I see this site as a sort of museum for old TV ads and trailers and that kinda stuff. As such, it should follow the policy for preservation that all brick&mortar art museums follow. Don't get out a sharpie and write the museum's name over the front of a painting. Same applies here.

I get it, though. You guys want online recognition/fame for what you do, archiving old videos, so you want your name plastered on every video uploaded to your website. However, there's 2 problems with that. One, this ruins the video, taking the clean copy that the uploader uploaded to your site and making it no longer the clean copy. For very rare videos, this means that the Retrojunk copy of the video may be the only copy of the video on the internet, and if the uploader deletes the clean copy on their harddrive, your watermark may have REMOVED FROM ALL EXISTENCE the LAST REMAINING COPY of a particular video. The other problem is that watermarks are typically used to indicate ownership of videos (TV station logos for example are frequently embedded in a corner of the screen on videos broadcast on TV). Since Retrojunk has no legal copyright/ownership of the videos in question (the makers of the actual original videos have this copyright/ownership), using such a logo opens you guys up to lawsuits that could potentially force you to close your entire website, and as a result THOUSANDS of rare videos may be made to cease to exist if your website closed.

So given these issues, I strongly request that Retrojunk refrain from embedding watermarks in any newly uploaded videos. Furthermore, I strongly request that if the script that embeds the watermark also makes a backup copy of the clean uploaded video somewhere on the server's harddrive, that this backup copy be restored for all videos hosted on the Retrojunk website, so that when viewing a video on Retrojunk, you will be viewing the clean version of the video. If the upload script does NOT make such a backup copy of the clean uploads, then I request Retrojunk that you reach out via email to the original uploaders (and I know you have their email addresses, because you need to be a member here to upload), and request they reupload the clean copies of their videos (if they still have them on their personal harddrives), after you have fixed the upload script so that it no longer embeds watermarks in uploaded videos.

Agreed. These are already difficult to get in higher quality. There's so many barriers, and a watermark from the people archiving shouldn't be one of them. Or, at least provide the negative of the logo used on the watermark to make removal easy. You didn't make this stuff, so what's the point in watermarking the video itself? Because you archived it? Have you? If you're putting a watermark on it, are you really archiving it? In my opinion, it's a disservice to archival. You want to upload them to youtube with your site mentioned on an end card, fine. I can respect that. But you aren't deserving of fame if you archive with your watermark. It defeats the purpose! I might as well go back to the original tape and get it because it's not in it's original form.

not to question but how the