South Park To Be Available Online Free and Legal

garnetlion writes "South Park is coming online, free and legal. My brief research has not indicated if it will use DRM, require some silly Windows-only software or be otherwise substandard. According to a Wired blog article, 'Parker and Stone said they were inspired to start the site when they got 'really sick of having to download our own show illegally all the time. So we gave ourselves a legal alternative.'" In this regard South Park joins fellow Comedy Central notable The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, whose archive was made freely available online late last year.

Illegally?

[Brian Gordon]

But they literally have the right to copy their own show (that's the meaning of copyright) so how is it illegal for them? And how is DRM free?

Re:Illegally?

[zappepcs]

The point is that they and everyone else has no 'legal' way to download it and watch. They are siding with john q. here. If there is no legal way, then everything else must be illegal.

It's not like South Park and The Daily Show are shows that no one has ever heard of before, so it's good to see that mainstream content producers are in agreement with pretty much all the consumers of that content. I hope that it catches on, and with widespread attention in the MSM. There is nothing like some very popular people telling the world that *Hey, this should not be illegal!* to get the ball rolling.

I'm sure there will be more support for such activity when the RIAA finally admits they wasted all the money from the Napster case suing grannies and basically ruining all the good will that the recording industry ever had. Not many artists will continue to support that kind of stupidity when it gets rubbed in their face harshly like that.

woot! I'd like to see an entire network follow suit... say SciFi or Commedy Central or you pick... but one whole network that just says fuck it, lets let them download the stuff...

Re:Is this really new?

[BlackCreek]

I thought that's what www.southparkzone.com was for?

My thoughts exactly. I have been (legally) downloading South Park from the web for some months now.

I've seen slashdot publishing old news many times, but this is the first time (I can recall) that I see it posting old news that I had read about in a "normal" newspaper.

Re:More free, legal TV online

[an.echte.trilingue]

Yeah, but having seen Comedy Central's other offerings (Colbert Report and the Daily Show), I am skeptical. Take two sites:

• The Official Colbert Report [comedycentral.com] site is slow, experiences frequent outages, has mediocre quality video, crashes several major browsers after 10-20 minutes of viewing, and shows you the same add every two and a half minutes. On the plus side, it looks pretty.
• The pirate south park [southparkzone.com] site is slow, experiences frequent outages and has mediocre quality video. However, the shows are easy to browse and the adds are limited to things outside of the viewer window (and are blockable).

From my perspective, the choice is clear here. I am sure that Comedy Central will do a worse job than the pirates did. It will be just like when they got Colbert off of YouTube and replaced it with something worse.

The media companies are really slow to learn: the Internet gives them a potential gold mine, they just have to come up with a way to deliver their wares that sucks less than what Joe up the street can do. So far, they fail, Comedy Central and Viacom included.

Re:More free, legal TV online

[elrous0]

Reminds me of when Fox started cracking down on YouTube and claiming that Hulu would make up for it. There was a time when you could find virtually every episode and skit from Family Guy on YouTube. Now Fox's great legal alternative, that was supposed to be everything YouTube wasn't, offers a grand total 3 lousy episodes. Whoopty fucking do.

They don't mind

[Apoorv Khatreja]

I have been watching South Park since the first season aired on Comedy Central. But then I got bored of waiting for a new episode every week, so I waited for a lot of episodes to pile up and then downloaded them off BitTorrent. Next, I found a site called southparkx.net, which offered news on South Park and offered episode downloads.

Their FAQs said that "Matt and Trey do not mind when fans download their episodes off the Internet; they feel that its good when people watch the show no matter how they do it." I felt good when I heard this, not because they legalised what I was doing, but because they made a truly great show and didn't believe in all the evil copyright laws.

Now, when they have offered a service to watch full episodes online, and to make small clips from episodes embeddable, I am a bigger South Park fan than ever.

Re:Illegally?

[deanlandolt]

Not sure how their particular deal works, but I think if Comedy Central actually owns the show they make, then they could have actually been criminally breaking the copyright of their own employers and in theory could be sued for it. IANAL, etc.

Wow -- it's all almost as illogical as academia, where professors have to beg permission from publishers to distribute their own works to students. Almost.

Re:Illegally?

[edwdig]

Wow -- it's all almost as illogical as academia, where professors have to beg permission from publishers to distribute their own works to students. Almost.

It's the same exact thing. The author gives the publisher some or all rights to their work in exchange for money and/or royalties. If they have a problem with it, they should have negotiated for more rights.

Re:Illegally?

[Anonymous Coward]

Alternatively, it may have been what humans call "a joke".

Re:How is this different?

[PopeRatzo]

This is legal, South Park Zone isn't.

Funny, South Park zone doesn't look illegal.

And that's a problem with the entire intellectual property battle. Batting an old woman over the head and taking her purse is clearly, to anyone with a conscience, illegal and wrong. Clicking a link on South Park Zone doesn't look or feel or act any different than clicking a link on Comedy Central Zone, so how is the average person supposed to come to the decision that it's "wrong"?

It's like the old question about how someone is supposed to instinctively know copying a Music CD is illegal when the same company that makes the Music CD also makes and sells blank CDs for copying?

Re:How is this different?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because ignorance is not an affirmative defense?