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HBO Attacking BitTorrent
DIY News writes "HBO is actively poisoning the BitTorrent downloads of the new show Rome. In addition to an older tactic of offering bogus downloads that never complete, HBO is now obstructing the downloads offered by other people. HBO runs peers that tell the tracker they have all the chunks of the show, but then send garbage data when a downloader requests a chunk. While the bogus peers can be detected, it will take much longer to download shows."
Rome is actively poisoning my HBO. What a craptacular waste of programming.
Its raining men!
Closed registration torrent sites will be able to weed out the poisoners.
These people would have been owned and disconnected within hours of this being discovered. With the changing of the guard, so too does the changing of morality.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Abusus non tollit usum. /There I said it!
Most modern Bittorrent clients will recognize that a peer is spewing garbage chunks, and snub them. Usually the trigger to snub is as little as 3 bad chunks.
So the whole idea that this will significantly increase download times is complete BullShit!
A Fatal OE Exception has occurred, Sig will now reboot.
azereus has this nifty little feature that blocks the IP of any client that sends more than 2 or 3 corrupt blocks of info.
rome wasn't built in a few shows
"Lead my skeptic sight."
svefg cbfg
Good for HBO. They have every right to protect their legitimate revenue stream. If we think we can send whatever sequence bytes we want over the p2p networks, I say we extend the same freedom to the fine people at HBO.
At the same time, this is also good for p2p software. I'm sure it will only result in better algorithms for dealing with tainted peers.
I use torrents instead of the TiVo I don't own. I've got fully legit paid for HBO but lately I've been too busy to watch Rome so I've just been d/l-ing them. I wonder how that falls under fair-use?
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
Rome wasn't downloaded in a day either, I guess.
Good things take time, so I guess Bit Torrent users will just have to wait a little longer for legitimate video files to become available if they desperately want to see this show.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
HBO is not attacking BitTorrent the program, they're attacking people misusing BitTorrent to share copyrighted material illegally.
It might be worth noting that I was using Azureus and running PeerGuardian at the time of the download.
I'm running Azureus on a different computer now.
In Bittornado, and possibly other clients, there's an option you can check that will ban peers that do this.
prefs -> check [Kick/ban clients that send you bad data]
After at least one failed hash check, the client won't eat any more poison, so to speak.
Okay, I understand why they'd want to do it, or at least some initial reasoning: People are infringing on our copyright (Arrrr!), so we should try to stop them. Thing is, how does this help them at all? Do they really think that people are going to try to download the first episode, realize that it's really difficult, so they'll pay for HBO and start mid-series? Is that their game plan here? I just can't imagine this working. What they've really done is only two things.
1: They've pissed people off, some who may simply download out of spite now, and
2: They're stopping potential customers from seeing their show. I don't have HBO (not sure I can get it here anyway, but let's say I can). So what if I download and episode, realize that I really like it, and want to sign up? Well, they've stopped me from doing that, or at least tried.
So yeah, I just can't imagine how this helps them at all. Of course, I may be way off here, so bring on the torches if you're into that sort of thing.
CC Licensed Serialized Story and Podcast: Ingenioustries
You say it like HBO is doing something Evil. I would agree, if they were messing up the protocol, across the board, but, from the article, they are doing this to downloads of their copyrighted material (specificaly, the show ROME).
Perhaps "HBO using technology to counter Copyright Infringment". I mean, really, downloading Rome cant be particularly leagal. It is theirs. Surely this is a good thing. I mean, entities have to be able to protect their property. Argue what you will about the terms of copyright (I would agree they are ridiculous). But this is somone trying to protect something which is currently making them money. And they arent suing anyone, either (yet). I for one, hope they can find a technological way to stop people from using BitTorrent to illeagly download theiri intellectual property, as I tend to prefer those solutions to the far nastier ones that are available (see the RIAA).
I hate to break it to you, they have the copyright to the show. They have full license to distribute the show in any way they see fit. They see fit in distributing the show as a garbled mess over Bittorrent. If you don't like their distributation method, that's YOUR problem. Find another way to watch their show.
Burn Hollywood Burn
That's pretty cute, the use of "obstructing" in the summary. Usually when I hear the word obstructing it is in phrases like "obstructing justice." Obstructing is usually something the criminals do. The word has picked up a pretty negative connotation.
