TVSquad

Are you bored? Do you have nothing much to do today? Does the thought of leaving your home and being around other human beings just leave you unfulfilled? Don't worry, that's why I'm here. Instead of stepping outside where you might risk being hit by a car or strangled by a squirrel, why not sit in front of the warm glow of your computer screen and watch some clips from old TV shows like You Bet Your Life, The Beverly Hillbillies, The Lucy Show and The Dick Van Dyke Show? There's also some old Popeye and Looney Tunes shorts, plus movie serials and trailers.

A friend of mine sent me this link to Public Domain Comedy, knowing I'm a sucker for all things cartoony. You can also find a lot of similar clips and full-length videos by poking around the Archive.org site. It's like YouTube, but without the guilt of viewing copyrighted material.

I alluded to the fact that YouTube was throwing the baby out with the bathwater in this recent post, but the information I had was coming from unknown commenters on John K's blog, so I decided to do the unthinkable and not take their word as gospel. However, a lot of people who actually work in the industry, such as Amid Amidi, have also echoed those same sentiments, and it seems that, yes, YouTube, in its quest to protect copyright holders, has also been deleting cartoons that entered the public domain many years ago and should be freely distributed to the masses by any means people see fit. I first began to suspect many of those old Warner Bros. shorts were public domain when someone mentioned "Yankee Doodle Daffy" had been taken off the site, a cartoon I bought as a "public domain" video almost a decade ago. Amid has a great post about this over on Cartoon Brew, with links to other great articles on the subject. I think whether or not YouTube should be showing copyrighted material is up for debate, but to also deny fans access to perfectly legitimate classic cartoons is not going to bode well for the site. People are angry, and rightfully so.