and American copyright law. However, by the 1870s, international outcry from authors and publishers alike prompted legislatures to consider revisions to end the "very unreasonable" principle. While increasingly uncommon, some books are published as abridged versions of earlier books, which is most common in textbooks, usually lengthy works in complicated fields like engineering or medicine. Abridged versions of popular textbooks are published to be used as study aids or to provide enough surface information for the reader to become familiar with the material but not have a full understanding of it or its full scope. Abridgement for television Plays, notably by Shakespeare, have very often been heavily abridged for television to fit them into ninety-minute or two-hour time slots. (The same is true of long classical ballets such as the two-and-a-half hour Sleeping Beauty, which has almost never been performed complete on television.) It was done more often in the past than it is now (such as in Hallmark Hall of Fame from the 1950s to about 1970). With the advent of such noncommercially-sponsored PBS anthologies such as Great Performances, Live from Lincoln Center and the BBC Television Shakespeare plays, there is now less pressure to cram a play lasting at least three hours, such as Hamlet, into a two-hour time slot. Abridged series An abridged series is a fanmade parody that uses video footage from an original series, often filled with comedic redubbing. It is called "abridged" because episodes are not as long as the original episodes and the comedic implication of being a proper summation of events. The first abridged series, Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series, was created by Martin Billany, better known by his screen name LittleKuriboh, in 2006 and has since inspired multiple popular abridged series such as Dragon Ball Z Abridged by TeamFourStar and Sword Art Online Abridged by Something Witty Entertainment. Since most abridged series are uploaded to Youtube, they are occasionally subject to aggressive copyright infringement takedowns by parent companies. References Censorship in the arts Editing fr:Résumé