But here, we have HBO obstructing the downloading of their copyrighted material. HBO is obstructing copyright violation. Would you say that a lock obstructs breaking and entering? Or that self defense obstructs assault? Perhaps good server administration obstructs the stealing of private data. Of course you wouldn't say that. It sounds silly. So why is HBO obstructing downloads?
are understandable since Rome is their big subscription pitch for the moment. If they can frustrate DLers enough to pay for a subscription, buy or rent the dvd, then they can profit. While many opinionated slashdotters will scoff and say people should boycott HBO, fact of the matter is most people's convictions aren't so strong that they will throw away the time invested in watching the earlier episode. On a positive note, the fact that HBO has some sense of what is going on technologically means that they are that much closer to offering download services of their own.
Easy solution. Dedicate a website to Rome trackers that actually contain other things (like fan-created things). Name them like HBO Rome Episode One.torrent, etc, etc. HBO will ejaculate half their money into lawyers and it'll go down like a burning ship
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
As I recall it started to get obvious a couple of weeks ago. Rome's a great series I couldn't see without P2P groups. MediaSentry released a 95+% complete fake of the next week's episode onto the networks a week early in order to try and entrap sharers. I tested that release by repairing the 95% downloaded file and it was indeed just silent black video fill-in. Peerguardian lit up like a christmas tree during (and for days after) the download.
I'm curious as to how they can chase people for sharing a file devoid of any content or copyrighted materials like that.
Anyway, it's really not a problem for people that use blocklists and blocklist managing tools such as PeerGuardian.
Now here's a note for the HBO readers. I will pay for your content. I'll buy DVD's of this series and all the other quality TV shows I can only currently acquire 'illegally'. I will also be quite happy to see a little watermark advertisement in place of corporate branding in the corner of the screen. That's some premium ad space you're wasting there - you know this quality material will spread like a virus. And on top of that it's an additional incentive to buy the non-watermarked content when you make it available. Come on, please do get with the programme. Believe it or not we actually want companies that make quality entertainment to succeed in their efforts almost as much as the company executives themselves. The old distribution model is dead. Believe it or not, and scary though it may be, this is actually good news for all of us.
Game the game! Perhaps this will help the rest of the "entertainment industry" (HBO is one of the few actually entertaining networks these days) understand that there is no way to prevent "piracy" via technical means. There is always a way around any technical "problem" (in this case, BT). By practicing this sort of act, it seems that at least some people at HBO will come to understand this. The only way to win the game, is to provide an easier, BETTER alternative. iTunes is proving this, for example. No, it doesn't stop MP3 trading, but it makes money DESPITE illegal file trading.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
Car thieves are miffed because auto makers are now installing locks on all cars.
...or...
If you're going to be a thief, don't complain when someone tries to stop you from stealing their stuff. Anyone who complains about this is an immature idiot. HBO spends 10 million dollars to develop, produce, and advertise a show on their premium networks. To recoup the costs, they charge subscribers money. For those that don't wish to subscribe, they sell DVDs in a couple of months, so that you can either buy the DVDs or get them off Netflix or from some other video rental source. HBO makes 20 million dollars from this process. HBO goes on to keep their people employed and continue to make television series and movies.
HBO spends 10 million dollars, and everybody steals their content without reimbursing HBO for any of their costs. 10,000 people lose their jobs because HBO declares bankruptcy.
I know this is an extreme case, but I'm tired of all the whining because a company (or even a person) who produces something that you think is valuable enough to at least steal would like to make some money off of it. Yes, I know they're rich, but if you don't like that, stop buying their product. Why exactly should networks, studios, software developers, or anyone else provide anything of value if there's no benefit to them, i.e. no way to make a living?
I'm a software developer, and if my company doesn't get paid for something, I get laid off.
Grow up people.
shh...
don't talk about usenet.
You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. - Winston Churchill
When you leave your name and IP address in the letter, doesn't it defeat the purpose of posting AC?
When will media companies get it.
I am more than willing to pay for shows - but make them available to me in the following ways/manner:
1) Don't artificially hold back on releases (Australia sometimes does not get shows for 6-12 months)
2) Make it available to watch on MY time scale
3) Not Streaming Only - DRM it if you think that will help, but P2P shows that it wont.
4) Don't over price it. AUD $1-$2 per show episode is acceptable - distribution could be achieved via P2P.
When will these fools get it?
Do the following really mean anything? SCSA MCP CCSA CCNA
--I'm not actually after an answer!
