9 ms·

Video piracy was hardly a crime in 1982

96 points by colinprince 7y ago

stanski 7y ago
And so, 40 years later, the creative process in North America is no more and the film industry is brankrupt.
- kiba 7y ago
  It is? My impression, speaking as someone who lived through only part of the period, that the creative process is the same as it always. Hollywood made shit movies, and good ones. Piracy made zero difference despite hollywood's insistence otherwise.
  - tombert 7y ago
    Not the OP, but I think they were joking; the argument that Hollywood was making when the VCR came out was that because of how easy it was to make copies, there will be no more film industry, they're going to be broke, and it will be the death of media. And of course that was ridiculous; the film industry still does well, despite (and some may argue in some cases because of) piracy. EDIT: I forgot to point out that because of how easy the copy-process became with VHS (and most of the other subsequent video recording and distribution media that followed), it greatly lowered the bar for regular people to start making movies or other kind of art projects. Stuff that these movie studios argued existed purely to pirate media gave the regular person access to a lot of the same tools that were previously prohibitively expensive for the average consumer. For example, I used to make home movies as a kid with my VHS camcorder, and used a VHS bootlegging setup (two VCRs, one hooked into the record input of the other) to edit them.
    - Adverblessly 7y ago
      > despite (and some may argue in some cases because of) piracy. A while ago there was an article on HN about the EU hiding the results of a study they ordered into the effect of piracy on actual sales because the study showed that piracy wasn't really that much of a problem. That study showed a 27% displacement rate for films (i.e. for each 100 copies pirated, 27 sales were lost), so going by that study it is indeed "despite of piracy" and not "thanks to piracy". IIRC this is the study: https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/59ea4ec1-a19b-11e7-b92d-01aa75ed71a1/language-en https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/59e... Super-summary: 0% displacement rate for Music, 27% for Film/TV-Series, 38% for Books and -24% for Games (i.e. every 100 copies of a game pirated resulted in an extra 27 legal copies sold!).
      - tombert 7y ago
        I apologize for not making this terribly clear; obviously piracy can be a bad thing, and I'm not arguing otherwise. I certainly think that if you make a product, you at some level should be allowed to monetize and make a profit off of it. That being said, there are plenty of pieces of media that only exist today because of pirated copies being circulated. The immediate example that comes to mind is the Star Wars Holiday Special (though some might argue that that would have been better forgotten). Games like Earthbound didn't do terribly well when they were released (at least not in the US), but due to pirated ROMs being circulated around the internet, and due to the increased popularity of emulation, the game has since received a second wind and has had several re-releases; obviously anecdata doesn't mean much, but I first played Earthbound with a ROM file when I was 13 years old, and when I saw they were putting it on the SNES Classic, it was literally the only reason I bought one. I can't remember where I heard this, but they said something to the effect of "piracy is sort of like bacteria; a lot of it is bad for you, and you certainly don't want too much of it, but some bacteria is necessary", and I think that's a pretty good way of viewing it.
        bloak 7y ago
        It was ordered that all copies of the film "Nosferatu" be destroyed, because it allegedly infringed copyright. Shortly after the alleged copyright had expired a copy was found in a safe. It seems that someone had failed to fully implement the court order: a punishable crime, no doubt, if it was done deliberately, but perhaps it was just incompetence.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    @stanski was being sarcastic.
  - hnick 7y ago
    They seem to make far more sequels and remakes these days, catering to nostalgia. That's a pretty big sign of lack of creativity. Though maybe it was always like this and I'm just old enough to notice.
- arethuza 7y ago
  That's probably just Hollywood Accounting, where everything makes a loss so you don't have to pay out to anyone who signed up for a share of the profits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting e.g. Apparently the Lord of the Rings movies made losses using these rules...
