TekSavvy → Re: If Voltage Take Customers To Court File Sharing Is Legal!

I have been giving this much more thought, and I can see where Jason is going with this...

Content creators also had the rights to stop people from using their VHS (or Beta) machines to record movies from the TV. And to record songs off the radio. And to create their own mix tapes. And to format shift their songs onto tape or CD. And to share media with friends.

But that happened, and it happened a lot. Just like the modern-day equivalent does -- Canipre said they were tracking 1 million households out of the ~9 million that CRTC say had broadband last year, so at least 10% of us have been flagged by these guys as pirates.

The big difference I can see here is that it is potentially much easier for the content creators to track down the casual pirates who are still using BitTorrent (let's be honest, the serious pirates aren't going to be caught in this dragnet unless they're included ironically due to an error by Canipre or the ISP.. they've moved on just like they jumped ship from Napster, Kazaa, etc when they became risky) and sue them.

Is that morally right?

My initial objection to this whole mess was one of fairness: that whether you were guilty or innocent, as soon as you were identified you had to pay big $$, either the extortion demand or court costs. All they needed was a name and a mailing address and you were screwed.

Now I'm thinking that in our society personal copyright infringement has always been acceptable and part of fair use, and that it is wrong for us to allow technology to automatically bestow rights on the content creators that they didn't have before.

It makes you think... Well, it makes me think.

The thing is that so much has changed, so quickly in the grand scheme of thing. 20 years ago we were recording albums onto cassette tapes, and television shows on to VHS tapes. Okay, mid-90s you might have been using CDs. So copying was awkward, resulted in loss of quality, and involved cost to the person copying. The running joke when I was in high school was that you needed to date someone long enough to copy their albums (then tapes).

Today you can take that music or video, copy it with almost no loss of quality and share it with thousands almost simultaneously. The copy costs the person doing the copy next to nothing. ie. maybe overage charges, maybe another hard drive - but only if doing high volumes. That's what has changed.

You can buy a copy of a book and after you've read it you pass the single copy to someone else. If you want to retain the copy you need to physically copy it. Now, switch it to electronic and again, fast multiple copies. Add the internet to it and how many copies can be distributed from a single purchase?

I've said in a couple of different instances that the distribution models need to change. Providers such as Hula, Netflix, and Pandora are starting to make some changes (and that's where we need to head). Of course Canadian licensing likely means people will still want to break the law and sign in using VPNs. To complicate things more our major service providers are in conflict as they want us to buy TV from them.

With better (and more reasonable licensing) wouldn't it be great to subscribe to Cogeco online TV? Favourite shows available on their conventional air dates, everyone would know exactly how many times each and every show was viewed. Hell, embed ads and you can collect even more revenue. I might actually 'turn on' the TV more. I've watched more since I subscribed to Netflix.