When the program aired originally, VH1/Viacom would have bought time-limited, media-specific licenses (i.e. you can play my song on cable tv on this program for 5 years if you give me $x dollars flat fee.)

If they wanted to release the thing again on a different medium (say internet streaming, or DVD) they’d need to find who owns the rights (it could have changed if the rights were bought or whole companies were bought or whatever) then they need to pay them all more money, for a DVD they could offer like .25 cents per $15 DVD sale or whatever, but for streaming that’s a monthly subscription so the royalties all need to be re-evaluated (for ad-supported)

Anyway, paying lawyers/accountants to sort it all out is an expense in and of itself, (in the like 10s of thousands of dollars range) for like maybe 100s or 1000s of dollars in revenue, and it just doesn’t pencil out.

I mean… it’s not a network technically. it’s a broadcast station (though the stations themselves are networks)

Seriously, you could yeet it at least 300m that way, maybe more since they’re less than 90kg.

Sorry if this sounds combative, but I just don’t think I’m understanding what’s going on, I can’t figure out how this could possibly work.

How does that even work though? Like… the exported doc is just a web page, it doesn’t have any google watermarks (except the now invisible ones) marking it as a google web page.

If it’s hosted on an external domain… it doesn’t have the google domain in the URL bar either…

Like how is the scam victim fooled vs a normal web page with the same information… How is a google docs HTML export visually different from a LibreOffice or Microsoft Office HTML export in a way that tricks the scam victim into thinking it’s legitimately from Google and therefore laundering the scammers reputation through Google. Like I know scam victims are generally distracted or otherwise not thinking clearly (or just dumb), but how does this work?

Besides the default font basically any Word Processor HTML export looks the same to a layman, it’s plain black text on a white background with 1in margins. If scam victims trust plain white backgrounds and simple formatting there’s a ton of ways to achieve that effect that bypass Google.

Those aren’t HTML exports though? Those are direct links to google docs.

Churning through senseless trends is a time honoured tradition. Just like beef stroganoff.