I remember there were issues after his passing with his produced material (of which I always found top notch) and I was hoping to maybe aquire some more of his work if it's still around.

Thanks.

There are some issues of "Splosh" on ebay at present, and videos turn up every so often. But if you're looking for downloads, they are not legitimately available.

Bummer. Okay thanks.

It's a shame that his contributions to the Community have vanished.

What little I've seen of his works over the years are A-Plus

PS - Apparently Plus-Signs don't show up once posted to the forum...

I gather his family were adamant that everything was to be erased from view after he died, I don't think they approved of what he did.

Terrible loss. Genuine character.

I have old copies of Splosh if anyone is looking to buy them.

Please, everbody at the UMD, PLEASE will your old wam material to another wammer! Let your legacy of wam-buying and wam-producing live on!

I do think as a community we should have a precident where by once the copy right holder has gone for a period and no one is going to profit from their material any more we should be allowed to exchange vids or host them somewhere to keep the material alive, i didn't know bill personally but i doubt he would want his work to dissapear and be forgotten

Absolutely not.

That would totally destroy the market for new material, and condemn us to an eternity of endlessly recycling the same old clips.

Big names from the early days seem to take on an almost mythical quality in people's minds, as if their work was in some way unrepeatable, when in fact anyone willing to put in enough effort could re-create those scenes, in modern HD, if they wanted to. Bill's work was amazing (I have a fair bit of it), his sense of comedy was absolutely superb. But those are learnable skills. Another producer could, given enough time and development and effort, produce new versions of the same concepts. And that provides work for current models and income for current producers.

Of course copyright does expire eventually, generally 70 years from either the author's death or when the production was first published. So by the mid 2090s, the Splosh! back catalogue will indeed be public domain.

I can't wait! Then I'll get the rest of what I want!



Norman

While i agree that people can learn the skills bill had i think every producer will come up with a unique style even if you gave two people the same skills they will come up with different stuff and again different models bring different things to the vids too, i have a fair bit of splosh stuff and gillys silly house stuff too i just think someone who was basically one of the founding fathers of our community should be remembered and celebrated and his work enjoyed not left to fade into obscurity because his parents didnt approve

it doesnt have to be is my point im sure there are enough of us that have some of his work to have most if not all of his work and i would happily share what i have if it was deemed ok to do so. I do buy plenty of stuff and never share stuff illegally as that is totally not ok but bill has gone and no one can profit from his work anymore so why not share it and allow people to see and enjoy it

Ridiculous stance and a large reason why copyright violations are rampant. 70 years after author's death?! GTFO.
AND it would absolutely not destroy the market for new material as long as, you know, new producers were as talented as Bill and Rob, etc. Folks here are always up for new material done with creativity and love. But I guess it is easier to hide behind this country's ridiculous laws, where copyright protection (because of the Disneys of the world) extends WELL beyond it was originally intended by the originators of the copyright concept.

I know quite a few musicians (and several ex-musicians) who would fundamentally disagree with that. Of course everyone hates copyright, because we all want everything for free. I know all these anti-copyright arguments because I used to make them, in other forums. But when everything is free, it (as the fall of the music industry has proven) destroys the market for new entrants. There will never be another Def Leppard or Queen or Iron Maiden. Instead there will be a million part-time bands playing for scraps, while the classic material is endlessly file-shared or streamed (think YouTube), all for free.

Shooting wam scenes costs money. To totally drench a fully dressed girl in custard takes at least 10 x 1kg cartons, more if she has long hair. And the girl has to be paid, and her clothes, boots, and underwear has to be provided, as does heat, light, and clean-up facilities, a decent hot meal afterwards, her transport costs, etc. I can't shoot a one-girl scene for less than 100 quid, and that's working with ordinary "girl I happen to be mates with" type models. Ask WAMTEC or Noise about what it costs to shoot with actual professionals.

If this "free sharing of dead producers' work" started up, very soon it would be "free sharing of anyone no-longer active", and then "free sharing of everything", at which point sales would collapse and you can kiss bye bye to any new material, and indeed the UMD itself.

This isn't just speculation - it's been fully worked in the music business over the last fifteen years. Remember record stores? Remember music labels signing bands based on actual talent? All gone the way of the stage-coach now.

I know we'd all love to have access to a free archive of all the producers who've disappeared, hell there's stuff out there (or rather no-longer out there) I'd love to be able to buy or download but can't any more. But I'd also like to be able to buy new scenes from current producers. Free sharing of "classic" scenes will destroy that. Ask any musician.

But when everything is free, it (as the fall of the music industry has proven) destroys the market for new entrants. There will never be another Def Leppard or Queen or Iron Maiden. Instead there will be a million part-time bands playing for scraps, while the classic material is endlessly file-shared or streamed (think YouTube), all for free.

