File Swapping and the Analog Hole

forehead writes "Lawmeme is running an interesting piece on piracy in the digital age. It covers a number of the logical fallacies often cited by the major media companies and certain lawmakers."

Comments

Re:Digital is different.

[Com2Kid]

In digital, you can create perfect copies and send them out to everyone you know... at the click of a button.

With analog, you actually have to work at it. You'd have to tape the tape (lossy), make copies (lossy), and give it to friends/fellow pirates manually.

Computers make things much easier for pirates. That's why there's so much focus on swapping music digitally. It's much more of a danger to the Music Industry, and they have a right to protect themselves.

Uh huh.

BULLSHIT

It is A LOT easier to make an analog rip (put tape in machine, hit record) then it is to do a digital rip.

First off there isn't any "Big Red Button" solution to doing movie rips that are of a high enough quality that ANY self respecting movie pirate would use.

Doing even a DECENT digital rip requires extensive knowledge of a large variety of programs and a good deal of work, not to mention the patience to wait while your video sits there and encodes at .1 FPS or so on a 1Ghz+ machine.

Now if you want to do a GOOD rip (a GOOD digital rip will look better then the original DVD, many rippers take pride in that they can correct errors made in the original DVDs mastering) then you had better know a ton about mathematics, some basic data theory, a good deal of color theory, have an intuitive understanding of at least some parts of matrix mathematics, and know how to combine it all of those skills together to create one nice highly polished product.

This is not even going into how you are using primitive tools that range from being everything from crash prone to inducing video or audio errors into your stream if you push the wrong button or select the wrong option. (not that that option should induce errors, but. . . . Betas are betas and all, and the programs you are using likely will never be out of beta stage).

Yah sure now the couriers may have a somewhat easy job (though it does depend on how you are transferring the files) but hell;

don't say that making a digital rip it easy, because it is not.

(of course good Analog copiers have to go through similarly difficult troubles, just hitting record on a VCR doesn't cut it if you want quality goods.)