Kahle v. AshcroftOld/Foreign TV Series
originally submitted by Steve Garriga:
The Professionals is a British TV action series from the late 1970's. I grew up in the UK, and had fond memories of the series. I heard the series was available on DVD and did some web serching. The series was available in the UK, with regional encoding for that region.
I was able to find the press release and I emailed the distributor to ask if they were planning a US version. They replied that they only had rights to the UK and under the terms of their licence could not communicate further.
It seems the only way I could get copies to view in the US are a) get a friend in the UK to video-tape a rerun broadcast for me and watch it on my format cnverting VCR or b) get a friend to buy copies of the DVDs and have one of us strip the CSS and re-encode for NTSC. Neither of which is, I think, strictly legal. This would seem to be a problem for any TV show (foriegn or domestic) for which demand for a DVD release is too low in the US to justify a release.
Surely there is place for a digital library with 'on-demand' publication of at least some of these works?
Stifled uses
Steve Garriga:
Buy a series of DVDs and watch it.