  - babypuncher 7y ago
    That hasn't been an issue for years. People know to ask for a % of the gross rather than the net. It helps that almost every creative position in Hollywood is protected by a union.
    - jsmith45 7y ago
      I've literally seen contracts that define promise n% of "____ gross", where "____" is some inconspicuous seeming word, but they then define that phase in such a way that it does not even remotely correspond to the actual gross. So knowing that you want gross instead of net is nowhere near good enough to avoid getting screwed. (In the case I am referring to a book author who sold movie rights was screwed over by a contract specifically misworded to sound like she would be getting a percent of of gross, when the actual definition used was much closer to that of net).
cheschire 7y ago
I remember when I went to a major electronics retail store in Germany back around 2006, I was looking specifically for a DVD player I could region hack easily. This was before smart phones so I took a small list with me. I asked a floor worker if they had one on the list, and he asked me why I needed one. I explained I wanted to region hack the DVD player using remote control codes so I could watch region 1 and 2 DVDs. He took me to his workstation in the middle of the show floor, looked up a DVD player in the list, printed off the region hack with company letter head, and showed me the DVD player on the floor to get. It was at that point I realized the way that other countries treat piracy is vastly different than America.
- sogen 7y ago
  same, years ago bought an unknown brand DVD player at a supermarket (it was the only one they carried). It came with the code region hack instructions printed.
- petercooper 7y ago
  There was a similar attitude in the UK. There were even (legitimate) retailers set up to sell region 1 DVDs into the UK via the Channel Islands to reduce tax. But was it truly "piracy"? You still had to buy the DVDs even if they were from the "wrong" region. It was a bit of a nonsense scheme by the industry and was more about them not violating rights (to distribute movies in certain territories) rather than the end user.
  - Cthulhu_ 7y ago
    The only reason I can think of why region locks were even a thing is that there was probably a price difference for DVDs depending on region - $15 in the one country, $5 for the same movie elsewhere.
    - pjc50 7y ago
      Nah, it really was all about movie distribution rights, and the completely bonkers web of agreements surrounding them. Since there used to be a desire to re-use 35mm film, countries would stagger cinema releases. So "6 months after end of cinema release" is different dates in different places. And there's also music rights which make the process even worse. A big problem is TV series re-releases which couldn't or didn't license the original music, so it's been substituted with something else. Much of the time for small films the distributors wouldn't bother, so it was region 1 or nothing - or buy a hackable player.
ReptileMan 7y ago
The way it should have stayed.
agumonkey 7y ago
It's a matter of proportions. Everybody had copies in the 80s but it wasn't perfect replica and infinitely feasible to distribute, so creators didn't care too much. Some did care.. there were copy protections of various kinds (IIRC Nintendo cartridges has some checks).
- teddyh 7y ago
  Some tapes had something called “Macrovision” which made it harder to copy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_protection#Videotape https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_protection#Videotape
  - agumonkey 7y ago
    True, but it didn't become mainstream until much later IIRC.
  - damontal 7y ago
    you could buy a filter to remove that
    - catalogia 7y ago
      IIRC some products even had the unintended consequence of removing it. I believe my mother copied those tapes using her camcorder to play the tape into the VCR which was recording. That's how I recall it working anyway, I don't think she had any special piracy/filter hardware.
filmgirlcw 7y ago
