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Originally Posted by kane
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.
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before the printing press the gideon bible was only available thru the church, it was hand copied and as a result very few people owned it. The printing press published the "Good book" on mass, making it available to everyone. They were called both pirates and heretics for doing it. Business finally realized that they could make money by supporting the technology and using it as a means of distribution
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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.
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tv was first broadcast thru the air, unless you were in a major metropolitan area ( NY) you got nothing
some smaller communities could not get access to the signal because the necessary equipment was not made available locally (very expensive recievers and rebroadcasters).
The cable companies trunked the signal from the metropolitan areas and expanded it to local affilate stations. They charged people for the transmission and the tv stations argued that they should be the only ones who should be allowed to make money from the signal
Until the government stepped in and said it was a good thing. They pointed out that air waves that the tv stations were broadcasting on were given to those broadcaster by the government. And this private industry extending the reach without massive government subsidization. They legalized it and established the regulation you are talking about.
After this happened television stations made way more money, it increase competition (more stations) and each station could broadcast more hours of television. Their revenue went up.
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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.
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i suggest you read thru the transcripts from the betamax case and the two previous rulings at to see. The act of recording a tv show that you got from the station and playing it at a later time was defined as an act of piracy. IT was legally ruled to be the fair use right of timeshifting.
The fact is we have always had the right to timeshift our content, we just didn't have the technology to do it.
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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.
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what you are doing is called a circular proof your trying to fabricate a difference based on the economy of scale, some how arguing that since the numbers are greater the rights which were previously established to exist should not exist. do i have a right to timeshift a show i paid for yes.
if the power went out at my house and i failed to tape my episode of "knight rider"
Under the tape cassette model i would have to
- call up all my friends until i found one who had the show i missed
- trek over to the friends house
- borrow his tape
- trek all the way back to my house
- watch it on my vcr
- trek all the way over to his house
- give him back his tape
under the torrent model i would
- find the torrent on a site like isohunt
- download the torrent file for the show
- copy the show to my usb stick
- play it on my dvd player
the fact that it is easier doesn't change the fact that i am performing the same act of timeshifting. I bought the right to watch that content at 8PM on monday night, and i am timeshifting the right to view to whenever i want to view it (ie 6 pm tuesday).
I paid for the content therefore i have a right to watch it when i want.
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Back with the cassette tape it would take me 61+ hours to make 61 copies for som
eone. 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.
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first of all you know that not true if i wanted to do a mass scale copying of tv shows i could daisy chain multple vcr together and record them all within one hour. That how those big piracy organizations do it when they make their bootleg copies of movies.
However it is irrelevant because we are talking about the fair use use of torrents not the illegal use of torrents.
the equivalent is borrowing of a tape from a friend to catch the show you missed. A single tape could be passed on to dozens of friends watched at different times before it ever get returned for reuse to tape the next episode.
When i download a tv show i want to watch from the torrents, i don't keep it forever, i watch it i delete it so i have space on my harddrive for next weeks episode. Since i only seed to 100% (give only what i get) it the technological equivalent to passing on the tape to the next person.
Your arguing that the total size of the swarm somehow makes it illegal, if anything it makes it more legal. I am never giving anyone a working copy of the file, if you played my pieces it would come up with the error saying the file does not work. The person giving you a complete working copy of the show on a tape cassette is giving you 1 working copy.
That tape trading act so that is legal, because i bought the right to view the content when i paid the cable bill.
The act of downloading the show from the torrents is equally legal for the same reason.
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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?
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it timeshifting when i paid for the content and i am just moving my listening/viewing rights to another time. It copyright infringement when i never paid for it in the first place.
Now if you want to talk music, there is more of a issue to discuss because there are many countries that have a piracy tax on recordable media.
When the record associate negotated the rate (offer) with the government of canada (acceptance) and they took the fee (consideration) you have all the conditions of a valid contract (licience). As a canadian citizen who paid a piracy tax, i paid for every song i choose to download. Which means for me ever download is timeshifting(assuming i listen and get rid of it ) or recovery (if i keep it forever).
That licienced right does not go away, just because i am vacationing in florida (geo targetted blocking).
The fact that i connect to 10,000 peers to fulfill that right, does not invalidate the right.
Especially if the technology prevents me from giving any of those 10,000 people a fully working copy of the file.