I received a letter on Tuesday. I don't know if it was to me personally, or regarding the blog, but here goes:

Hello —

I'm a big time fan. Have been for a long time. Like everyone else who probably writes you, I am looking to somehow get copies of this stuff on video. I was wondering if you had a resource?

I’m looking for the following (believe it or not, I haven’t seen these particular episodes): #s 109-111, 204, 302, 305, 307-308, 310, 312, 404, 405

I will pay whatever it costs as I think we will be waiting a LOOOONG time for MTV to finally get its act together.

Thanks. I hope to hear from you.

My answer:

I’m glad you’re interested in Daria. My answer will be somewhat laborious, but it will eventually get to the point.

If you haven’t seen certain episodes of Daria, your best bet is YouTube. It has a lot of ... uh ... copyrighted material available, and generally, if you put in a combination of the show and the episode name and number in the search function, you can find pretty much every episode you want.

(How do you think I got those neat framegrabs? Thank “The Gimp,” a freeware program ...)

Now, here’s the hard part. I don’t think the blog has ever had a policy on how to obtain Daria on VHS/DVD/palimpsest. Myself, if I knew of a free way for you to download episodes off the computer, I’d tell you, but everyone would probably know about it anyway, so you wouldn’t need to ask me.

The problem is the copyrights. I can understand your honorable offer to pay for the episodes. The problem is that if any fan were to accept payment beyond the cost of mailing the episodes, this would turn fans into illegal distributors of copyrighted material.

Now as for me, MTV/Viacom can burn to the ground and people can loot its content to their heart’s content. The problem is that in the past, MTV tried to “fox” the biggest fansite at the time, Outpost Daria. By “foxing,” I mean they mailed, if I recall correctly, some legal boilerplate to the site owner telling him that their lawyers said it was a very, very good idea to take down the copyrighted material.

Later, the miscommunication was resolved — it was just some legal beagle jumping the gun — but the older fans keep a wary eye over their shoulders. (Or, as they say in the drug culture, “How do I know you’re not ‘the Man’?”)

Since then, the policy has been, “We don’t bother MTV/Viacom, and, hopefully, they don’t bother us.” For my own personal, devious, evil reasons I’d like to see Outpost Daria live a long, healthy life, and I don’t want to get into the business of providing episodes.

The best hope is to:

a) Let your request be known here at the blog. Maybe one of our readers will have mercy on you and hook you up with a source of eps.

b) Go to one of the major message boards (see the links on the left-hand side of the blog) and ask, politely, if anyone can help.

c) Go to DVDaria and sign those petitions.

Sorry I couldn’t be of help. If someone in the comments section is willing to help, I’ll make the French Connection. — CG

Labels: Downloads