Back when we would record onto VHS, is that considered piracy? Found a super bowl XXXI tape from my Uncle circa 1997. I'm curious lol.
Also side note, have any of you dabbled in digitizing old VHS? Have quite a few home videos on VHS and I'm wanting to preserve them for the future. I've done a bit of research and have come across a wide array of information. I know that doesn't really qualify as piracy, if there's a better comm for this, please direct me there!
Partially off-topic but I rarely get the chance to tell this story:
My old man was a porn hound. Talking wall of VHS tapes. You know what I'm picturing, that was his living room. Had 4 VCR's hooked up at once with several switches, a few switchboards for colour and audio correction, whole 9 yards. Lost an eye when I was a kid so always wanted to make his viewing 'optimal' for him.
What he'd end up doing was go down to the local Variety Video, rent 5-6 tapes, come home, and dub em over the weekend. Then once dubbed, remove the label with some heat, open the cassettes (the og and the copy he made) and swap the reels so he'd have the original one (which would be ever-so-slightly better quality than the copy he made, again, cause of his sight). Then seal em up, return the copy and no one was the wiser. Did this for close to 15 years before the place closed down (for unrelated reasons) and had his huge wall of big titty wank material for years to come lmao.
The VCR was invented, marketed, and sold to do this very thing. When the VCR first came out (same for betamax) they didn't sell pre-recorded tapes because the only way they had to make those was to manually record them individually in real-time which was prohibitively expensive. That's also why movie rental places caught on: early VHS movies were too expensive for most to afford. But not too expensive for a business to rent hundreds of times.
Suffice to say: if recording TV was piracy, it wasn't illegal and the people bitching had no way to enforce their will.
Only if you sold it. Back when cassette tapes first came out, the
mysticmusic industry sued, and the Supreme Court ruled it fair use. So VHS tapes were under the same umbrella. We wouldn't get that same ruling now.Holy hell, that was one hell of an autocorrect on mobile.
the mystic industry sued
They considered video recording to be black magic and they're very protective of their turf.
The implications of "magic is data" are fun. It leads to stories like Unsong where you can brute-force enumerate incantations until you find a good one. I also like the concept of Wizard's Bane. I haven't read it, but my understanding is that magic turns out to be Turing-complete, and the protagonist creates a LISP evaluator in magic, which enables them to outcast their enemies who are still doing the magical equivalent of writing assembly.
You'd probably also enjoy The Laundry Files. Math is magic, and while you -can- do it in your head, using computers is a lot safer and more efficient. Includes such gems as a basilisk gun integrated into CCTV camera systems.
My brother and I (mostly him, just helped a small bit) used to distribute Anime this way. He'd buy laserdiscs of Anime like Rurouni Kenshin (OVA/Prequel)and Yu Yu Hakushou, then download translations for subtitles and time them on the computer, using a bluescreen pass through and onto some SVHS VCRs. From those two SVHS VCRs, he'd use 9 others to copy them onto VHS tapes for distribution via mail. He'd charge cost iirc, not making profit on it.
I'm 100% sure it would be considered piracy if the companies had a way to find out. Plus VHS tapes had piracy warnings on them back then anyway.
You know what I think is funny? The NFL doesn't have any footage of Super Bowl 1, the only known tape of the game is held by a private collector, but he can't watch it due to the NFL copyright. So its sitting in an Iron Mountain facility in the Poconos. And its deteriorating.
It was definitely considered piracy by the public at the time. Everyone I knew called it a "legal grey area", but as far as I know it was legally permissable.
The media companies tried their hardest to make it sound like you were destroying the entire industry and you'd go to jail for life as soon as they caught you.
What makes me mad is the boomers I watched copy rentals and NFL games are the same ones telling me I'm stealing by using an ad blocker.
