Forums / Discussion / Serious Debate

If anyone doesn't now, sometime back the day (Before I was around because I'm a young kiddy-kong). There was a massive argument over the legal-status of Video Cassette Recorders being use as piracy devices (Like our internet).

The MPAA (Who else, of course) argued over them being devices that could kill the movie industry as a whole due to it's ability to record and replay. Being seen as a potential source of counterfeit movie making.

And what happened later? Nothing. The movie industry just slapped a warning across anti-piracy of their work, and later saw even more profit from making VCR movies themselves. Of course, for private use.

And yes, I know the internet is a much larger, easier to access medium. And if anything all these bills will just cause riots-upon-riots from other countries that it doesn't deserve this American treatment. Hell, other countries might even make their own form of internet to replace our current internet setup…. or start a war.

Which brings another theory. Will the next major war be about who controls the internet? Meh, better save that for later.

" Hell, other countries might even make their own form of internet to replace our current internet setup…. or start a war."

I'm actually laughing so hard at this. XD

And the analogy doesn't quite work because the scale ratio is all off. During the time of the VCR's, it took time to create copies to sell as counterfiets, and operations were limited due to needing to distribute using a physical means, such as mail delivery.

Now-days all it does take is a single recording, and in a matter of hours to days depending on the internet, you can upload it to a mass sharing site, distribute it via torrents or even straight up internet player files and on sites like Youtube or Dailymotion, and have millions see it for free, or worse, pay the uploader or sharing site to see it. And that's just with movies, with songs its even easier than that.

The industry's slowly learning, and I agree that most of the bills being pushed are reactionary. But they aren't without some legitimacy. The internet has made it so easy to pirate stuff, just look at almost the entire anime and manga community. There's a huge divide between Official release and Fan-released content fans, due to how prevalent taking scans of mangas or episdoes of anime and uploading them with subtitles for free in real time with their japanese counterparts.

And starting a war? Over copy-right law? You gotta be kidding me with this one. If that's the case, the United States should invade China for the sheer give-no-fucks attitude they have for completely ripping off the United States and other countries. If only for the coffee alone.

At most, the industry will switch to a purely digital format in order to completely encode their content to prevent theft or posting on other websites. Theaters and Book Stores will go the way of the Music Stores and disappear forever, and the world will mourn it a couple years before forgetting it ever existed, say for a few people on the internet waxing nostalgia of the good old days.

Well, the biggest problem is the US movie and music industry. They don't like their content being related to anything that's not theirs, it's pretty much that.

Hell, sometimes I feel like one of those cheap chinese-bootlegers when I draw fanart myself, I get kinda guilty.

There was an actual source of bootleg movies at a flea market near me, the place got raided quickly and badly (I forget where it was since it was so long-ago. Pretty sure the place got shut down)

And for encoding, that doesn't sound like a bad idea. As I never really cared about stealing stuff. I mostly Just like drawing fanart. But I know most would get angry over that type of stuff…

hang on a second why are you laughing at "the other countries might make their own internet"?

That is legit happening already, there's a US company trying it too. Everybody in the world is trying to succeed the current internet which hasn't really changed much at all in 20 years. GENI, MaidSafe, even the EU has invested $27 million into a possible internet replacement. No governments like how unregulated the internet is, everybody's trying to "fix" it. One of the priorities is to kill anonymity so you always know exactly who you're talking to and that they're really how old they say they are, it's a "security" measure to them.

And OP, no war needed, the US already relinquished federal control of the internet, does nobody remember this happening? Obama relinquished what little control we had left last year, that's why we got all those new domain extensions. They (the world leaders) held a little meeting and got together to form the NetMundial Initiative.

{ The meeting produced a nonbinding statement in favor of consensus-based decision-making. It reflected a compromise and did not harshly condemn mass surveillance or include the words "net neutrality", despite initial support for that from Brazil. The final resolution says ICANN should be under international control by September 2015. }

edit: actually you know the fuck what, we really need some Congressmen to check the TPP for establishing the very global internet authority discussed in the Initiative. I forgot all about it until I started writing this post, but that is totally where they'd try to sneak it in.

One day, people are gonna realize that trying to stop Internet Piracy is like trying to stop the Sun from rising.

There's nothing wrong with fanart persay, especially since its content you made. The only thing is, it gets iffy when people try to make money off of said fanart, or claim that it isn't fanart but actually the real genuine product.

It's a matter of scale and intent as far as I see it. Most fanartists who make their art do it as something of a celebration of the source material, and do it on a 1 picture type basis, as in creating 1 piece of fanart per every time they make fanart.

Pirates and Bootleggers do it for the money. And when they do what they do, they crank it out in the thousands in order to get the product out there, distributed, and rake in as much cash as possible. They'd also have no problem with the source material going out of business cause hey, they can just find something else to bootleg.

copying and spreading copyright material before and after the internet is a HUGE difference.
Before, many people had to secretly sell physical things
Now, literally only one person can spread a movie or song to literally everyone in the world instantly.

I have no clue how to solve that issue though.

Also, you can't regulate the internet, you just can't.

"The movie industry just slapped a warning across anti-piracy of their work,"
From what I understand, the fear of VCRs pretty much died down once Macrovision starting playing a major role in stopping VHS counterfeiting.