Sony sends copyright notices to Museum of Television about shows dating back 40 to 60 years
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Rick Klein and his team have been sifting through TV commercials, forgotten tapes, and TV shows dating back decades for years. The Museum of Classic Chicago Television now operates as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and has called YouTube its home since 2007. However, copyright notices posted on behalf of Sony, which protect the television programs that Between 40 and 60 years old, they can close down. down the project in 48 hours. “Our YouTube channel with 150,000 subscribers is at risk of being terminated by September 6th if I don’t find a way to resolve Markscan’s copyright claims,” Klein told TorrentFreak on Friday. “At this point, I don’t even care if it’s released under a Sony license or not — I just want access to a living human being to try and fix this without copyright infringement. I’m willing to manually remove the material against the blows.”
Over the weekend, Klein shared details of copyright complaints filed with YouTube. Two of the prompts can be seen in the image below, and it seems obvious enough at first glance. Two episodes of the 1964 TV series Bewitched aired on ABC and nearly sixty years later, archive copies of those transmissions were removed from YouTube for Sony copyright infringement, with MCCTv receiving a strike. A claim targeting an upload titled Bewitched — ‘Twitch or Treat’ — WPWR channel 60 (full broadcast, 8/6/1984) follows the same pattern, but what’s missing are the details MCCTv added to put the episode (and the embedded commercials) in historical context. Another elimination target – Enchanted – “Sam in the Moon” (complete 16mm retina print, 1/5/1967) is accompanied by more details, including in-episode references to current events at the time.
With copyright law blocking the content for decades, Klein knows that can sometimes cause problems, although his 16 years on YouTube suggest the vast majority of rights holders don’t see his channel as a threat. If they do, monetizing the recordings could be an option. (…) Klein says MCCTv certainly does not aim to harm copyright holders. However, there is always a balance between preserving the “rare fragments of video ephemera” and the possibility that no one will need to enforce any rights, against the unusual circumstances such as those requiring unforeseen complaints to be resolved with inaccessible parties. Klein says the team is happy to comply with Sony’s wishes, and they hope that with a little leeway, the project won’t go down in history. Perhaps Sony is remembering the significance of the time shift while realizing that time itself is running out for the Museum of Classic Chicago Television.
