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? Heck, I was sharing music with my teachers, and nobody thought anything wrong about it or considered it to be piracy. Nor was there anyone complaining.
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The copyright terms were the same also back then.
The point is that the studios didn't care too much, and therefore people considered the lack of legal suits as the status of freedom. And apparently they do today, too
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The point was that analogue copies suffer from degrading quality. The studios started to move only when the recording devices and media reached a quality level that the copy was almost as good as the original. This happened for the first time around 1964, when taxes like RIAA and GEMA (for Germany) have been introduced for the recording gear. The next step occurred in 1990, when another tax was levied, this time off recordable media, and introduced the SCMS copy control (actually it's a copy prohibiting) system - and almost killed the DAT (and made CDR live on "life support"). Surely the older amongst us remember the "Taping home is killing music" slogan.
Levying a tax for copying but preventing it altogether (BD cannot be copied yet the tax levied is around 3,9€ apiece) is a con act.