Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Sorry, Sparrow, but when I was a teenager in the 1970s, we all used to save up our pocketmoney to buy "45" records; we didn't expect to be able to get it "for free". There really IS a different attitude towards it these days. I don't know whose "fault" it is, but the fact that the attitude exists is undeniable.
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The reason there is a different attitude today is that there is a different reality today. That change is what underlies this thread. I'm not discussing the moral aspects, per se, but the technological change itself. (This is an overview so dates are approximate and I've left out minor technologies.)
Before 1950, if you wanted a I.P. product, an analog copy had to be made in a factory. To make a mass illicit copy of it, you had to have a factory. Since a factory can be legally seized (for cause), the econmonic risk was much higher that the reward, so there was (basically) no I.P. "piracy".
Around 1950, the first magnetic tape came into existance. this was the first breach of the old analog ways. It was expensive, but it allowed easy individual duplication of certain I.P. property. Then in 1960 came the photocopy. For a US dime, you could copy a page of print. These thing became better and cheaper, and copying became more and more common. However since it was analog copying, each generation became less and less accurate, limiting the number of generations available from a master. A major nusiance for copyright holders, but not insurmountable. Note, VCR's are just a variant of magnetic tape. As the tapes and recorders got cheaper and cheaper, kids started to swap LP's and bung down their own copies of their friend's LP's (at least in the US).
The computer changed all of this. Suddenly 1. You weren't limited to analog gen loss, there was no gen loss in digital copies. and 2. You had a built-in digital copy machine as part of the package. (By definition anything that allowed you to save data was a digital copier.)
The internet, which is an outgrowth of the computer, allow you to digitally communicate with anyone with a computer around the world, in real time.
So instead of a factory at risk for I.P "piracy", you have a computer. and the cost to make a perfect copy has dropped from millions (for that factory) to a few hundreths of a penny, for the electricity.
This is the reality change. And this reality change is what's caused the attitude change in the next generation. When the cost of production for anything approaches zero, the rules of the analog world simply stop applying.
You may not like, I may not like it. But the world has changed and short of joining the ghost of Ned Lud, it's not changing back.