyright system I'd hope that a "Just to tell everyone I made it" copyright could stick around so that it's a matter of public record.

[Patrick Degan]

Star Trek and its spin-offs especially could go onto DVD with no hassal since they used classical music and therefore have no damaging entanglements with greedy music companies if they used their music

No, Star Trek used music from composers commissioned for the series by Desilu Studios and thus the music was as much the property of the studio as the rest of the series. Paramount owns that now of course, and the RIAA has exactly dick to say about the matter. The same with The Twilight Zone and quite a number of series from the 60s and early/mid 70s. Shows like WKRP In Cincinnatti and Northern Exposure which used a lot of independent music in the soundtracks are the ones currently being held up and their fans fucked over for it. In a lot of cases, syndicators have been forced to recut episodes of their shows with generic music to avoid RIAA lawsuits, as happened with part of the soundtrack to the Carl Sagan science series Cosmos.

[Darth Wong]

Well if you're clarifying your argument from "no royalties" to "no lifetime royalties, they should all be of modest length" then I'm inclined to agree with you, your example of moving things pre-1992 into public domain sounds pretty good

And fair point about distributors no longer profiting when a copyright expires, I was concerned about a theoretical situation where copyright still holds but the original artist is paid a one time fee while the distributor makes a profit multiple times for many years. If the approach to limiting royalties is to change the broader system of copyrights then it makes a lot more sense.

The part about how certain works are actually disappearing because of copyright (eg- old movies and TV shows which cannot be released on DVD because they only had music copyright licensing for TV, not DVD) is especially troublesome: copyright was invented to increase the number of artistic works available to the public. If we have a situation where artistic works are being taken away from the public due to copyright, that is a clear example of the law not performing its intended function.

I'm still not sold on this idea that royalties are so harmful just because of their nature. Wouldn't any payment method be harmful if it gave the individual producer too much? If rock stars demanded the millions they might receive from royalties up front instead of paid out over many years, that sounds as bad or worse, the problem being that they're seriously overvaluing their product, regardless of whether they get paid in royalties or per commission.

Actors often get paid millions up-front. But at least huge up-front payments do not create a situation where people are straitjacketed decades into the future.

Hm I think I'm creating a dumb argument here. Musicians could never realistically demand such massive up front payments due to there being so many solid artists out there who'd be willing to work for reasonable fees. The royalty model allows the overcompensation problem to sort of sneak up on everyone.

That's exactly the problem: it's not so much the sheer amount of money as the fact that it ends up being this endless quagmire which saps society and creates too much income without work. It's all well and good to say that an artist should be paid for work he's doing right now. Maybe you can even say he should be paid for many years for work he's doing right now. But when you have films that were made in the 1930s that are still copyrighted even though their creators are all dead, and which cannot be legally distributed except by a certain Mickey Mouse company which sits there and continues to draw profits off the public even though they don't have to lift a finger to get it, that's a disservice to society.

I think I knee jerk against the idea of not having the current IP system because it's hard to imagine the alternatives in effect. Your brain sort of jumps to "zomg someone could steal my thing and profit off of it" without realizing that it would be impossible to profit off of that IP in the age of the internet when anyone could simply get it for free after you've been paid your one time or hourly fee for the creation of it. Claiming credit would still be an issue, if you were to replace the copyright system I'd hope that a "Just to tell everyone I made it" copyright could stick around so that it's a matter of public record.

I would agree there; you can't pretend you wrote something when someone else actually wrote it. But the ability to charge royalties for copying should be cut off after a certain time limit.

[Jade Falcon]

No, Star Trek used music from composers commissioned for the series by Desilu Studios and thus the music was as much the property of the studio as the rest of the series. Paramount owns that now of course, and the RIAA has exactly dick to say about the matter. The same with The Twilight Zone and quite a number of series from the 60s and early/mid 70s. Shows like WKRP In Cincinnatti and Northern Exposure which used a lot of independent music in the soundtracks are the ones currently being held up and their fans fucked over for it. In a lot of cases, syndicators have been forced to recut episodes of their shows with generic music to avoid RIAA lawsuits, as happened with part of the soundtrack to the Carl Sagan science series Cosmos.