I started watching Rome after a friend got an unsolicited DVD from HBO in his mail that had the first episode of Rome. I really liked it and wanted to get into the series, but it's the kind of show where you have to watch the episodes in order. So I had no choice but to download the first five episodes from my commerical usenet feed :)
I did however watch the sixth episode "regularly" on HBO, so I guess their tactic gained them a viewer. Then I immediately downloaded that episode so I could have a complete collection. Next Sunday, I'll probably be on my couch watching the seventh episode as it airs. And then I'll download it, too.
I'm not sure what the moral of this post is. Perhaps that "pirates" and legitimate customers are more closely intertwined than the simplistic among us would like to admit.
Rome sucks, it's by far their worst show in 10 years.
I use Torrents to download legal things like linux isos and video clips and copylefted music like mine.
I also use it to download the occasional missed episode that I can't tivo.
how exactly does the license work for stuff you send out over the free air waves work?
"we're beaming this into outerspace, but you can't download it from the internet because we could theoretically charge you for it. We don't want to do that because we can't quite figure out a business model that involves what people want."
CBS, NBC, ABC, FOX, UPN, WB, HBO, SHO: offer for download for a nominal fee, $1.50 or so, HD episodes with DD sound of your shows on your website in a reasonable format (not Real Media) with decent high quality compression, and I guarantee people will use it. I would consider downloading a complete season for $1.50 an episode.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Last time I checked, my BT client watches for bogus peers and bans anyone who sends too much garbage. I think it's something low like 10 packets or so. HBO is just wasting bandwidth like a mothercluck, because the junk packets fail the hash check and are dropped automatically. Yes, it wastes time, but it doesn't corrupt the file unlike Kazaa spoofs.
;)
It's a double-edged sword really. If the programming were better I might actually want to get the extra channels, but on the other hand if their programming turns to even worse puke, people won't bother sharing the videos. Tough decision
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Which part of the original poster's "Won't you please offer your shows for download via BitTorrent for $20/mo?" did you fail to comprehend?
I'd also pay the $20 a month, and I'm guessing that's more than HBO gets from my cable company as their cut of my subscription. They could even offer an a la carte subscription: I just want to watch Rome, so give me a high-quality copy once a week, and I'll give you $5 a month. Or something like that.
Anyway, yours is a humorous enough response, despite the dull, reactionary nature of your mind being revealed by equating "$20/mo" with "free".
Let's do some math:
Now lets see, HBO has at least four decent series, and I'll let you do the math. I think $4/download for each hour long series they do would compensate them more than enough.
It's time media companies adapt and grow up.
- Nolan Eakins
But there was a time when HBO showed movies. Several "movie" channels actually showed movies 24 hours a day with only previews for movies between them. Then HBO started showing a lot of crap like Rome and this new channel came along called... "The MOVIE Channel (TMC)" and they showed movies- just movies. One month they showed almost 500 unique movies (including the old Boston Blackies!). I know it's hard to believe these days but it's true!
... GET THIS... MTV only showed music videos 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Get out of town!
And
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
As long as they don't do it to Deadwood, I don't care.
our written thoughts are gifts to our future selves
HBO didn't start poisoning torrents with "Rome". It started with season 5 of "Six Feet Under". I live in Australia, where SFU is shown - eventually - on free-to-air television, but it's shown months after my friends watch it in the US, so I tend to grab the episodes off the torrent as they're shown on HBO. With the beginning of series 5, I noted that I was getting 2x the hash errors than I was receiving good chunks. I knew that it must be HBO "poisoning" the torrent.
Whether it's good or bad, it's certainly within their capabilities to do so. The danger for HBO is that it is forcing BT clients to evolve in interesting ways to avoid this kind of manipulation. SafePeer anyone?
The raw, honest truth is that anything that is broadcast - via airwaves or cable - is up for grabs. HBO doesn't yet understand that the real money is to be made in licensing - DVDs, soundtracks, decorative "Rome" wall hangings, what have you. That's where they'll need to earn back the $100M they spent on the series, because it's growing increasingly impossible to force people to watch something through a proscribed channel once it has been broadcast through _any_ channel.
Fine, people trying to kill Bittorrent altogether because some people use it for copyright infringement is bad. But for christs sake, HBO puts a ton of money into those episodes and it deserves to get paid for them. It's illegal and immoral to download them, and I think it's perfectly fine to attack transfers of obviously copyrighted material.
How do you justify it morally? On a very small scale, filling in an episode you haven't seen, sure, no big deal. Massive redistribution of an entire series is obviously going to harm HBO, whose only crime was creating something which people like to watch. Do you think that HBO is some soulless bunch of corporate assholes who deserve to get screwed? Where do you draw the line between small artists and these corporate assholes? HBO hires the best screenwriters, directors, actors, and technical people in the business, and the result is the show that you like to watch. Do you think you're benefiting anyone by downloading it for free en masse?
