Quote:
Originally Posted by TorqueDog
Majority of the things I download are things I already have the rights/ability to watch through perfectly legal means through either Netflix or the fact that I pay for all the cable channels. Television shows, specifically.
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What the rights holders want to make clear is that you've only purchased the rights to consume those media in a particular way.
Paying for cable only gives you the right to watch those shows as they air (or when you get around to watching those PVR recordings). You did not pay for the right, in their mind, to transfer those recordings to your computer and watch them there or on your mobile devices. There are separate licenses available for them. Heck, lots of television stations put many of their shows online for viewing whenever you want... but it's a limited run of episodes, there is lag between when a new episode is aired and when it shows up online, and you usually have to put up with a ton of ads.
What you're doing is not legal. Never has been. But it should be if rights holders came to their senses.
I'm convinced there are some smart people that run these companies. They know the way things are trending and it is all just a matter of time before a la carte options and online streaming services prevail. There will be ways to consume media that are sufficiently convenient and sufficiently inexpensive that piracy will fade away.
This will require a correction in revenues generated by record companies and television/movie studios. They are/were making an artificially large amount of money doing what they were doing so naturally the urge to resist change that threatens those beaucoup bucks is tremendous. We are seeing this already with iTunes. It's so easy to buy a track that it's not really worth your while to pirate music unless you are looking for something obscure or a wicked high bit rate. There's still room for improvement, but people are coming around to the idea in large numbers.
Television and movie people will come around to it eventually as well. You know we will have reached a tipping point when Game of Thrones, the most pirated television show of 2012, is available on Netflix. Maybe it makes sense to lock down their content to HBO Go on some level, but eventually, that content will reach a wider audience and generate more money for the studio if it is more accessibel.