The New York Times has caught onto to Personal Video Recording. Sadly, they pull out the age old cry of old media tyrants: piracy.
The article, entitled “Steal This Show,” covers the story from both angles and attempts to be fair. Read the article for yourself and make your own judgments.
It's not about Piracy. It's about Control.
I built my own PVR not to pirate television shows, but to make TV run on my schedule. Broadcast and Cable TV outlets are throwbacks to the time when VCRs were new fangled devices and the term “on demand“ had yet to be coined. The music industry made the mistake of assuming the MP3 file sharing craze was about piracy. It wasn't about piracy; it was a mass consumer rebellion. People were long aggrivated by paying $17 for one good song with 10 other filler tracks.
When the technology came for a more flexible format that put listeners back in control. the feeding frenzy of free music began. The fact that is was free only sped up the adoption process. Had the music industry wised up back in 1997, they could have averted their sad state of affairs, which has them filing lawsuits against 12 year old girls.
I heartily resent the fact that the FCC has decided to treat everyone like a criminal in the hopes to prevent piracy. Professional pirates do the industry the most damage and these feeble attempts to stop them will only slow them down for a little while.
There's no escaping the relentless march of technology. When the RIAA put the brake on Digital Audio Tape in the 80's, they only postponed the inevitable. People want control of their entertainment. They will circumvent the normal retail process if they have to. “Protection“ schemes will only aggrivate the legitimate consumers. The pirates have near limitless resources and will break anything in their way.
I would have hoped that the television and movie industry would have learned from the mistakes of the RIAA.
[found via PVR Blog]