This made me look at this, then this and now I am asking this?

June 19, 2016 12:24 PM

I was intrigued by a post a little while back on a Family Dog concert, it that post were references to a great site about identifying lost live grateful dead shows.

at the "identifying blog" I followed a link to the Family Dog concert which directed me to the good old Internet Archive. Which sometime not too long ago became very snazzy and web 3.0-ish.

Now in the family dog posts they are talking about a DVD of a certain concert that is a commercial DVD, still available for purchase, yet there it is there on the Internet Archive in full VIDEO_TS quality? That made me wonder about other stuff on the archive and I found another commercial DVD release, fully available for watching and downloading.

So, what gives. It is just the wild frontier of the internet once again breaking the rules, or is there something here I dont understand?

Thanks y'all!

posted by silsurf to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Wow, I missed that post but I did not miss that concert at the Family Dog, and it was splendid. I remember it was supposed to be on tv, but didn't have a tv. I'll have to watch it, maybe I'm in there as my way younger self dancing. I know this doesn't answer anything you asked.
posted by mareli at 2:50 PM on June 19, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'm guessing there must be some murky copyright issues, that's all.
posted by freakazoid at 4:43 PM on June 19, 2016

I work for the Archive. Feel free to email them at [e-mail] to ask about specific items (especially if they are items you own copyright to). In reality there are an awful lot of things that are technically copyrighted but realistically various levels of abandoned by their copyright holders and/or "orphan works" The Archive complies, to the best of my knowledge, with all takedown requests.

It's also worth knowing that--though I don't think that is the case here--there is very little barring someone from taking a public domain work and creating a copyrighted version of that work and then selling it. It's just that people are less likely to purchase it unless there's some sort of value-add. This is why you see so many public domain works for sale on Amazon. You can get them for free also but maybe you want them preformatted for Kindle or whatever.

Feel free to email me directly if you have other questions you might not want to put in a public forum.
posted by jessamyn at 5:53 PM on June 19, 2016 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: thanks, curiosity for me that is. Love the new format of the Archive!
posted by silsurf at 7:11 AM on June 20, 2016