
Video piracy was hardly a crime in 1982 - colinprince
https://www.cbc.ca/archives/video-piracy-was-hardly-a-crime-in-1982-1.5263051
======
cheschire
I remember when I went to a major electronics retail store in Germany back
around 2006, I was looking specifically for a DVD player I could region hack
easily. This was before smart phones so I took a small list with me. I asked a
floor worker if they had one on the list, and he asked me why I needed one. I
explained I wanted to region hack the DVD player using remote control codes so
I could watch region 1 and 2 DVDs.

He took me to his workstation in the middle of the show floor, looked up a DVD
player in the list, _printed off the region hack with company letter head_ ,
and showed me the DVD player on the floor to get.

It was at that point I realized the way that other countries treat piracy is
vastly different than America.

~~~
pjc50
I wouldn't consider that "piracy", and certainly at the launch of the DVD
player it wasn't considered piracy either. It may have been turned into an
infringement by the DMCA, and it was a breach of the DVD-CSS licensing
agreement by the manufacturer, but not actually piracy.

And of course other countries than region 1 were unsympathetic to it, as it
prevented them from watching things.

(It was this that taught me the heuristic that if you want a piece of consumer
electronics with maximum format support and convenience features, it should be
the cheapest and most Chinese version you can find; expensive e.g. Sony kit is
heavily loaded with "protection" antifeatures.)

~~~
Scoundreller
I love it when DVD players force me to watch an unskippable anti-piracy threat
that pirate copies always cut out.

It’s like they want me to pirate so I can avoid that garbage.

~~~
dkersten
That's actually what stopped me from watching DVD's many years ago. I got so
pissed off at all the unskippable garbage one day that I decided never to
bother with DVD's again and haven't watched a single DVD movie since. I
haven't pirated in a long time either, though, as I'm not a particularly heavy
TV/movie watcher, so Netflix has been enough for me.

------
filmgirlcw
I wasn’t quite alive when this happened so I have to go off of the stories my
parents told me (but neither are tech savvy and would have no reason to lie),
but when VHS was first a thing in the early 80s, my parents had two VCRs (they
had a Betamax in the late 70s too I think — they aren’t tech savvy but my dad
loves his gadgets) and used to go to the local video store regularly to make
copies of the tapes. Apparently there was a whole informal trading ring of
tapes amongst the teenage employees and the rich yuppies in their 30s (my
parents and their friends).

The net result was I had tapes copies of lots of the Disney movies that didn’t
come to home video, in some cases, for more than a decade after I was born.

I figured out how to program and dub tapes on the VCR when I was 3 or 4, my
first real interaction with technology.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that I helped run a massive Direct Connect
hub off the Georgia Tech/Georgia State Dora backbones my freshmen year of
college.

~~~
EA
In the 80's, rural America was copying cassettes for video and music at home.
You could go to flea markets and buy copied products but many homes had tech
to record/duplicate.

And then it got wild with cheap media for CD-ROM and DVD duplication just as
Napster and other services along with the proliferation of internet
connectivity.

In elementary school we made and traded mix tapes of songs from the radio. We
rarely traded duped video cassettes.

~~~
ryandrake
When I grew up in the 80s, every movie we ever had was a VHS copy from a
friend. Along with every cassette tape and all the Commodore 64 software. I
remember the day my old man’s cool friend stopped by and handed me a box of
about 100 5.25” floppy disks full of games and software.

I didn’t learn until I was practically an adult that some silly people
actually bought movies and software. Now it’s the norm.

------
PaulHoule
The scale was different back then.

With a VCR you could make a limited generation of copies, plus normal VCRs
could only copy at a 1:1 time ratio so it took two hours to copy a two hour
movie.

The copy was notably worse than the original, and if you copied a copy and
copied a copy pretty quickly the sync signals would b3e lost.

With the DVD on the other hand, once you cracked the DRM, you could make
perfect (better than perfect because of DRM removal) copies at a speed much
faster than viewing.

~~~
u801e
> The copy was notably worse than the original, and if you copied a copy and
> copied a copy pretty quickly the sync signals would b3e lost.

According to this video[1], it really only starts at around the 6th copy of a
copy.

[1]
[https://www.snotr.com/video/16624/What_happens_when_you_copy...](https://www.snotr.com/video/16624/What_happens_when_you_copy_a_VHS_twenty_three_times)

------
mncharity
Decades ago, I talked with someone close to the government side of the
negotiations with Hollywood which resulted in the copyright term extension act
of 1976. They were perhaps a bit defensive. But they claimed the act as a
success. A success in _damage control_. Because, roughly, "you should have
seen the _crazy_ <bleep> Hollywood wanted". And in the decades since, year
after incremental year, we have.

