I am ashamed that I hadn’t reasoned this through given all the rubbish digital services have pulled with “purchases” being lies.
I am ashamed that I hadn’t reasoned this through given all the rubbish digital services have pulled with “purchases” being lies.
Things got weird when we went digital.
Recording from free to air is legal because of the “time shifting” argument. The show is being broadcast regardless, just because it’s at an inconvenient time for you doesn’t mean you should have to miss it. It’s also worth noting that media producers fought tooth and nail against this.
Piracy is just reverse time shifting. It’s going to be on FTA TV at some point, I’m just making it more convenient to watch now.
That might actually be an element of a workable argument in Court. I think it’s a very clever reframing of the precedent that allows recordings of broadcast media.
Companies pay big bucks for timed exclusivity though. If reverse timeshifting was legal, movie theaters would go bankrupt. I feel like this wouldn’t hold up.
I like the way you think, but that’s kind of not true these days. We have streaming services and rights holders just straight deleting shit or producing shitty sequels and reboots just to keep the IP out of public domain. IDK about your location but here FTA is basically dead. It’s all shitty reality shows being hosted by third rate celebs from other reality shows because they either can’t or won’t produce or pay for actual content.
The difference is that grabbing it pre-FTA is also grabbing a perfect copy. The quality may not matter to many of us, but to some it does. And because it matters to some, major copyright holders have started to treat unlicensed exchanges as “competition” from a business PoV (which is a concession from strictly seeing it as crime). So their business strategy is to compete with the unlicensed channels by offering perfect quality media at a price (they hope) people are willing to pay (also in part to avoid the inconvenience and dodgyness of the black market).
FWiW, that’s their take and it’s why they get extra aggressive when the unlicensed version is perfect.
Remember that there were also big campaigns against tape recorders and VCR. They even managed to get VCR vendors to implement a feature that prevents users from skipping ads. So it’s not like it’s simply legal, the media corps were just not as successful in their lobbying as they are today.
I can’t find anything about VCR’s blocking; I did find a bunch saying the opposite.
There were copy protections that prevented a VHS -> VHS copy being made of some movies. Easily defeated, but they did exist.
My scenario was recording an Over The Air transmission onto VHS using a VCR; not making a backup copy of a movie you purchased on VHS.
Edit: I do recall a campaign against VHS recording of TV shows, but didn’t it ended basically saying “Broadcast public == public domain”?. That actually led to copy protections in VHS tapes.
I don’t recall ever having a VCR that prevented skipping ads. Maybe that was a Tivo thing?
I don’t subscribe to the logic but I guess a part of it can be the lossless factor. Quality of pirated digital content is exactly like the original. If you tape something it usually loses quality. So people seem to care less about that kind of piracy. Which is stupid since going for lossy compressed pirated videos is allegedly not less wrong in the face of law.
Let’s get crazier.
Our current favorite show is Bob’s Burgers, it’s a comfort show we fall asleep to. Prior to signing up with real debrid I got tagged for downloading a 2 year old episode.
We pay for Hulu. We pay for YoutubeTV. We have a working OTA antenna (for when the internet goes out).
My math says I have 3 licenses, yet still illegal to download?
Well it’s an interesting question. From Hulu’s TOS:
While I’m not a lawyer, I’m gonna guess the lines about a revocable license are intended to cover this. Sites like Hulu rotate their content out, which I’m gonna guess means your license to view their content only extends to what’s in their library at that time. Under fair use, you might be able to argue that you can create a backup copy for your own viewing – it does say “temporarily download,” but doesn’t say you have to download it from them – but legally you’d probably be obligated to delete your copy once Hulu gets rid of it regardless.
Also, the TOS does specify that circumventing their copy protection is a TOS violation. While the DMCA grants certain exceptions to the copy-protection rule for fair use, I don’t think it requires Hulu to continue to serve you content or not revoke your license if you break their TOS. Kinda reminds me of Red Hat’s use of TOS to enforce terms that go above and beyond the GPL. They can’t exactly stop you 100%, but they can refuse to do business with you, which makes it a lot harder.
The whole “illegal to download” bit is somewhat misleading. People almost always get in trouble for uploading, which just happens to be a part of how bittorrent works. When you’re downloading, you’re also uploading (Unless you’ve changed your settings).
In fairness, it was never legal to make thousands of copies of that VHS tape and hand them out en masse. Which is how you’re getting it when you download it, from someone doing exactly that.
deleted by creator