I wasn’t quite alive when this happened so I have to go off of the stories my parents told me (but neither are tech savvy and would have no reason to lie), but when VHS was first a thing in the early 80s, my parents had two VCRs (they had a Betamax in the late 70s too I think — they aren’t tech savvy but my dad loves his gadgets) and used to go to the local video store regularly to make copies of the tapes. Apparently there was a whole informal trading ring of tapes amongst the teenage employees and the rich yuppies in their 30s (my parents and their friends). The net result was I had tapes copies of lots of the Disney movies that didn’t come to home video, in some cases, for more than a decade after I was born. I figured out how to program and dub tapes on the VCR when I was 3 or 4, my first real interaction with technology. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that I helped run a massive Direct Connect hub off the Georgia Tech/Georgia State Dora backbones my freshmen year of college.
- EA 7y ago
  In the 80's, rural America was copying cassettes for video and music at home. You could go to flea markets and buy copied products but many homes had tech to record/duplicate. And then it got wild with cheap media for CD-ROM and DVD duplication just as Napster and other services along with the proliferation of internet connectivity. In elementary school we made and traded mix tapes of songs from the radio. We rarely traded duped video cassettes.
  - ryandrake 7y ago
    When I grew up in the 80s, every movie we ever had was a VHS copy from a friend. Along with every cassette tape and all the Commodore 64 software. I remember the day my old man’s cool friend stopped by and handed me a box of about 100 5.25” floppy disks full of games and software. I didn’t learn until I was practically an adult that some silly people actually bought movies and software. Now it’s the norm.
- john-radio 7y ago
  > I wasn’t quite alive when this happened so But also not completely dead I see
PaulHoule 7y ago
The scale was different back then. With a VCR you could make a limited generation of copies, plus normal VCRs could only copy at a 1:1 time ratio so it took two hours to copy a two hour movie. The copy was notably worse than the original, and if you copied a copy and copied a copy pretty quickly the sync signals would b3e lost. With the DVD on the other hand, once you cracked the DRM, you could make perfect (better than perfect because of DRM removal) copies at a speed much faster than viewing.
- u801e 7y ago
  > The copy was notably worse than the original, and if you copied a copy and copied a copy pretty quickly the sync signals would b3e lost. According to this video[1], it really only starts at around the 6th copy of a copy. [1] https://www.snotr.com/video/16624/What_happens_when_you_copy_a_VHS_twenty_three_times https://www.snotr.com/video/16624/What_happens_when_you_copy...
- shmerl 7y ago
  Copyright extremists were freaked out with VCR anyway, and tried to claim it's forbidden. They never learn. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Universal_City_Studios,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Unive....
KibbutzDalia 7y ago
Why is Hacker News pro-piracy?
mncharity 7y ago
Decades ago, I talked with someone close to the government side of the negotiations with Hollywood which resulted in the copyright term extension act of 1976. They were perhaps a bit defensive. But they claimed the act as a success. A success in damage control. Because, roughly, "you should have seen the crazy <bleep> Hollywood wanted". And in the decades since, year after incremental year, we have.
james_kim2 7y ago
This post reminds me of when I went to Korea when I was younger, I would bring back a whole bunch of movies that were pirated onto a DVD. These movies were in good condition and were movies that were still in theaters at the time. The business was so good that it actually had actual stores selling these copies. I am still amazed at the quality of these DVDs that I had around 2003-2004.
mzs 7y ago
to give some context in '82 most theatrical releases cost $80-100. Wrath of Khan was a test where Paramount sold it at $40. It did very well, then they released Raiders in time for Christmas '83 and it did spectacularly. Those Videodiscs sold for $25 at the time. There was a gas station near me that rented pirate copies of movies from a rental place. Renting a new release back then from a legitimate place tended to be $7 for one night plus a membership and there wren't many copies available so you can see how they worked-out. https://www.nytimes.com/1983/12/12/business/hollywood-gambles-on-video.html https://www.nytimes.com/1983/12/12/business/hollywood-gamble...
dredmorbius 7y ago
Compare: "A Woman Who Recorded 70k Tapes of American News". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21558684#21560747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21558684#21560747