What do you think will happen if no one enforces their legitimate copyright, and everyone has push-button access to free copies of Rome. Fast-forward to a time when most houses in America would have the ability to watch freely downloaded episodes on their TV, as an alternative to subscribing to HBO. Do you think HBO will make money? Do you think they will continue to make high-budget shows when their subscriber base shrinks? Their most likely source of income is incoporating ads into the scripts in a way which is impossible to skip, like references to how well Tide gets their togas cleaned. Is that better than paying for HBO?
The technology isn't wrong. But don't go bullshitting yourself thinking that downloading copyrighted material anonymously and in large quantities is somehow justifiable.
to do anything worth their while. Maybe in the short run they'll discourage some of the downloads, which is good for them. But in the long run, let's consider the likely possibilities:
1. Bittorrent is a great distributed protocol to distribute content. It can be modified to instantly block ips that provide bad data. This may slow down the protocol overall a bit, but it should be quite possible and it WILL prevent these "geniuses" from f'ing up the authentic data from the original uploader.
2. As they are doing this, many people around the world are connecting to the www and finding out how to download content.
Perhaps instead of petty attempts such as this, they will figure out a way to distribute their content effectively and cheaply while still making enough profits. People shouldn't have to be charitable to these companies by not downloading. Yes, I know they need money to make content, many people, especially outside the US, do not feel morally bad to be downloading their content.
"Probably because they'd just be pirated to hell and back"
The problem with your logic is that it assumies that the content isnt being pirated to hell and back allready. Which it is. Releasing the show online would only allow those who wish to purchase it the choice to do so, as opposed to having no choice but to pirate it (assuming that they intend to download the show one way or the other).
I would gladly stop paying my $20 a month for commercial newservers if I could instead pay $20 a month to an itunes like video store instead.
If you're going to be a thief, don't complain when someone tries to stop you from stealing their stuff. Anyone who complains about this is an immature idiot.
No, there's still a reason to be worried about this, even if you're a staunch supporter of copyright. This tactic can be applied to any torrent. Today it's HBO interfering with illegal downloads of the show they're trying to sell to subscribers, but tomorrow it could be Microsoft/SCO interfering with legitimate downloads of Linux ISOs, or the MPAA interfering with some independent director who's chose to distribute his film over the internet. Eventually, BitTorrent client authors will have to solve the problem.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
What HBO is doing is what every business should be doing instead of taking the RIAA's route.
That's called "vigilante justice", and there are laws against it. Maybe HBO's particular denial of service attack on BitTorrent is both harmless and specific in this case, but the next attempt at vigilante justice may end up shutting down the OpenSuSE distribution as a side effect.
HBO's actions amount to computer hacking and denial of service, and they should be treated as such by the legal system. On the other hand, if HBO wishes to claim copyright infringement, they should bring legal cases; nobody other than a court of law can determine whether copyright infringement has taken place.
No kidding... it's hard for some people to even consider the fact that HBO IS IN THE RIGHT!
The issue is not whether HBO is (formally) in the right--they probably are. The issue is that whether HBO is in the right, as well as the remedies, are a matter for a court of law to determine. We don't want a world in which companies decide for themselves whether they are in the right and then decide for themselves how to enforce the rights they themselves have determined they have.
I'm getting soooo sick of this sense of self-entitlement... "give me everything for free" attitude.
Many companies have that attitude, and they have the lobbying power to get their free handouts. Laws like the DMCA and the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act are such an egregious violation of the fundamental social contract behind copyright laws that, ethically, these companies don't have a leg to stand on as far as I'm concerned.
why is it acceptable for a company/person to take the law into their own hands when it's copyright, but not when i catch someone breaking into my car and i give them a beating? thats what the real outrage here is. these movie studio's think just because it's their precious copyrighted works, they are some how justified in anything and everything they do.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I downloaded the first six Prison Break episodes, after watching the first, I was hooked, so I watched the rest. After that, I was excited to watch the next one so I did the unexpected... I WATCHED IT MONDAY NIGHT @ 9PM ON FOX! Wow, if it weren't for those torrents then Fox would be without a viewer! HBO should smarten up. The same thing happened with me and Sopranos, after a few episode downloads off the net, I was hooked and watching it on the tube.
"you sonofabitch i didn't know!"