I can name about 35 bands making music right now that I would rather listen to and see in concert than any of those bands (yeah, I know, Queen is now, somehow, considered canon .. still not a fan). That is, I like a TON of music being made now and -- as you can tell from my avatar -- it isn't because I am a huge fan of modern pop. There is GREAt music being made now. Just like there is great WAM being produced now. Your argument, if true, would mean that no modern screenwriter should bother trying -- all the best stuff was already produced by Bill Shakespeare. Frankly, I prefer the Coens and Scorsese to yet another Bard rewrite.

The problem with modern music is that the labels and the dinosaurs are consistently behind the technology-- i.e., sharing. You response to a completely reasonable suggestion (why can't Splosh's stuff still be sold in the community if its creator is in no way being protected by it being unavailable to honest folks (because he is dead)?) suggests that you are on the same side of things as the record labels and dinosaurs. No offense, but not surprised that you are still looking for the next Def Leppard.

Likewise, I know loads of people making great music. None of them are getting signed to labels or offered recording deals that let them give up their day jobs though. I'm not talking about kinds of music - just used those rock bands as examples.

If free sharing of "classic" wam prodcers' work becomes a thing, it will kill off new material. Which, amongst other things, is why its banned by the UMD's ToS. Is MM also a dinosaur? Also, given that the orders to shut down Bill's old stores, etc, came from his estate's lawyers, I suspect anyone trying to share or sell his material will soon find themselves in court. The point someone made earlier in the thread about producers leaving their WAM works to someone wam-friendly in their wills is a good one - we should all ensure that the copyright in our material (and hence legal right to go on selling it) goes to people we trust to keep it available, not order it all to be taken off line.

For one you can still buy def leopard and queen and iron maiden stuff so of course i wouldnt suggest sharing it. Michael Jackson is dead but he left his music to family who now are the copyright holders and they make money off it which is fine but say one of the worlds best musicians died and took the copyright to their grave do you think people should just forget them and stop listening to their music or share it and enjoy it?

Also i dont just want things for free i would happily pay for the material but that would be wrong for others to profit from his work, i just hate the fact that his work is gone from this community because his parents didnt understand and as i said it doeant have to be gone if say MM hosted it somewhere on the UMD as a kind of hall of greats or something and what material went in there can then be controlled

I find it interesting that the topic of "preservation of classic material" somehow equates to "the rampant and unmitigated sharing of any and all material".

Slippery Slope indeed.


The REAL issue here is preserving your materials in the event of your death, so that there's no murky issues to deal with at all, OR creating some kind of Free share archive where your materials can be Preserved in perpetuity, if that is your desire. Hard fact to swallow is that some people pull material and have reasons for doing so. Those types of decisions are also to be respected.

Many current producers have acquired Back-Catalogs of Classic Wam Material and are now keeping it in circulation years after it would of been otherwise sometimes just breaking even and donating the profits to charity too.

No matter which side of the coin you land on, It's a topic of interest from a historical perspective and one that I think deserves more discussion and proactive consideration.

YMMV.

I would agree with you, DungeonMasterOne, if you criticized i_like_pie's comment that we "should be allowed" etc for sounding kind of self-entitled to other people's material after they're long gone if it goes against their will. Although, I cannot make a good argument for making it NOT allowed, future people having to endlessly worry that some third party will actively stop them because the video that got passed around to them could be traced back to a deceased person's property. After all, even dear Bill Shipton, while he lived, walked on the graves & past properties of thousands of deceased humans who came before him, as we all do now. Having to keep track of that would make living impossible for the living.

But I digress. And, yes - I strongly agree with your point that hard work can overcome talent. Hence, for example, some wammer-to-be can produce just as good work as Bill Shipton or even better in the future.

That is, if the raw materials are provided. You cannot assume the future will go merrily along like the past (although there is a certain cyclical nature to it, but over much longer time scales than a single human life).

The earth & its inhabitants of the 2nd half of the 20th century to now have been blessed with a one-time lottery ticket of cheap oil & fossil fuels that power everything, right down to wam materials & video production.

I'm not saying we'll never produce wam movies again. But, we cannot take what we have already created for granted and assume that some wammer-producer-to-be out there can affordably produce videos during the next 50 years of the quality we have become used to. We must preserve those recycled videos and pass them around to keep them alive. That idea should take precedence over infinite copyright. At least until we pass through the coming dark times and come out into the light of sustainable energy & advanced biotechnology.

Hard to believe that it has been 50 years since 1965. And we have wam videos (old mud wrestling archive footage from the 1950s) even before that. So, 50 years is not a long time to look into the future.

Not to mention: a lot of Florida will be underwater in 50 years. So, any wammers thinking of setting up shop in Florida: don't.

