Music, hark!

I’ve not started diving into my Doctor Who – Series 3 DVDs yet (waiting to finish up the House – Season 1 set we’ve been plowing through), but I’m disappointed that the final ep’s commentary track has been changed.

Doctor Who – The Complete 3rd Series, released on DVD earlier this month in North America, was quickly noticed to have an issue with the final episode on the set, “Last of the Time Lords” (the last part of a 3-part story) having a “wrong commentary track”. The booklet and the pre-release materials indicated that David Tennant (“The Doctor”), Freema Agyeman (“Martha Jones”) and John Barrowman (“Capt. Jack Harkness”) recorded a commentary track for the DVD release of this episode. However, fans only found a re-run of the internet podcast by the show’s Producers.

Well, these things happen.  Bu evidently the commentary track is on the UK DVD release, and the (speculated) reason for why it was changed seems particularly irksome.

From BBC Worldwide
“Unfortunately, though we make every effort to offer identical content in our Doctor Who releases to every territory, the original commentary track for Series 3, Episode 13 featuring David Tennant, Freema Agyeman and John Barrowman could not be cleared for the North American DVD. We acknowledge that the booklet accompanying it has the incorrect credits and they should read Russell T Davies, Julie Gardner and Phil Collinson. The booklet will be corrected as soon as possible.”

“Could not be cleared”…the message boards all over the ‘net are speculating on what this means. The consensus is…singing. Folks who have access to the U.K. release know that there is singing on the commentary track, led by Barrowman, and everyone figures that the rights to the different songs (there are more than one) were unable to be cleared for use outside of the United Kingdom. Is that accurate? The BBC won’t say for sure on the record, so we’ll just have to leave you hanging right there…sorry. If true, though, I think we can expect a “no singing” policy to be instituted pronto for future commentary track recordings!

Give me a break.

If the DVD had instead been issued (and promoted) as “John Barrowman’s Greatest Sing-along Hits,” that would be one thing.  Copyright exists to protect against people exploiting the works of others and depriving them of compensation to which they would otherwise receive.  I have no problem with that.

But if a single commentary track of a DVD includes some folks impromptu singing some songs — does that really require obtaining rights to the tunes?  Or, rather, since we know it does, should it?  Am I less likely to go out and buy a copy of (whatever it was) because, hey, I can just listen to the cast of Doctor Who on this DVD I have? 

Silly and stupid.

Not that there’s anything wrong with a track by the folks described.  But I count it as yet another example of the silly extremes of current media companies regarding intellectual property “rights” they “own” and how they end up neither profiting themselves, only inconveniencing the public.