"Oh wait, do HBO do The West Wing?"
Thanks, but we got "What a bunch of assholes" the first time around; no need for redundancy.
In Soviet Russia, Chuck Norris will still kick your ass.
I'm sure the executives at HBO are thinking the same thing about people who have the ability to pay for HBO yet won't.
I, for one, applaud their pseudo-solution to piracy of their show. This action, though not very nice, is a direct result of people trying to jack them of their creativity. While I haven't seen the show, I can comment that the steps they are taking do not interfere with legitimate downloads, nor are they suing everyone in sight.
Those of you bitching about your slow downloads must realize that someone pays for this, and HBO is trying to make sure that if they have to foot the bill, you won't get your downloads easily.
Well then HBO for gods sake please, pretty please, *let me pay you guys*!!
HBO rules, I would gladly pay for watching The Wire, Bill Maher and Penn and teller`s bullshit...(showtime) But as it stands my European IP isn`t even good enough to get on the showtime website! Let alone paying for HBO. I can get the sopranos, but only two seasons late... and I haven't seen a six feet under for a couple of seasons now.
Ofcourse living Europe I can:
Now ofcourse I can get all emotional about this but there is a cool thing about using azureus. It has room for crazy plugins that do stupid useless things like displaying the flags of the countries that the client I share with come from. The thing is based on geolocation (Like I assume the showtime site is).... So it is even less scientific than a slashdot poll. The funny thing is that most of these clients apear to be from European countries, especially the ones where people tend to know a bit of english. Say Denmark, the UK, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Poland and Germany.
It makes perfect sense that HBO original series would appeal more to European audiences than American shows that lack at least two things, acting, and seven English words that Europeans still know but American apparently stopped using... wait, thats eight things, but still.
"Veni, Vidi, Vici"...roughly translated into modern English reads:
"I came, I saw, I 0wned your BitTorrent tracker"
Of course, after watching a few episodes Rome, I've learned that in Ancient Rome they actually spoke English anyway. Who started this Latin rumor?
Now if they produced shows that didn't SUCK I might give a shit.
Apparently all those people downloading episodes of Rome seem to think it's worth something. If the show was really crappy nobody would care that HBO is poisoning torrents that nobody cares about, and we wouldn't be discussing this.
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
We got sick of it and cancelled our cable. We still get a few local stations for news. We rent or buy only the DVDs we want to see. The kids get videos of cartoons for as cheap as 99 cents, and they get to see the *good* cartoons, without commercials. It's cheaper in the long run, more convenient, and HBO has made a habit of releasing their original series complete on DVD, which is the only way to make sense of the entirety of "Carnivale", for instance.
As for HBO, shame on them; they host Bill Maher, and I wonder what he's had to say about this.
Does BitTorrent use MD5 or SHA1 for computing hashes? How computationally feasible would it be for an organisation on the scale of Time Warner to poison torrents with bogus chunks whose hashes check out correctly? (Could they do it with a few powerful machines? What about a SETI@Home-style distributed-computing application running in the background on all corporate desktops?) If they did that, downloaders would not find out that the file was bogus until they downloaded the whole thing; such a tactic could render BitTorrent unusable for poisoned shows.
I'm sure the executives at HBO are thinking the same thing about people who have the ability to pay for HBO yet won't.
They are probably thinking "Premium cable was a lot easier when all you had to worry about was Captain Midnight."
Their model of distribution? A scarce network of trusted hosts.
Can this be used for p2p? You bet - even if encryption is outlawed, there's still steganography or just a walk to a friend with your hard disk (usb pen drive, whatever). Will this be used for p2p? That depends on how hard the content owners and the state will go against p2p.
We live in interesting times, my friends. Btw "p2p users are like drug users" would be a misrepresentation of my view.
for at least the last 3 or 4 years, a company called overpeer has been doing this for hire in the music industry. labels would pay them a fee, and they would get a few hundred (or thousand) hosts on all of the p2p networks that claimed:
:) they used to have a large presence in some of the northeast datacenters, but since they got aquired by loudeye, they seem to have moved some gear around.
- high bitrates
- high bandwidth
- full artist catalogs
except all of they files they offered had been re-sampled like 10x, so the music was equivalent to about 24kbps...
This is the method that we all said we would prefer. I don't understand why people are all up in arms over this; would it be better if they were throwing lawsuits around instead of beating people at their own game? Really, I prefer this way anyway, and it has the fringe benefit of getting people get to try to design better protocols. This keeps sounds more and more preferable to lawsuits.
