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.

[Indras]

Yes, but the point of this article is to detour people from this way of thinking. The fact is, while digital copies may make things easier, it's no more or less illegal than analog copies, which is what the writer calls the "analog myth." I can remember getting most of my home music by borrowing other people's cassette tapes (audio, not VHS) and copying them. A friend of mine had two VCR's, and every night he would rent a few movies and make copies, and sell them for a few bucks to friends (just enough to get more blank tapes, no profit involved).

The fact is, digital pirating is likely just as difficult, just as widespread, and just as damaging as analog pirating. Actually, many cam rips (when someone sits in a theater with a camera and records the whole movie) are analog to begin with, then later converted to a digital format, and additionally put through some lossy compression schemes to bring it down below 700Mb to be put up on servers.

"It's much more of a danger to the Music Industry, and they have a right to protect themselves."

Actually, this article is about the Movie Industry, not music, I see you didn't take time to read it. And yes, they have the right to protect themselves, but suing KaZaA, Morpheus, iMesh, Napster, and so on for allowing this to take place is like suing UPS for allowing people to send drugs illegally through the mail. The fact is, they SHOULDN'T know what's inside the files that are being swapped, just as much as UPS shouldn't know what's inside a package they deliver.

And, forcing companies to create hardware that won't allow you to make illegal copies is stupid, too. That's like making Xerox put something in their copiers that won't allow people to make photocopies of of pages out of copyrighted books without permission (which is illegal, too). How does a DVD player know that the DVD you're playing in it is being copied to another DVD, and how does the DVD burner (in the case of copying DVD's) tell that the incoming signal is copyrighted material, not the owner's home movie of his son building a sandcastle?

The fact is, if something is being done illegally, the MPAA needs to go for the people who are committing a crime using these devices, not the people who make the devices.