So, one of the last portals anywhere for garnering new Daria fans is shut down. The show is no longer on line at YouTube. All of the fan-contributed seven-minute portions of episodes have been removed, both in English and in French. (Including the thousands of user comments. Fortunately, Cinc saved a few of them for your pleasure.)

Several fan creations from S.C., Eccles, a “release the DVDs” partisan, and others have also been removed. (Martin Pollard has said he’ll host multiple versions of such videos at Outpost Daria.)

Viacom couldn’t come to an agreement to share revenue with YouTube, as it had with the video division of parent Google. (Some Daria episodes, in single pieces, are still available at Google Video.)

It was inevitable, amigos. YouTube is too visible, and is too widely decried for building a content base upon copyright infringement, to have had the party last forever.

(I do get perplexed about all this talk of “copyright” by the legal suits, though, when a piece such as S.C.’s voice-enriched video is at issue. What’s being infringed, if anything, in all such fanworks are trademarks, not copyrights. “A Little Knowledge” used an original script, and took the character and setting names and designs from Daria. ... Ah, but I digress.)

What seems even more evident these days is that Viacom and MTV have pushed Daria further to the back DVD burner. Yes, the music clearances are a royal pain. Freaks and Geeks managed a full release, though, all songs intact, partly by the rights holder outsourcing the clearance grunt work.

And now, with consumer broadband creating new and viable distribution channels, they’re being remarkably unimaginative in what they put forward. Take a look, if you want to bother, at the new Viacom initiative for offering video downloads through Wal-Mart.

A more detailed report notes how constricted this will be:

[...] all downloads will be WMV [Windows Media Player files] with Windows Media DRM [“digital rights management,” copy-restriction techniques]. You can burn them for backup, but they’ll only work on a single PC, with an option to be moved to “three compatible portable devices.”

Only marginally more usable, and backup-capable, than Apple’s iTunes, in other words. Steve Jobs has already ably punched holes in the case for DRM restrictions on music. When will someone make the connection for video, as well?

This copy-restriction merde is really only to cover their legal backsides, in the long run. Every DRM scheme is or will be broken. DVDs, for a decade now. The high-definition HD-DVD and Blu-Ray Disc schemes, as of last month. Content will find its way to users, sooner or later.

Where the DRM gatekeeping comes in is to give some legal cover for the studios to prosecute and sue large-scale infringers, or large and inviting targets such as YouTube. They make an effort to erect digital gates. Breaking them becomes a federal felony, under the DMCA. This can be used to selectively smash anyone they choose.

Anyway, the Wal-Mart scheme is full of computer-clogging DRM, whether or not you have the new Hungry-Man portion of it dished out by Windows Vista.

It’s also not aimed at the geeks — face it, for many of us, that’s what we are — who have taken up Daria and other iconoclastic TV pleasures. You can only use the security nightmare of Internet Explorer to make downloads, not Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, Safari, or anything reasonably sane.

Here’s the relevant bit of puffery at Wal-Mart’s site for this still-in-beta-test service:

MTV needs no introduction. As the epicenter for anything and everything music and pop culture, MTV has produced more groundbreaking programming — like Beavis & Butthead [sic] and Jackass — than any other cable network.

In your dreams, guys. Not for over a decade has this even come close to possibly being true.

And their “groundbreaking” selection for download? Andy Milonakis, Beavis & Butthead: The Mike Judge Collection, Jackass, Laguna Beach, My Super Sweet Sixteen, Punk’d, and Two-A-Days.

You know what’s missing here. Someone at Viacom has to know what's missing — they pulled it off of YouTube, after all. Who among them is going to do something about it? Is anybody there? Does anybody care? I'm about ready to give up.

(Find out ten more good reasons for why these downloads bite the big one.)

Labels: Downloads, DVDs

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