/Rome/ wasn't broadcast, so it doesn't count. HBO is a somewhat pricy subscription based cable TV network, so their content never hit the air in any form of open format. This is like throwing DVD rips up on a BT tracker and wondering why whoever bankrolled the movie is a little peeved.
Besides all of that, I really don't have a problem with people downloading broadcast TV shows. I honestly think the legal system shouldn't have a problem with it either, since it was broadcast and all. Now, the courts probably would take issue, seeing to how the industry bought so many wonderful laws. But that isn't the point.
The problem here is that
The fact that someone compared DLing a TV-show with free cheese-samples, in a somewhat (but definitely not entirely) valid way, doesn't mean you should continue to use it.
First off. Media: digitizable, zero-cost reproducable, non tangeable goods. Cheese: actual, physical, unreproducable goods. Now copying something that inherently reproducable costs noone nothing. Stealing physical goods will result in expenses for the producer or store.
Please stop equating these to fundamental different things. Foe.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
What HBO is doing is similar to defending yourself against a mugging. You legally need not wait for the police to take action. They are not going against someone who has downloaded, they are disrupting the illegal actions of someone who is downloading. They are also doing it without any collateral damage.
This is very similar to banks putting purple ink bombs in the sacks of money robbers demand. Only the money is destroyed, making it useless to the robber. If the robber is cheezed, tuff.
This seems like any other denial of service attack to the BT users.
This is vigilantism. I am not even a BT user, but how is this different from a DoS attack on a web server or any other portion of machines connected? From the descriptions of the fragments, and slow downloads, it seems disruptive. No matter if you have an issue with someone's activities, a DoS attack is still not a valid way to tread.
But what do I know..
I have to say, im perplexed by this post. First they call HBO "unscrupulos" for poisoning downloads of their content (wouldn't the people doing the downloads be the unscrupulous ones?), then they go on to lament the network bandwidth loss generated by said poisoning data that technically they shouldn't be downloading at all? Then they compare this to spam. I really think this person's sense of morality is a bit out of kilter.
Granted, I posted not long ago about how I have downloaded a lot of music and this stance COULD be seen as hypocritical. I don't think these are the same thing at all. In THIS situation, HBO is the original creator, and entitled to get paid for their hard work. In the other, the RIAA gets almost all the money instead of the artist who actually deserves to get most of it, not some pittance.
When you taped their show with your VCR you could do exactly what with it? give or loan your tape to someone else? Spend far more time than it was worth making a copy of your tape to give or loan to someone else? There was a limit to the "so called" damage you could do. I say "so called" because honestly, your shared tape of a show on HBO was little more than a small, free sample to anyone you gave it to. At best it was an extended commercial for HBO and their wares.
Now you go online and the entire season will be there to be downloaded. Given time and enough fans the whole run of the show would be available online if HBO didn't do something about it. Why bother paying for HBO if you can get the one or more shows you want to watch online for free?
You can't compare the taping of television shows twenty years ago to the ridiculous level of leeching that takes place today. As Samuel L. Jackson said so well in Pulp Fiction it "ain't the same fuckin' ballpark, it ain't the same league, it ain't even the same fuckin' sport."
And most of all every single person who tries to draw the comparison knows it perfectly well.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I don't think it's the entire season that bothers them as much as the fact that you and any number of others can grab the entire season in about six hours or so. There was plenty of entire season sharing in the VCR days but it was usually limited to a circle of friends. Even in VCR days distributing a trunk full of tapes would generally attract legal attention.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
imho what's really missing is a pay-for-download version (iHBO anyone?).
This service could be free to HBO subscribers, and everyone else could buy single shows, a series or a time-span (1-month, etc).
The single thing that media groups didn't learn from s/w companies is that 100% piracy elimination is 100% impossible, and in my opinion software piracy even helped certain products become #1. I think this would be true for media as well: as more people pirate it, more people talk about it, and more people buy it.
The bottom line is that there is no product that everyone will buy, so any product that can be exchanged for 'free' will be. To a large degree this has positive, not negative economic impacts for the rights-holders. Since the piracy has no direct impact there is no monetary loss, but there is increased exposure.
It blows my mind that these supposed business experts are failing business-101: If there is a demand, fill it. The demand is to have media available on the internet, and since they are not filling it, it's being filled by others.
iTunes is proof that despite 'free' content, there are lots of people will pay for it...
If you think imaginary property and real property are the same, when does your house become public domain?