Totally 100% agreed (hence I thumbed up both your points).
That is, IF new material CAN be made. THAT is my #1 worry & should be yours & that of all future wammers. Music can be produced cheaply. It is basically information & sound waves. Wam videos requires raw materials and much more energy.

The problem isn't format conversion, that was already done and dusted, there were download stores on Vidown with the Splosh! material. The problem is that as he'd not left a will, Bill's estate reverted to his family, and they wanted it gone.

This is the original thread where Soundguy very kindly gave everyone a couple of weeks warning that the shutdown was coming, so we could all grab what we could before it went down. https://umd.net/forums/bad_news_-_splosh_vidown_store?start=0 - it has pretty much the full details of what happened and why. As the forum was community-generated content we were able to save that, it still exists under a different domain and runs off the Saturation Hall servers. And someone kept the studio open for a while, though I don't know what happened to that in the end. I've no idea if anyone was able to save the actual Splosh! content archives, tapes, photos, or digital files, though.

Not a problem for me, cos we have already been producing underwater videos in Florida for the last 24 years. All we have to do now is more research on what kind of pie recipe we need to develop in order to stage a pie fight underwater.

I don't worry about the polar ice caps melting and causing sea levels to rise and flooding us in Florida....a much more likely scenario that could happen any day is that volcano in Tenerife that is showing signs of stress, and if that blew the scientists say it could could cause one third of the volcano to slide into the ocean, creating a super-tidal wave 1000ft high...racing across the Atlantic at the speed of a Jumbo jet...and most of Florida is less that 20ft above sea level...so that would wash us away....so I guess I need to buy a surf board,

MK

Yes. I know about that volcano on Tenerife. That's always a slim possibility. Don't know why you think that is "more likely" than melting ice caps from AGW. Volcanology - predicting exactly when volcanoes will erupt - is far less predictable & measurable & testable than climate science: because one does not have easy access to what's going on with solid or molten rock 50 miles down. But we DO have access to air and oceans (to a lesser extent, but still easier than drilling far down into the ground).

Regarding the issue of endlessly seeing old tapes,
Peter Griffin on last night's episode, "Peter & Chris & Brian",
of Family Guy, demonstrated the typical human response to fetish material best
when he goes back to his old home to retrieve his childhood stash of porn,
brings it back to his current home, then 11 minutes later declares he
"never wants to see it again". LOL!

Sorry. No clip yet.

Just to be clear I don't feel entitled to Bills or anyone elses material and i do buy plenty of vids to contribute to the community, and if bill had left a will saying he wanted his work destroyed after his death then fair enough. But from what i understand he left no will hence his work fell to his parents who asked that it be destroyed for whatever reason. I just hate the thought that a man who worked so hard to promote and spread awareness of our fetish (he is also the reason i found out i wasn't alone in liking the sight of women being pied) will be lost to the passage of time when something can and should be done to preserve it, what that "something" should be and how it would be controlled i don't know, if he'd been a painter his work would be in a museum. And just to continue the doom and gloom no ones mentioned yellowstone park volcano yet or the fact some scientists recon the earths 6th great extinction has already begun and humanity has only about 3 generations left lol and on that happy note night all i'm off to bed

I have no idea who owns the Messy Fun catalog now, but it is still available (well, 85 videos worth of it anyway) for sale here:

http://vidown.com/cgi/store2.pl?site=mfvideosonline.com

The downside is that the video files they're selling must've been rendered back in the early aughts, because the file sizes are tiny: about 6-7MB per minute. That's very primitive by today's standards, and it's an especially cruel fate for the work of Rob Blaine, since he was such a stickler for high-quality output. I can only hope that the original uncompressed master copies of these videos still exist and will one day be re-rendered in the quality that they obviously deserve. But I'm guessing that's not terribly likely.

[If this sound eerily familiar to anyone, that's because it's a repost of something I wrote on the Rob Blaine tribute thread of about two weeks back, in response to another complaint from nightwatchman about the unavailability of the Messy Fun material.]

EDIT: Soundguy pointed out on the other thread that there are actually two Messy Fun stores up, with a total of over 200 videos. The second store is here:

http://vidown.com/cgi/store2.pl?site=classicwam.com

I have sequentially numbered Splosh magazines from way back near the beginning. Not sure if I started with #1 or #6 but they are in new condition. Make me a decent offer and I'll go dig them out of storage and give you the exact issue numbers. Keep in mind I paid a lot for those back then having to do the dollars to pound conversions before it got simple so I certainly am not going to let them go for anything less than I paid for them.

As to the videos, I have most of them but frankly, I suspect they'll turn up for free any day now somewhere. I've already seen most every Messy Fun posted around and about. No need to worry excessively about things like that becoming permanently unavailable, all it takes is someone eventually posting just one copy and the genie can't be gotten back in the bottle. Same with Chuck Lang's material. Just get good at looking around and you'll eventually find most everything.