------
agumonkey
It's a matter of proportions. Everybody had copies in the 80s but it wasn't
perfect replica and infinitely feasible to distribute, so creators didn't care
too much. Some did care.. there were copy protections of various kinds (IIRC
Nintendo cartridges has some checks).

~~~
teddyh
Some tapes had something called “Macrovision” which made it harder to copy:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_protection#Videotape](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_protection#Videotape)

~~~
damontal
you could buy a filter to remove that

~~~
catalogia
IIRC some products even had the unintended consequence of removing it. I
believe my mother copied those tapes using her camcorder to play the tape into
the VCR which was recording. That's how I recall it working anyway, I don't
think she had any special piracy/filter hardware.

------
james_kim2
This post reminds me of when I went to Korea when I was younger, I would bring
back a whole bunch of movies that were pirated onto a DVD. These movies were
in good condition and were movies that were still in theaters at the time. The
business was so good that it actually had actual stores selling these copies.
I am still amazed at the quality of these DVDs that I had around 2003-2004.

------
mzs
to give some context in '82 most theatrical releases cost $80-100. Wrath of
Khan was a test where Paramount sold it at $40. It did very well, then they
released Raiders in time for Christmas '83 and it did spectacularly. Those
Videodiscs sold for $25 at the time. There was a gas station near me that
rented pirate copies of movies from a rental place. Renting a new release back
then from a legitimate place tended to be $7 for one night plus a membership
and there wren't many copies available so you can see how they worked-out.
[https://www.nytimes.com/1983/12/12/business/hollywood-
gamble...](https://www.nytimes.com/1983/12/12/business/hollywood-gambles-on-
video.html)

------
dredmorbius
Compare: "A Woman Who Recorded 70k Tapes of American News".

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21558684#21560747](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21558684#21560747)

------
ReptileMan
The way it should have stayed.

------
stanski
And so, 40 years later, the creative process in North America is no more and
the film industry is brankrupt.

~~~
kiba
It is?

My impression, speaking as someone who lived through only part of the period,
that the creative process is the same as it always.

Hollywood made shit movies, and good ones. Piracy made zero difference despite
hollywood's insistence otherwise.

~~~
tombert
Not the OP, but I think they were joking; the argument that Hollywood was
making when the VCR came out was that because of how easy it was to make
copies, there will be no more film industry, they're going to be broke, and it
will be the death of media.

And of course that was ridiculous; the film industry still does well, despite
(and some may argue in some cases because of) piracy.

EDIT:

I forgot to point out that _because_ of how easy the copy-process became with
VHS (and most of the other subsequent video recording and distribution media
that followed), it greatly lowered the bar for regular people to start making
movies or other kind of art projects. Stuff that these movie studios argued
existed purely to pirate media gave the regular person access to a lot of the
same tools that were previously prohibitively expensive for the average
consumer. For example, I used to make home movies as a kid with my VHS
camcorder, and used a VHS bootlegging setup (two VCRs, one hooked into the
record input of the other) to edit them.

~~~
Adverblessly
> despite (and some may argue in some cases because of) piracy.

A while ago there was an article on HN about the EU hiding the results of a
study they ordered into the effect of piracy on actual sales because the study
showed that piracy wasn't really that much of a problem. That study showed a
27% displacement rate for films (i.e. for each 100 copies pirated, 27 sales
were lost), so going by that study it is indeed "despite of piracy" and not
"thanks to piracy".

IIRC this is the study: [https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-
detail/-/publication/59e...](https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-
detail/-/publication/59ea4ec1-a19b-11e7-b92d-01aa75ed71a1/language-en)

Super-summary: 0% displacement rate for Music, 27% for Film/TV-Series, 38% for
Books and -24% for Games (i.e. every 100 copies of a game pirated resulted in
an extra 27 legal copies sold!).

~~~
tombert
I apologize for not making this terribly clear; obviously piracy _can_ be a
bad thing, and I'm not arguing otherwise. I certainly think that if you make a
product, you at some level should be allowed to monetize and make a profit off
of it.

That being said, there are plenty of pieces of media that _only_ exist today
because of pirated copies being circulated. The immediate example that comes
to mind is the Star Wars Holiday Special (though some might argue that that
would have been better forgotten).

Games like Earthbound didn't do terribly well when they were released (at
least not in the US), but due to pirated ROMs being circulated around the
internet, and due to the increased popularity of emulation, the game has since
received a second wind and has had several re-releases; obviously anecdata
doesn't mean much, but I first played Earthbound with a ROM file when I was 13
years old, and when I saw they were putting it on the SNES Classic, it was
literally the only reason I bought one.

I can't remember where I heard this, but they said something to the effect of
"piracy is sort of like bacteria; a lot of it is bad for you, and you
certainly don't want too much of it, but some bacteria is necessary", and I
think that's a pretty good way of viewing it.

~~~
bloak
It was ordered that all copies of the film "Nosferatu" be destroyed, because
it allegedly infringed copyright. Shortly after the alleged copyright had
expired a copy was found in a safe. It seems that someone had failed to fully
implement the court order: a punishable crime, no doubt, if it was done
deliberately, but perhaps it was just incompetence.