96 points by colinprince 7y ago

stanski 7y ago

And so, 40 years later, the creative process in North America is no more and the film industry is brankrupt.

kiba 7y ago
It is? My impression, speaking as someone who lived through only part of the period, that the creative process is the same as it always. Hollywood made shit movies, and good ones. Piracy made zero difference despite hollywood's insistence otherwise.
- tombert 7y ago
  Not the OP, but I think they were joking; the argument that Hollywood was making when the VCR came out was that because of how easy it was to make copies, there will be no more film industry, they're going to be broke, and it will be the death of media. And of course that was ridiculous; the film industry still does well, despite (and some may argue in some cases because of) piracy. EDIT: I forgot to point out that because of how easy the copy-process became with VHS (and most of the other subsequent video recording and distribution media that followed), it greatly lowered the bar for regular people to start making movies or other kind of art projects. Stuff that these movie studios argued existed purely to pirate media gave the regular person access to a lot of the same tools that were previously prohibitively expensive for the average consumer. For example, I used to make home movies as a kid with my VHS camcorder, and used a VHS bootlegging setup (two VCRs, one hooked into the record input of the other) to edit them.
  - Adverblessly 7y ago
    > despite (and some may argue in some cases because of) piracy. A while ago there was an article on HN about the EU hiding the results of a study they ordered into the effect of piracy on actual sales because the study showed that piracy wasn't really that much of a problem. That study showed a 27% displacement rate for films (i.e. for each 100 copies pirated, 27 sales were lost), so going by that study it is indeed "despite of piracy" and not "thanks to piracy". IIRC this is the study: https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/59ea4ec1-a19b-11e7-b92d-01aa75ed71a1/language-en https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/59e... Super-summary: 0% displacement rate for Music, 27% for Film/TV-Series, 38% for Books and -24% for Games (i.e. every 100 copies of a game pirated resulted in an extra 27 legal copies sold!).
    - tombert 7y ago
      I apologize for not making this terribly clear; obviously piracy can be a bad thing, and I'm not arguing otherwise. I certainly think that if you make a product, you at some level should be allowed to monetize and make a profit off of it. That being said, there are plenty of pieces of media that only exist today because of pirated copies being circulated. The immediate example that comes to mind is the Star Wars Holiday Special (though some might argue that that would have been better forgotten). Games like Earthbound didn't do terribly well when they were released (at least not in the US), but due to pirated ROMs being circulated around the internet, and due to the increased popularity of emulation, the game has since received a second wind and has had several re-releases; obviously anecdata doesn't mean much, but I first played Earthbound with a ROM file when I was 13 years old, and when I saw they were putting it on the SNES Classic, it was literally the only reason I bought one. I can't remember where I heard this, but they said something to the effect of "piracy is sort of like bacteria; a lot of it is bad for you, and you certainly don't want too much of it, but some bacteria is necessary", and I think that's a pretty good way of viewing it.
      - bloak 7y ago
        It was ordered that all copies of the film "Nosferatu" be destroyed, because it allegedly infringed copyright. Shortly after the alleged copyright had expired a copy was found in a safe. It seems that someone had failed to fully implement the court order: a punishable crime, no doubt, if it was done deliberately, but perhaps it was just incompetence.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  @stanski was being sarcastic.
- hnick 7y ago
  They seem to make far more sequels and remakes these days, catering to nostalgia. That's a pretty big sign of lack of creativity. Though maybe it was always like this and I'm just old enough to notice.
arethuza 7y ago
That's probably just Hollywood Accounting, where everything makes a loss so you don't have to pay out to anyone who signed up for a share of the profits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting e.g. Apparently the Lord of the Rings movies made losses using these rules...
- babypuncher 7y ago
  That hasn't been an issue for years. People know to ask for a % of the gross rather than the net. It helps that almost every creative position in Hollywood is protected by a union.
  - jsmith45 7y ago
    I've literally seen contracts that define promise n% of "____ gross", where "____" is some inconspicuous seeming word, but they then define that phase in such a way that it does not even remotely correspond to the actual gross. So knowing that you want gross instead of net is nowhere near good enough to avoid getting screwed. (In the case I am referring to a book author who sold movie rights was screwed over by a contract specifically misworded to sound like she would be getting a percent of of gross, when the actual definition used was much closer to that of net).

cheschire 7y ago

I remember when I went to a major electronics retail store in Germany back around 2006, I was looking specifically for a DVD player I could region hack easily. This was before smart phones so I took a small list with me. I asked a floor worker if they had one on the list, and he asked me why I needed one. I explained I wanted to region hack the DVD player using remote control codes so I could watch region 1 and 2 DVDs. He took me to his workstation in the middle of the show floor, looked up a DVD player in the list, printed off the region hack with company letter head, and showed me the DVD player on the floor to get. It was at that point I realized the way that other countries treat piracy is vastly different than America.

sogen 7y ago
same, years ago bought an unknown brand DVD player at a supermarket (it was the only one they carried). It came with the code region hack instructions printed.
petercooper 7y ago
There was a similar attitude in the UK. There were even (legitimate) retailers set up to sell region 1 DVDs into the UK via the Channel Islands to reduce tax. But was it truly "piracy"? You still had to buy the DVDs even if they were from the "wrong" region. It was a bit of a nonsense scheme by the industry and was more about them not violating rights (to distribute movies in certain territories) rather than the end user.
- Cthulhu_ 7y ago
  The only reason I can think of why region locks were even a thing is that there was probably a price difference for DVDs depending on region - $15 in the one country, $5 for the same movie elsewhere.
  - pjc50 7y ago
    Nah, it really was all about movie distribution rights, and the completely bonkers web of agreements surrounding them. Since there used to be a desire to re-use 35mm film, countries would stagger cinema releases. So "6 months after end of cinema release" is different dates in different places. And there's also music rights which make the process even worse. A big problem is TV series re-releases which couldn't or didn't license the original music, so it's been substituted with something else. Much of the time for small films the distributors wouldn't bother, so it was region 1 or nothing - or buy a hackable player.

