Copyright issues are both a blessing and a curse, but lately it's the curses that frustrate people like me who HATE it when information is lost because of it. What do I mean? Take for example a cartoon that's gone off the air.

Many people actually have archived recordings or old VHS tapes of cartoons that are no longer on the air in the US or any other country. So they upload it onto YouTube and people enjoy the hell out of it because there's no other way (legal or not) to view it.

If public domain is harder to attain, you'll NEVER see these cartoons brought back in your lifetime unless the current owners show a little mercy and re-release them. But all the while YouTube removes all these cartoons because of copyright law and that's where you question what's worth saying "HANG the Code!" for and what isn't.

So far I've only ever seen Fleischer cartoons and older pre-Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies successfully stay on YouTube. Being a child of the 80's, there's a mass of cartoons I may never see again and it drives me batty that all I get now in this age of good archiving technology is some sad, vague descriptions and summaries on Wikipedia because tiny details aren't part of Wiki's formatting. Some things considered trivial are voted out by a panel of editors. I suppose that's a good thing... but then I think of how in the Hitchhiker's Guide, the Earth got boiled down to "Mostly harmless".

/headdesk