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This topic comprises 4 pages: 1 2 3 4
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Author
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Topic: It's so easy to pirate content, some people don't believe it's pirated
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 02-16-2015 03:34 PM
quote: Martin McCaffery
Gotta disagree there, at least in the time period before the illegality became big news. People have been recording things off the air or from their own purchased LP/DVD/Itunes since forever and do not know or think of it as illegal. The general public, I'm willing to bet, thinks "As long as I'm not selling it, it is fair use."
The act of recording music off radio or TV broadcasts might technically be illegal (or not), but the recorded content has little if any value. The audio and/or video quality is seriously degraded compared to that of a retail product. This is especially true for music pulled off radio broadcasts. Plus music on radio is often edited shorter to squeeze in more commercials, plus you have some announcer or other crap blaring over the beginning or end of many songs. Back when I was in grade school I remember trying to record things off the air onto casette tape and never liking the results.
Today you can use web browser plug-ins to download music videos off YouTube or Vimeo. From there you could open a downloaded .MP4 file and extract the audio out of it. The problem is the audio has already been seriously degraded by being compressed down to 160 kilobits per second or worse than that. Saving it again as a MP3 or AAC file will only worsen the situation because another level of lossy compression is being added. The only choice is saving it has a LPCM .WAV file, which is sad because you don't want an audio file with crap quality hogging 50MB or more space on a hard disc.
I don't use my Dish Network DVR for archiving any kind of movie collection, even though I could do that. The video quality just isn't all that great. It might be better than DVD quality, but it sure isn't comparable at all to Blu-ray and barely any better than Netflix. That's a big reason why I haven't bothered with any virtual purchases of "HD Digital" download movies. If they're streaming from the cloud the video quality is only as good as the Internet connection. My Internet connection isn't all that good. Things might be different if I had a 30 million bit per second connection.
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Marcel Birgelen
Film God
Posts: 3357
From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012
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posted 02-17-2015 02:23 AM
quote: Mike Blakesley
That, and "As long as I'm not carrying an item out of a store, I'm not stealing."
This is also where it gets flaky. For example, everybody knows taking a magazine from a store without paying for it is wrong, illegal and punishable. But if someone would read the entire magazine inside the store without buying it? Sure, many would consider him an *sshole, some would consider him being clever. But if this is actually illegal and punishable is rather questionable (and also a whole lot harder to prove). I guess the public would say it would be punishable by just throwing him out of the store, which would usually be a far lesser punishment than the one for shoplifting.
quote: Bobby Henderson
The act of recording music off radio or TV broadcasts might technically be illegal (or not), but the recorded content has little if any value.
Even with the DMCA in place you can still record radio and TV broadcasts for personal use. Even giving those recordings to a friend is still within the realms of "fair use". Sharing those recordings with everyone else via the Internet is the thing that makes it illegal. On the Internet, sharing something with your friends and everyone else is just a very thin line to cross...
The thing is, in many places around the globe, the act of filming in a theater actually isn't illegal, as long as it is for personal use. The only standing the exhibitor has in those cases is that it is against their own regulations, which you agreed upon once you bought a ticket. For movie theaters, the no filming thing is relatively simple to enforce, but for stuff like live performances of popular bands, I wish you good luck. It might actually even be counter-productive, because all those little, crappy YouTube movies that will pop up will serve as marketing instrument in itself.
I doubt people record music off the radio nowadays, there are far simpler ways to get the same music. Also, the popularity of rental streaming services has shown that many people aren't even so keen to "own" their content, as long as it is there in some way to instantly access it, they're perfectly fine with it. That's also why services like Spotify, Netflix and Amazon Prime are so popular.
Maybe I'm still old fashioned, I want to own my copies. Maybe also because I know how those big corporations operate. Once corp X gets a conflict with Y, they just pull the plug on it and that's that.
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 02-17-2015 03:02 PM
Unfortunately for those of us who like "perpetual licenses" and buying content on physical media, the subscription based business model seems to only be getting more popular.
The user base for streaming services like Netflix, Pandora, etc. is only going to grow as residential Internet speeds slowly improve. Some places already have download speeds more than fast enough to stream HD movies at Blu-ray quality bit rates. Most places however are still in the dark ages with download speeds well under 10 million bits per second, even with high monthly prices for shitty low bit rates.
Computer software subscriptions are getting more popular whether anyone likes it or not. Windows users have already been accustomed to paying for annual anti-virus subscriptions for many years. Microsoft is signing up more people to Office 365.
I'm pretty concerned about the potential of Adobe strong arming its customers with big price hikes on Creative Cloud subscriptions. For now the $50 per month subscription price is still holding steady. Even if Adobe isn't thinking about raising prices I'm sure its investors are demanding big hikes.
A couple years ago there were lots of predictions that Adobe would face increased competition from rivals when its 2013 generation of applications went exclusively to Creative Cloud. That hasn't really happened. If anything Adobe seems to be turning into even more of a monopoly in creative software. As older computers stop working that will force users holding onto their aging Creative Suite perpetual license software to switch to Creative Cloud when the old applications won't install on new systems. It's already a crap shoot getting applications from the CS3 generation or earlier to work on new systems. It probably won't be long before the CS4 & CS5 app generation starts getting flaky on new machines.
By the way, software piracy was one of the big reasons why Adobe shifted its applications to Creative Cloud subscription. Lightroom, Premiere Elements, Photoshop Elements and Acrobat are (I think) the only applications they sell in boxed form anymore.
quote: Marcel Birgelen
Once corp X gets a conflict with Y, they just pull the plug on it and that's that.
There's a good chance of that happening with portions of Adobe Creative Cloud. Adobe has strung together a variety of partnerships to build up the benefits of Creative Cloud. Any disputes or deals not renewed could turn off portions of the service. You could see content disappear from the CC market, certain fonts go dead in Typekit or any number of other things get suspended.
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