ReptileMan 7y ago

The way it should have stayed.

agumonkey 7y ago

It's a matter of proportions. Everybody had copies in the 80s but it wasn't perfect replica and infinitely feasible to distribute, so creators didn't care too much. Some did care.. there were copy protections of various kinds (IIRC Nintendo cartridges has some checks).

teddyh 7y ago
Some tapes had something called “Macrovision” which made it harder to copy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_protection#Videotape https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_protection#Videotape
- agumonkey 7y ago
  True, but it didn't become mainstream until much later IIRC.
- damontal 7y ago
  you could buy a filter to remove that
  - catalogia 7y ago
    IIRC some products even had the unintended consequence of removing it. I believe my mother copied those tapes using her camcorder to play the tape into the VCR which was recording. That's how I recall it working anyway, I don't think she had any special piracy/filter hardware.

filmgirlcw 7y ago

I wasn’t quite alive when this happened so I have to go off of the stories my parents told me (but neither are tech savvy and would have no reason to lie), but when VHS was first a thing in the early 80s, my parents had two VCRs (they had a Betamax in the late 70s too I think — they aren’t tech savvy but my dad loves his gadgets) and used to go to the local video store regularly to make copies of the tapes. Apparently there was a whole informal trading ring of tapes amongst the teenage employees and the rich yuppies in their 30s (my parents and their friends). The net result was I had tapes copies of lots of the Disney movies that didn’t come to home video, in some cases, for more than a decade after I was born. I figured out how to program and dub tapes on the VCR when I was 3 or 4, my first real interaction with technology. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that I helped run a massive Direct Connect hub off the Georgia Tech/Georgia State Dora backbones my freshmen year of college.

EA 7y ago
In the 80's, rural America was copying cassettes for video and music at home. You could go to flea markets and buy copied products but many homes had tech to record/duplicate. And then it got wild with cheap media for CD-ROM and DVD duplication just as Napster and other services along with the proliferation of internet connectivity. In elementary school we made and traded mix tapes of songs from the radio. We rarely traded duped video cassettes.
- ryandrake 7y ago
  When I grew up in the 80s, every movie we ever had was a VHS copy from a friend. Along with every cassette tape and all the Commodore 64 software. I remember the day my old man’s cool friend stopped by and handed me a box of about 100 5.25” floppy disks full of games and software. I didn’t learn until I was practically an adult that some silly people actually bought movies and software. Now it’s the norm.
john-radio 7y ago
> I wasn’t quite alive when this happened so But also not completely dead I see

PaulHoule 7y ago

The scale was different back then. With a VCR you could make a limited generation of copies, plus normal VCRs could only copy at a 1:1 time ratio so it took two hours to copy a two hour movie. The copy was notably worse than the original, and if you copied a copy and copied a copy pretty quickly the sync signals would b3e lost. With the DVD on the other hand, once you cracked the DRM, you could make perfect (better than perfect because of DRM removal) copies at a speed much faster than viewing.

u801e 7y ago
> The copy was notably worse than the original, and if you copied a copy and copied a copy pretty quickly the sync signals would b3e lost. According to this video[1], it really only starts at around the 6th copy of a copy. [1] https://www.snotr.com/video/16624/What_happens_when_you_copy_a_VHS_twenty_three_times https://www.snotr.com/video/16624/What_happens_when_you_copy...
shmerl 7y ago
Copyright extremists were freaked out with VCR anyway, and tried to claim it's forbidden. They never learn. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Universal_City_Studios,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Unive....

KibbutzDalia 7y ago

Why is Hacker News pro-piracy?

mncharity 7y ago

Decades ago, I talked with someone close to the government side of the negotiations with Hollywood which resulted in the copyright term extension act of 1976. They were perhaps a bit defensive. But they claimed the act as a success. A success in damage control. Because, roughly, "you should have seen the crazy <bleep> Hollywood wanted". And in the decades since, year after incremental year, we have.

james_kim2 7y ago

This post reminds me of when I went to Korea when I was younger, I would bring back a whole bunch of movies that were pirated onto a DVD. These movies were in good condition and were movies that were still in theaters at the time. The business was so good that it actually had actual stores selling these copies. I am still amazed at the quality of these DVDs that I had around 2003-2004.

mzs 7y ago

to give some context in '82 most theatrical releases cost $80-100. Wrath of Khan was a test where Paramount sold it at $40. It did very well, then they released Raiders in time for Christmas '83 and it did spectacularly. Those Videodiscs sold for $25 at the time. There was a gas station near me that rented pirate copies of movies from a rental place. Renting a new release back then from a legitimate place tended to be $7 for one night plus a membership and there wren't many copies available so you can see how they worked-out. https://www.nytimes.com/1983/12/12/business/hollywood-gambles-on-video.html https://www.nytimes.com/1983/12/12/business/hollywood-gamble...

dredmorbius 7y ago

Compare: "A Woman Who Recorded 70k Tapes of American News". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21558684#21560747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21558684#21560747