Space:1999's first season used a few classical soundtracks like Alboni's Adagion for G Minor and Holst's Mars Bringer of War. However, a lot of TV shows that try to capture a particular setting get crippled. Tour of Duty, the 80's Vietnam series is a prime example on DVD. Wiki has this to say.

"The show was known for its classic American rock soundtrack including Creedence Clearwater Revival, Jimi Hendrix, and Jefferson Airplane. One first-season episode, "USO Down," used "live" versions of "Wooly Bully", "We Gotta Get Out of This Place", "Mannish Boy", and "Just My Imagination" as performed by a USO band, the latter song being used also for ironic comment. The songs in this episode were retained in the DVD soundtracks. But for copyright reasons, the VHS and DVD soundtracks of the majority of episodes were replaced with more generic music by lesser-known bands — a move which was widely protested by buyers, and resulted in a significantly lower sales volume for the third-season DVD set than for the first two."

Hell, even Married with Children has been penalised.

"The DVD box sets from Season 3 onward do not feature the original "Love and Marriage" theme song in the opening sequence. This was done because Sony was unable to obtain the rights to the theme song. It is highly unlikely that the theme song will return in any yet to be released DVD box set.[

[Big Orange]

Patric Degan, I'm not just suggesting "inhouse" music to fit the scenes, but a good reason why Captain Picard and his contemporaries almost entirely listen to or conduct classical music, is because it is thankfully out in Public Domain and Paramount has no dealings with music clearance bullfuckery. And it is not only just sound, but images as well: wonder why Michael Garibaldi's favourite cartoon character was Daffy Duck instead of Donald Duck on Warner Brother's Babylon 5?

And and as far as I know WKRP In Cincinnatti and Northern Exposure did see limited DVD releases, but of course the music industry sharks wanted it all their own way, so the DVDs of the two shows were compromised (like Quantum Leap's were) with fake music dubbed over and even some scenes/whole episodes removed, so it is easy to see why those DVDs dropped off the radar quickly. Dark Skies and China Beach are great shows as well, but haven't been released, despite the great profits of other series' DVDs those show's stars have been involved in.

This kind of infuriating idiocy makes me want to have my head repeatedly collide with the nearest wall, why are these fuck ups passing up such great promotion of their musc in the first place? They're idiots comparable to idiots in the olden days who tried to sue pioneering aircraft pilots flying over their private property. I'm not sad or surprised to hear how these lumbering prehistoric pigs have been ruthlessly supplanted by illicit downloading and Apple iPods, since they can't even tolerate having their music heard in the background in documentaries, so they've asked for it.

And to minimise piracy you should distribute material as freely and tolerantly as possible, don't suppress and antagonise (like the music industry has done to its ultimate detriment and Disney to a certain extent as well).

[Spanky The Dolphin]

Patric Degan, I'm not just suggesting "inhouse" music to fit the scenes, but a good reason why Captain Picard and his contemporaries almost entirely listen to or conduct classical music, is because it is thankfully out in Public Domain and Paramount has no dealings with music clearance bullfuckery.

Everything I've read about the matter of characters in TNG favoring classical music over modern popular music says it was because the producers wanted to avoid having the show come off as dated in subsequent years. I assume if they ever wanted something like Riker have an interest in 50s rock & roll, they would have just grabbed something from the public domain rack, used something Paramount already owned, or write their own piece.

And it is not only just sound, but images as well: wonder why Michael Garibaldi's favourite cartoon character was Daffy Duck instead of Donald Duck on Warner Brother's Babylon 5?

Besides the fact that it'd be essentially advertising a competitor's product? If anything it was just WB taking advantage of the fact that they owned the show and an archive of animated shorts.

