Copyright Infringement Hits Close to Home

This is going to get very personal. 

So, around thirteen years ago, right after Pixar's Toy Story 2 came out,  Disney and Pixar came out with a 2D animated television show called Buzz Lightyear of Star Command. It showed on ABC's One Saturday Morning alongside Recess  and Fillmore.  It followed the adventures of a version of Buzz Lightyear that the toy in the Toy Story films is supposedly based on. I wasn't much of a Toy Story fan, I'll admit, but I fell in love with the show.  Deeply.  It was funny and cool to watch. My brothers loved it, and I remember my mother telling me about how she came home from work late one night and stayed up late with my babysitter just to watch it Buzz Lightyear.

But, like all good TV shows of my childhood, Buzz Lightyear eventually stopped airing.  All my family had left were the direct-to-video premire and a few tapes of the Saturday morning show, but gradually we forgot about them and lost interest.  The only show that got remotely close was Star Wars: The Clone Wars, but then Disney bought Lucasfilm and canceled that too--and rumor on the street is it ended on a cliffhanger.

self-generated meme

Then last year, feeling a need to reconnect with my childhood (another long story),  I looked up the show on YouTube.  The best resource I found was a YouTube channel called Radio Free Planet Z (reference to Zurg's headquarters in the TV show), which featured the entire series premire and whole episodes in single youtube blocks, mostly recorded off the British Disney channel Cinemagic.  Let me tell you, that was a glorious, albeit indulgent, summer.  And not only did I find episodes I was familiar with but also episodes and plots that I had never been aware of. (And my mom was very excited)

This past summer, I wanted to introduce my roommate to the show because, for crying out loud, it's awesome, and this is what I found:

 YouTube account RadioFreePlanetZ has been terminated because we received multiple third-party notifications of copyright infringement from claimants including:

• Disney

I swallowed it.  Sure, I knew the episodes had been ripped off of old television recordings, I knew it was bound to happen sooner or later, but it stank that I had lost access to a precious resource that gave me access to childhood memories and that I was able to share with friends and family.

But as we have begun talking about copyright in our Digital Culture class, I have realized something.  Disney has not come out with the episodes on DVD.  If they did not make Buzz Lightyear available for fans publicly--in fact, there are a lot of classic TV shows that aren't available publicly--what did they expect us to do if we wanted to watch it?

I think this brings up an interesting point about copyright.  If people care enough about something that isn't available to them, they will make it available for themselves and for other people who want it.  And for free.  If Disney doesn't care about its old animated TV shows anymore, why doesn't it release them for sale, or for free even, instead of blocking people on YouTube who are trying to do the world a favor.  On Radio Free Planet Z's site,  there were a lot of comments from people like me who watched this show growing up and loved it.  They appreciated the poster's efforts to make this available. I posted pictures from the show from my facebook profile, and people told me--former roommates, cousins, less-than-intimate-acquaintances--how much they'd loved that show growing up.  If Disney cares so much about making childhood memories, why must it dictate what we ought to cherish and how?  It wasn't earning money from that channel but it wasn't losing money, either?  I am sure the company had good reasons to take it down, but it was a big letdown for people who, like myself, gradually came to depend on it for a small, 20 min+ dose of happiness. 

That's my beef on copyright.  Having finished composing this, I feel more angry than sad. And if you don't understand my angst, here is a video of the lyrics to "Those Were the Days" sung by Mary Hopkins.