Wikinomics blogger Denis Hancock has a hilarious post about the ridiculous state of intellectual property madness in today’s economy. Here’s an excerpt.

In and attempt to fulfill my contractual obligations as a member of the Net Generation, for years I’ve been trying to get my parents to buy something online. While they have “stubbornly” refused for a variety of reasons, this changed yesterday when I got an email from my Dad who was looking at his first web purchase - a complete DVD box set of his favorite show from many years ago called WKRP in Cincinnati.

Boy did he ever make the wrong choice about where to start in the whacky world of digital commerce today - as he’s now recieved a crash course in the fraudelent looking retailers that float around out there, and all the funny things that happen when the music labels are involved with anything.

So things immediately got off on the wrong foot when I looked at the link he sent me - promising seasons 1-4 for $55.99 (versus a regular price of $199.99). The site just a looked little bit shady. Among other things, there was no company address anywhere, and a phone number that just went to an automated voice system. So I did a quick search for the site name, and lo and behold 1/2 of the hits led to sites complaining that the “company” was basically just ripping people off. I’m not sure if it’s true… but don’t want to take the chance.

But that’s not the big problem, because I was undeterred and hit Amazon and eBay trying to to find the DVDs from more reputable retailers. From this search I found out there were no “complete sets” out there. In fact, only season one was being released - and not even the real season one at that. To quote Fox on the release:

“Some fans are going to look at this and say, ‘Well, this isn’t the show I saw on television.’ It’s not, but it’s the only show we could bring out on DVD.”

Awesome. You see (for those that are unfamiliar with the antics of Les Nessman and crew) WKRP was a show about a fictional radio station in Cincinnati from 1978-1982. As one would expect, a lot of music from the time was being played in the show in short snippets, and that music was kind of critical since it’s about a radio station and all. But it seems that WKRP only had music licensing deals cut for a limited amount of time, and these would have to be “renegotiated” in order to things like DVDs to be released.

So this is where the music labels get involved, and anyone that’s been following what happens when the music labels get involved won’t really be surprised by what follows. Re-licensing the songs is prohibitively expensive (tens of thousands of dollars for even short pieces of songs, which adds up quickly if you have a lot of them), so WKRP can’t be re-released at anything close to a reasonable price point. In turn, for season one, nearly all the music has been replaced with “generic” music, and some scenes have been cut all together or truncated to avoid using musical content. On a show about a radio station.