jd's Journal: Well, this is irritating.

Someone has trawled through YouTube and flagged not only the episodes of The Tripods, but also all fan productions, fan cine footage and fan photography of the series. How so, can't you buy it on DVD? Only the first season, the second exists only in pirated form at scifi conventions, and of course the fan material doesn't exist elsewhere at all. The third season, of course, was never made, as the BBC had a frothing xenophobic hatred of science fiction at the time. (So why they made a dalek their general director at about that time, I will never know...)

What makes this exceptionally annoying is that the vast bulk of British scifi has been destroyed by the companies that produced it, the vast bulk of the remainder has never seen the light of day since broadcast, and the vast bulk of what has been released has been either tampered with or damaged in some other way, often (it turns out later) very deliberately, sometimes (again it turns out later) for the purpose of distressing the potential audience.

I've nothing against companies enforcing their rights, but when those companies are acting in a cruel and vindictive fashion towards the audience (such as John Nathan Turner's FUD of audiences being too stupid to know what they like, or too braindead to remember what they have liked), and the audiences vote with their feet, on what possible grounds can it be considered justified for those companies to (a) chain the audience to the ground, and (b) then use the immobility of the audience to rationalize and excuse the abuse by claiming the audience isn't going anywhere?

I put it to the Slashdot Court of Human/Cyborg Rights that scifi fans are entitled to a better, saner, civilized explanation, and that whilst two wrongs can never make a right, one wrong is never better.

lions and hyenas eat each other's young

[spun]

Because they are competitors. Corporate media never used to have to compete with amateur productions or older professional products. Now thanks to the Internet, they have to. And just like a hyena with a lion cub, when corporate media spots competition they can easily kill, they will never hesitate to do so.

sad

[jdray]

If it is as you say, and some producer has flagged a bunch of fan-created material as "infringing," then yes, that's sad. For series that are so far out of print no one will ever watch them again, fan-posted episodes are the only way some of those things are going to be accessible. I can see giving out take-down notices for stuff available on DVD, but the rest is BS. Unless, of course, they're planning on re-releasing the whole kit on DVD. That still doesn't explain the fan material.

So, spare me from

Re:

[jd]

The Tripods was the most expensive, elaborate BBC science fiction series of the 80s, based on a trilogy of books by the same name. The adaptation is considered one of the best transfers from book to small screen ever, and most of the changes made were due to serious errors in thinking by the original publisher being corrected. Set on post-apocolypic Earth, human civilization had been reduced to an agrarian society enslaved to the Tripods, mysterious three-legged machines that roamed the Earth. On their 16th