Video piracy was hardly a crime in 1982 | Hacker News Reader

Video piracy was hardly a crime in 1982

cbc.ca

96 pointscolinprince72 comments

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.

I wouldn't consider that "piracy", and certainly at the launch of the DVD player it wasn't considered piracy either. It may have been turned into an infringement by the DMCA, and it was a breach of the DVD-CSS licensing agreement by the manufacturer, but not actually piracy.

And of course other countries than region 1 were unsympathetic to it, as it prevented them from watching things.

(It was this that taught me the heuristic that if you want a piece of consumer electronics with maximum format support and convenience features, it should be the cheapest and most Chinese version you can find; expensive e.g. Sony kit is heavily loaded with "protection" antifeatures.)

I love it when DVD players force me to watch an unskippable anti-piracy threat that pirate copies always cut out.

It’s like they want me to pirate so I can avoid that garbage.

That's actually what stopped me from watching DVD's many years ago. I got so pissed off at all the unskippable garbage one day that I decided never to bother with DVD's again and haven't watched a single DVD movie since. I haven't pirated in a long time either, though, as I'm not a particularly heavy TV/movie watcher, so Netflix has been enough for me.

That always reminds me of the parody anti-VHS-piracy warning I remember from an old Australian skit show from the 80s.

"FBI Warning. If you suspect this video is not a legitimate copy, please call the number that is not appearing on your screen to report it."

This is how I feel every time I type "youtube-dl" in my terminal.

I ended up ripping my DVDs as the resulting MP4s were so much nicer than the original media. I'd rip it, put it on a tablet to watch on the airplane, then flush them out for the next set waiting at home for me. Zero interest in blu ray media.

> (It was this that taught me the heuristic that if you want a piece of consumer electronics with maximum format support and convenience features, it should be the cheapest and most Chinese version you can find; expensive e.g. Sony kit is heavily loaded with "protection" antifeatures.)

Earlier it was Japanese gear from the Akihabara that had that desirable property. Sony didn't participate because they had a conflict of interest: they had bought large film and music studios. Showing again that vertical integration is anti-consumer.

A difference is that while copyright restrictions as such are nearly universal worldwide, any further restrictions like those imposed by DMCA are USA-specific, so for decades there have been actions (and software tools) that were considered 'shady' in USA but legal and condoned elsewhere.

Region-lock is one thing. Selling "chipped" game consoles is another - while piracy is obviously a clear driver, as long as no pirated software exchanges hands, in many places outside USA it was legal to sell consoles with pre-installed mod-chips that can play "game backups", so major legitimate electronics stores did so.

> I wouldn't consider that "piracy", and certainly at the launch of the DVD player it wasn't considered piracy either.

It was definitely treated like piracy at the time (if for no good reason other than that DVD distributors demanded that it be treated like piracy.) At the consumer level it wasn't at all criminal, but pressure on retailers was pretty absolute. You had to shop at weird stores to get out of region DVDs or region-free players, or be in the know about how to hack mainstream models.

It was notable that amazon began to ship you DVDs from other regions the more international it became. It was the most mainstream place that I had seen that would do that.

Ignoring the region code didn't enable DVD piracy (like for example putting a modchip in your Playstation enabled game piracy while allowing you to play games from other regions) so the industry didn't have an argument that would aid them in making region code violation an actual crime.

> Ignoring the region code didn't enable DVD piracy (like for example putting a modchip in your Playstation enabled game piracy while allowing you to play games from other regions)

Only because the equivalent hack was unnecessary, right? A standard region locked DVD player can play a pirated disc by default, unlike a Playstation.

> and it was a breach of the DVD-CSS licensing agreement by the manufacturer

Hum, no. The poor manufacturer only created a test system, kept secure, with instructions for internal people only. It's hardly his fault that somebody leaked the instructions.

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.

"Piracy" has very little actual meaning, it's just a negative metaphor. Smuggling things across the border that you aren't meant to have works better with the metaphor than making copies for personal use.

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.

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.

I feel like you're confusing movie theatres with DVDs. DVD regions were _all_ about market segmentation and affordability as opposed to release dates.

It was very much about price differences. Here in Australia we'd pay $30+ for a music CD around the year 2000. We always got shafted on regional pricing. The companies would use the "distributor" excuse but it didn't explain why our prices were so crazy.

EDIT: To clarify, the "local distributors" were a method to optimise local price points.

Like Dawson's Creek on Netflix.... totally different theme song.

There are a few TV series where music played a significant role that, on DVD, much of that has been stripped out because of music rights. You basically can't get the shows as aired. Norther Exposure, and (I've been told) WKRP in Cincinnati come to mind.

My favorite butchering of a show due to external license rights is Beavis and Butthead. My guess is that during their original run on MTV, MTV possessed the rights to air the videos, and the show never acquired those rights. Given the sheer number of videos the series must have gone through, I don't hold out much hope for ever having a complete set, short of piracy.

Hilariously, or sadly, depending on your point of view, box sets of the series say things like "Complete Episodes!" which is technically true, if you consider the episode to be only the non-video content, but the episodes were also largely about B&B saying stupid things while sitting on the couch watching videos.

