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Comment by froggertoaster | Hacker News Reader

Only Hacker News could make piracy sound so eloquent and - dare I say - romantic.

Slashdot did a pretty good job of romanticizing this type of thing for a couple of decades before HN. Miss the old /.

It was perfectly fine when it was cassettes off the radio, or a friend's record or cassette. RIAA changed the rules when it changed to, "on a computer."

https://www.soundandvision.com/content/flashback-1984-suprem...

It wasn’t cassette vs computer, it was the scale of the sharing. With tapes, sharing wasn’t really practical beyond a handful of friends. With Napster, you could share with the whole world.

> With tapes, sharing wasn’t really practical beyond a handful of friends.

LOL. There were entire organizations doing copies.

I think the general rule back then was you couldn't make money off it. People would charge for the cost of the cassette or something like that. There were tons of bootlegs out there too.

https://youtu.be/81c1L8SrXcU

DVDs pre-date my youth. I used to do it with records. There was a record store where you could “buy” a used record for like $5 and they’d take it back within a week or so and refund $4. They also sold a lot of cassette tapes.

For music it makes sense to me, I’ll listen to records I like over and over. For movies, not so much. Once I watch a movie I have very little desire to watch it again.

DVDs predating your youth implies DVDs were phased out before you were young. Given that you were copying records to cassette tapes, it sounds like the opposite is true?

Yeah said it backwards. When I was a teen, there were no DVDs. Most people didn't even have a VCR, though they were starting to get popular.

Per the halting problem, it would be impossible to say if this was merely time shifting and thus fair use. (Not counting the DeCSS step, since access control circumvention is explicitly prohibited by the DMCA, although I’m not sure of the current status of that law.)

Does the time shifting doctrine really apply to rentals?

I’m very out of date on this stuff, but I thought the more relevant thing was that you’re not supposed to keep permanent copies of stuff around. I believe the original court cases were about recording live TV to watch later, presumably under the assumption that the video tapes would be recorded over quickly (as was common in those days). In that case I don’t see why doing the same with a rental wouldn’t also be fair use.

The standard I used to hear for copying library materials was "lower quality reproductions for personal use".

Johnny Depp did a good job

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