Quote:
Originally Posted by doctorow
While various industry protagonists are lamenting the piracy effect of digital goods, I wonder, how is that any different from the good old analog days when everyone was happily making analog copies left and right? Remember how you could buy blank cassette tapes in bundles of 20, 50, or 100 for very little money? What other purchase did these serve for the normal consumer than to rip lots audio?
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They were sold to allow you to make cassette copies of your own records, in the days when cassette players were the only portable form of music, as exemplified by devices like the Sony Walkman, and the cassette players that people had in their cars. I'm sure you're absolutely right in saying that they were also extensively used for music piracy, but (as Paul has said) there were mass-market advertising campaigns run in the UK to educate people that this wasn't legal.
One difference, though, between taping music and copying digital products is that taped music was very much an inferior product in terms of quality - I can't imagine anyone preferring to listen to music on cassette rather than the LP original; hence there was still a great incentive for people to continue to buy LPs. A copy of a digital product is identical to the original - it's not degraded in any way, so if you have a copy of digital music or a book, you have no reason to go out and buy the original.