Back when we would record onto VHS, is that considered piracy? Found a super bowl XXXI tape from my Uncle circa 1997. I’m curious lol.
Also side note, have any of you dabbled in digitizing old VHS? Have quite a few home videos on VHS and I’m wanting to preserve them for the future. I’ve done a bit of research and have come across a wide array of information. I know that doesn’t really qualify as piracy, if there’s a better comm for this, please direct me there!
Not an answer to your question, but in the 80s/early 90s my grandmother used to tape movies off the tv, I believe she actually copied VCR to VCR so she could make a copy without commercials. She’d then cut out the description from the TV Guide, and scotch tape it to the top of the video cassette tape.
In 1984, this issue made it all the way to the US Supreme Court, which ultimately decided that recording television to tape using a VCR for personal use (“timeshifting”) is fair use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Universal_City_Studios,_Inc.
Of course it was Sony filing the suit. Of course.
To the top with you! I see some opinions quoted, but yours is the right answer.
For personal use, so not for distribution and a copy made on your own, not procured from someone else, right?
The Wikipedia article has these relevant quotes from the court opinion:
The question is thus whether the Betamax is capable of commercially significant noninfringing uses … one potential use of the Betamax plainly satisfies this standard, however it is understood: private, noncommercial time-shifting in the home.[7] […] [W]hen one considers the nature of a televised copyrighted audiovisual work… and that time-shifting merely enables a viewer to see such a work which he had been invited to witness in its entirety free of charge, the fact… that the entire work is reproduced… does not have its ordinary effect of militating against a finding of fair use.[8]
The VCR was invented, marketed, and sold to do this very thing. When the VCR first came out (same for betamax) they didn’t sell pre-recorded tapes because the only way they had to make those was to manually record them individually in real-time which was prohibitively expensive. That’s also why movie rental places caught on: early VHS movies were too expensive for most to afford. But not too expensive for a business to rent hundreds of times.
Suffice to say: if recording TV was piracy, it wasn’t illegal and the people bitching had no way to enforce their will.
People did end up copying rentals too. Not just for videos but also games.
Pre-recorded tapes usually had a primitive form of copy protection called macrovision. It would make the copy pretty much unwatchable, but it was fairly simple to remove. You could build or buy a device that would strip it out.
Yup, those little inline filters. Even building the circuit for $5-10 in RadioShack parts was pretty simple.
Recording home videos for personal use within your immediate family was protected. Screening for people beyond that was not. Mr. Rogers famously gave us what little protection we had and insured that we could even have home VHS recorders. Testified before a congressional committee that was on the verge of banning it, changed one critical mind and that stopped it.
Partially off-topic but I rarely get the chance to tell this story:
My old man was a porn hound. Talking wall of VHS tapes. You know what I’m picturing, that was his living room. Had 4 VCR’s hooked up at once with several switches, a few switchboards for colour and audio correction, whole 9 yards. Lost an eye when I was a kid so always wanted to make his viewing ‘optimal’ for him.
What he’d end up doing was go down to the local Variety Video, rent 5-6 tapes, come home, and dub em over the weekend. Then once dubbed, remove the label with some heat, open the cassettes (the og and the copy he made) and swap the reels so he’d have the original one (which would be ever-so-slightly better quality than the copy he made, again, cause of his sight). Then seal em up, return the copy and no one was the wiser. Did this for close to 15 years before the place closed down (for unrelated reasons) and had his huge wall of big titty wank material for years to come lmao.
The ur-gooner
Unrelated reasons, of course.
80s Goon Cave.
That’s dedication.
Loved him some tiddy.
