Good Eats Dies with Scripps

I honestly believe in the three children of trouble. Or as I like to say “Shit happens in threes!”. Sometimes, a person can just pick two random bad things that happen over a span of time and say “yeah, I’m waiting for number three” and then as a pessimist, would soon find it. However, sometimes shit really does happen in threes, and this is a good example.

I’ll talk about the first two children later, after I feel more stabilized. But right now, I’m pissed over child number three.

As some of you may know, I've started a little project (little. Ha!) to post all of Good Eats onto Youtube. It became somewhat of an obsession a couple years ago, when we bought our first Tivo system and I realized that I could transfer shows from the Tivo onto my computer (which I think that alone makes it worth every cent). I started saving all the Good Eats that played. And soon thereafter, Youtube decided that it was going to expand its services and allow videos longer than 15 minutes. That’s when I posted my first Good Eats video a year ago. It’s an arduous process that takes anywhere from 60 to 90 minutes to upload and takes most of our bandwidth. And then, Food Network decided it hated Alton Brown and moved Good Eats over to the Cooking Channel. I suppose it fits better over there, since FN is turning into a reality TV, competition-based food channel anyway. But unfortunately, The Cooking Channel is a premium channel. So now, suddenly, Good Eats was very inaccessible to the main public. Its not on DVD except for the first 2 seasons (they do have random DVDs by category, but not all of the seasons) it’s not on Netflix, it’s not on Hulu, its shows aren’t archived at FoodNetwork.com, and it barely plays on FN; I think one or two episodes a week at most. Not to mention it’s not played in many other countries (or so I’m told from comments on my Youtube channel.) So, it became my solemn duty to put all of them online (I have about 240 out of 252). I’m not the only one that has episodes up, but I am one of the few that have them not split up, and in HD.

And here’s where the third child comes to play. Obviously, I do not own Good Eats, so it’s technically a violation to post them. Anything posted from Fox or NBC gets a warning almost immediately. They’re right on it. Scripps… plays the game a little differently. They’re some selfish pr*cks (excuse my language). Just about every popular show you want to see, past or present, can be found to watch somewhere, legally. Except for Good Eats. Scripps is so selfish, they won’t even allow it to be posted on Youtube, even though I’m not profiting from it. I realize that they’re allowed to be – they own it or license it or whatever. But why? Why make it inaccessible to the public? If the show was on DVD I wouldn’t even bother. Alton gets the money from the DVD sales and I wouldn’t take that away from him. But it’s not on DVD, so it’s quite unfair to everyone who likes the show. And it’s Food Network that is cheap and lazy and won’t make the DVDs.

So, finally, Scripps caught up with me. I got a violation notice from Youtube and had to take down Ginger: Rise of the Rhizome. If I incur any more violations, then my account will be shut down. I don’t know how Scripps finds these episodes (it’s not like its hard), but so far it’s only been the one. Now it’s a waiting game. I COULD take them all down myself and keep my account. Or, I could wait it out. I really don’t want to lose my account, though. I have many other videos that I posted and liked and favorited. If they shut me down and I have to make a new account, I suppose I could do that, without the Good Eats, of course. But it’s just the principle of the matter, you know? I almost want to start up my own website and post them there, but if THAT gets found out, I think the penalties would be a lot worse, and it’s not worth it.

I love this show so much and I wanted to just be able to share it with others. It’s good to have around as a reference guide, and it was nice to know that if my hard drive crashed I would have them saved on Youtube. But I guess Scripps thinks differently.

Wish me luck.

This is my example of fair use. Unfortunately, it would 

be taken down with everything else.