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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Whizbang Dustyboots" data-source="post: 8359890" data-attributes="member: 11760">While that sweeping language is scary, it's meant to combat things like how music rights and changes in distribution models have meant a number of television shows can no longer be legally seen anywhere, since the rights that were negotiated don't cover streaming or DVDs/Blu-Rays and tracking down the various rights-holders, many of which have been sold or merged or gone out of business, is too much trouble.So you can no longer see the real WKRP in Cincinnati, where rock songs of the 1970s were important not just for the jokes in the show, but sometimes the plots of whole episodes. Northern Exposure isn't even available in a bowdlerized form.DDB is not intending to use someone's circle art in 2300 when character sheets are all beamed directly into someone's brain. They just don't want a new platform or distribution method to arise in a few years and, again, get sued because they didn't track someone down who may have changed email addresses or names or died and deeded their artistic output to their heirs or something, to make sure a tiny piece of art won't get them in trouble.My company has had to create new cumbersome systems to deal with works that we licensed years ago for print, but once it appeared on the web, we had people saying that those rights didn't include us using them on the web. They're not a key part of our website, but they're attached to other materials we do own and did create. So we have the choice of either not using our own works on our website (which is why we use the "in perpetuity" phrase in our own new licensing agreements) or going through a tremendous amount of work to disentangle these works by freelancers from the larger products, all for stuff that's often years old and isn't a big money maker at this point, but which is useful for archival purposes.Legal stuff definitely sounds scary, but there's rarely a grand conspiracy behind the terms. (The grand conspiracies won't use these legal agreements to ensnare you -- they'll come at you from different angles, like the TOS no one reads when they sign up for a social media account or, more importantly, the updated ones they don't read when they change, several years into using Instagram/Tumblr/whatever.)</blockquote>

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