And and as far as I know WKRP In Cincinnatti and Northern Exposure did see limited DVD releases, but of course the music industry sharks wanted it all their own way, so the DVDs of the two shows were compromised (like Quantum Leap's were) with fake music dubbed over and even some scenes/whole episodes removed, so it is easy to see why those DVDs dropped off the radar quickly.

While some episodes of WKRP's season one release were indeed butchered due to music cuts, the DVD releases of Northern Exposure and Quantum Leap are completely uncut (save for music replacement) with episode counts intact. All three were also standard DVD releases and are still widely available, NE and QL in their entirety.

[Big Orange]

Everything I've read about the matter of characters in TNG favoring classical music over modern popular music says it was because the producers wanted to avoid having the show come off as dated in subsequent years. I assume if they ever wanted something like Riker have an interest in 50s rock & roll, they would have just grabbed something from the public domain rack, used something Paramount already owned, or write their own piece.

It still mainly boils down to the production costs and avoiding legal pitfalls - "You Are My Sunshine" is in the Public Domain.

Besides the fact that it'd be essentially advertising a competitor's product? If anything it was just WB taking advantage of the fact that they owned the show and an archive of animated shorts.

And it would be too expensive for a relatively low budget TV show like Babylon 5 anyway.

However it is not completely watertight and should not be - in Disney's Who Framed Roger Rabbit? it is clearly more based on WB animation than Disney animation, with Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse appeared together for the only official time in that movie, while Disney is made the butt of jokes in WB's Animaniacs. However Disney's fierce protection of its intellectual property can still be terrifying and absurd, I mean they sued daycare centres (!) for having wall murals showing Disney characters. I can sort of understand a rival media corporation getting in to legal trouble for similar reasons, but harmless child nurseries?

While some episodes of WKRP's season one release were indeed butchered due to music cuts, the DVD releases of Northern Exposure and Quantum Leap are completely uncut (save for music replacement) with episode counts intact. All three were also standard DVD releases and are still widely available, NE and QL in their entirety.

WKRP was supposedly about music right? What is the point of getting it if most of the music tracks are glaringly missing?! Why pay again and in greater sums for DVD? If TV shows are getting badly truncated if not cancelled altogether from DVD despite their popularity, then the current music copyright laws are inefficient and need to be seriously overhauled. But general inertia and greed seems to be getting the way of that happening anytime soon, even though media companies have perhaps lost tens of millions in lost TV sales on DVD because of the unrealistically exorbitant royalty fees getting pushed by music companies quickly going out of business.

[Darth Wong]

However it is not completely watertight and should not be - in Disney's Who Framed Roger Rabbit? it is clearly more based on WB animation than Disney animation, with Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse appeared together for the only official time in that movie, while Disney is made the butt of jokes in WB's Animaniacs. However Disney's fierce protection of its intellectual property can still be terrifying and absurd, I mean they sued daycare centres (!) for having wall murals showing Disney characters. I can sort of understand a rival media corporation getting in to legal trouble for similar reasons, but harmless child nurseries?

All part of the glorious copyright system, comrade.

[Big Orange]

However Disney's fierce protection of its intellectual property can still be terrifying and absurd, I mean they sued daycare centres (!) for having wall murals showing Disney characters. I can sort of understand a rival media corporation getting in to legal trouble for similar reasons, but harmless child nurseries?

All part of the glorious copyright system, comrade.

The way copyright is applied now it has become an abject dead hand that is unconductive as a business model that can weather the digital age or even common sense. I mean you were also not allowed to keep VHS tapes of recorded movie/shows and of course it was a silly, unenforceable law and would've done more damage to the entertainment industry's profit margins if it was seriously enforced, but thankfully (as far as I could see) it was not.

The Sony Corporation (the Bush Administration of electronic entertainment) decided to legally bully Hong Kong games emporium, Lik-Sang, out of business because of copyright breach, even though individual Sony employees used Lik-Sang's grey market services. I guess that cemented Sony's place as king of the video game industry and closing down a popular grey market business protected the sales of the Playstation 3 - oh wait.