Quote:
Originally Posted by gideongallery
the printing press was called a piracy tool when it was first created
cable tv was called piracy when it first came out
the vcr was called a piracy tool when it first came out.
Each resulted in content industry making way more money then if they had stopped it.
smart people figuire out how to use the technology rather then fight it.
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I know we have had this discussion before but there is a difference.
The printing press: Most people couldn't then (and can't even now) afford a printing press. Even if they could there was an inherent cost to operating it and distributing the material you printed with it so it was never (and still is not) a very big piracy tool.
Cable TV: This one kind of throws me for a loop. I have never heard of people saying cable TV was piracy. I have heard of it about those old satellite dishes that could pick up a ton of stuff once you had them hooked up, but Cable has pretty much always been regulated and the channels on it pay for content so I'm not sure how this was considered piracy when it first came out. And even if when it did come out they stole the content they broadcast, it wasn't long until they were paying for the content they were broadcasting.
VCR: It was a scare at first, but it wasn't long until they realized that it was like the audio cassette recorder/player. It is not a very good tool for piracy. You have to own 2 VCRs, get a copy of the movie, buy a blank tape and then spend 2 hours making one copy. Not very effective at all. You could record TV shows and fast forward past the commercials and I think this is something that they are still wrestling with today because of Tivo and DVRs and such. But when it comes to pirating movies the VCR was not a very efficient tool.
Here is the big difference. With a VCR, cassette recorder or printing press I can make a few copies at a time. It is labor and time intensive and the copy that I make is often not as high in quality as the original (with some exceptions) With MP3s and online video I can copy it in seconds and I can share it with millions. Before it would take me an hour to make a copy of a tape I bought for a friend of mine, for which he will have had to purchase a blank tape and chances are it won't sound as good as the original. With MP3s in that same hour I can download the full album in near CD quality and using my bit torrent client I can instantly share it with hundreds if not thousands of people. For example I just bought my niece Taylor Swift's new CD for Christmas. If I go to ISO Hunt and search for it I see there are nearly 1200 people seeding that album. Who knows how many thousands downloaded it and are not seeding it and at this moment there are 61 leechers. That means if I downloaded it and shared it I would be instantly sharing it with 61 people.
Back with the cassette tape it would take me 61+ hours to make 61 copies for someone. The VCR would take me at least that long to share a TV show I had recorded or a movie I had with 61 other people. In both cases I would have had to purchase blank tapes. Here it takes minutes and it is spread all over the place.
So explain to me how downloading a full CD and sharing it will 100's, if not 1000's or more is Timeshifting?