Daria is another case of that happening. I have seen DVD rips with the audio track from old TV rips floating around somewhere just because people want the music back.

It is a real shame when art gets modified after release due to licensing agreements

You know, I never though of this before, but I'm sure there was an episode of Northern Exposure that ended with Etta James's "At Last," and I'm positive that the DVD version doesn't have the song.

I remember it because it was one of my favorite episodes. I lost my box set years ago, so I guess I won't be verifying that.

Haha, always funny when an EU watcher starts singing the « wrong » theme song to a show and confuses all the Americans on the couch.

Contrast that with today in Canada, where telecoms are trying to sue big box retailers and their customers because they sold blank Android STBs:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/best-buy-staples-canada-com...

It’s like the 2003 RIAA dinosaurs have been resurrected.

What's with this weird trend on HN lately of taking some random anecdote of an experience in a non-US country, then using that as well as a bunch of assumptions to extrapolate how you think the US did things? Stores in the USA sold unlockable DVD players as well. Hell, we even had Divx DVD players that would play pirated movies off of CDs (which is why you often see old scene releases limited to 700mb).

> taking some random anecdote…as well as a bunch of assumptions to extrapolate

I don't think this is specific to Hacker News, or even a recent phenomenon…

I can confirm, I still have a DivX DVD player although I think I smoked around it a little too much, messed up the laser. I guess it is popular to bash on the place DMCA comes from, although the US has people from everywhere, so if some other place has good circumvention, it will reach it(US) sooner or later.

Yea I had similar experiences in the US with burning CDs and electronic stores helping me. Some even told me better and cheaper ways to do it.

If I went to Microcenter and wanted to build a plex server they would help me optimize it for sure.

Not only is that not piracy, region locks themselves should be seen as illegal, anti-competitive measures that infringe on user rights. The only reason they're not treated as such is industry lobbying.

The only reason the rest of the world even cares about intellectual property is America forces the issue via trade agreements. The US makes "adopt laws similar to ours so that our companies can reliably sell stuff to your people" part of the conditions for the agreement. Developing countries end up having the same laws on paper but little to no enforcement.

In USA, stores in chinatown openly sold multi-region DVD players. But outside of immigrant communities, most Americans had no reason to know or care about this. (Also bittorrent was a thing in 2006 so many ppl had moved away from physical disks.)

Best Buy sold unlockable players as well, though they weren't unlocked by default.

Eh, Germany isn't exactly "piracy friendly" at all. If you torrent a popular song there's a decent chance you get sued for hundreds (previously thousands) of dollars.

But region hacking isn't really piracy, and the guy you talked to might've just been cool with it. People in electronics stores are super different, some of them are just nerds who pirate at home and will gladly help you with any problem you have in that regard, others will just follow "protocol".

My thought exactly.

Germany is probably the unfriendliest EU country when it comes to piracy, enforcing fines even on small offenders.

Grandparent's example with the DVD player region lock isn't exactly piracy.

In some cases the region locks were even counterproductive if the goal was to reduce piracy. If you have to install a modchip to play a game from a different region, then you've just enabled someone to pirate who might not have bothered otherwise. But now that they've gone to the trouble to mod the system it's no extra effort to start pirating games.

It also give the modchip companies a thin veneer of semi-legitimacy.

I had the exact same experience in the US when CD burning became popular. Same with Divx DVD players.

Your comment was spot on until you turned it in America thing.

Copying a copyrighted disk is clearly against the law in most countries that have copyright law.

But I'm not sure that changing the region code settings would be "piracy."

In Sweden around the same time, a big-box retailer asked my parents if they wanted their DVD player region-unlocked for a $10 fee.

Pre-smartphone, but I could probably have looked up if it was possible without some special IR remote (which was required for some players in that age) in Opera Mini on my Sony Ericsson on some shady site if I spent half an hour but it was worth it to just say "yeah sure".

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.

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.

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.

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.

Back in the early 80s (pre-Blockbuster) there were independent video stores. They were great, because you could "reserve" a video for a night and they would hold it for you, unlike Blockbuster where you had to hover like a vulture by the return counter.... Anyway, back on topic, one of these independent video stores I believe was the source of several pirated movies as well, including a copy of "ET" filmed in the theater which was awful quality.

> 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).

My parents were not rich yuppies by any stretch, but were also part of a similar video cassette trading ring. They were probably really common.

Totally — I was more referring to the segment of people that had not one but two VCRs in 1983 in order to facility the copying, not the broader network of traders.

> I wasn’t quite alive when this happened so

But also not completely dead I see

I mean, my mom was pregnant with me for some of this so yeah.

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.

> 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...

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Unive....

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.

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).

Some tapes had something called “Macrovision” which made it harder to copy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_protection#Videotape

True, but it didn't become mainstream until much later IIRC.

you could buy a filter to remove that

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.

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.

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-gamble...

Compare: "A Woman Who Recorded 70k Tapes of American News".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21558684#21560747

The way it should have stayed.

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

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

e.g. Apparently the Lord of the Rings movies made losses using these rules...

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.

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).

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.

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.

> 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/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!).

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.

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.

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.

@stanski was being sarcastic.

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