EmuParadise has removed its entire library of retro game ROMs and ISOs

[Leynos]

VHS was massive in the US as well.

[MrMatthews]

I don't think it was clear as you make out . I know it was meant to be illegal to record films and programmes off the BBC on VHS in the UK, but everyone did it and for programmes on ITV, Channel 4 it really wasn't clear at all. I really knew of no-one who owned a VHS and Cassette player, that didn't tape films and TV shows of the TV to their VHS player or didn't have some taped music off the radio. I sort of think you underplay VHS too, I can't think of a House Hold that didn't have at least one VHS player, never mind the huge retal market that was there for VHS back inthe day, VHS helped to turn a lot of films that flopped at the box office in to timless classics and finally make a profit like with The Thing or BladeRunner Ect.


The VHS market in the 80's was huge, well at least in the UK

It's irrelevant how many people copied tapes. Of course everyone did, but it was not a selling point of the VCR or tape recorder. The recording function of the VCR was to record TV shows and whatnot - if you believe for one second that Magnavox and Panasonic marketed their VCRs as "You'll never have to pay full price to own a movie ever again!!!" then you seriously need your head examined.

The anti-pirating campaign was alive and well. Being a bit precocious, I actually called my parents out on the number of recorded tapes we had in our video library.

The FBI wasn't concerned about the end user who was copying rental tapes for their own use (which was still technically illegal). They were going after the pirates who were actually profiting by selling pirated video tapes.

[Ecco]

Ecco, I’m not sure what you aren’t understanding here. You are talking about a bunch of different things here and trying to say they are all the same.




Oh you mean like DVR? The kind of thing that is still marketed today?

Yeah, not the same thing as illegally recording and distributing movies and music.



They sure as hell weren’t. There was ZERO question about the legality (or, more specifically, the lack thereof) of recording movies and music in the 80’s, and it doesn’t matter than everyone did it. You couldn’t play a movie without first sitting through a 20-second warning that told you that you’d be fined or go to jail for unauthorized recording and distribution of said movie.

The big difference is that music and movie pirates back in the day could only reach a market of a few hundred people, like at a yard sale or a flea market. Today, with the advent of the internet, a single person ripping and dumping game roms can literally reach every person in the world who has a computer and an internet connection.

Do you seriously not see the difference? Do you really not understand why this is a bigger issue today than it was thirty years ago? The attitude towards pirated media has not changed at all, it’s just become a lot more urgent for the companies who stand to lose money on this.

Well of course I see the difference, I just tend to think of it as the difference of scale, with the internet able to reach everyone. Before that, I think taping movies, TV shows, and copying music tapes in one boombox were limited to people's personal lives.

Still I was mainly saying that the cultural attitude is what has changed opposite, and I think it's absurd, especially when people act like there's some moral element about it.

VCR's and casette tapes were blatantly embracing copying media, as central features of the machines. Every 2-deck stereo could copy your friend's tape or the radio. Every VCR could record TV or even straight copy movies if you had a 2nd VCR plugged into it.

So yeah the scale is obviously different, but it's the moral attitude shifting opposite that I find absurd.

It's essentially just copying or freely sharing media, in the respective time periods, so it's essentially the same thing (with the huge difference of scale from the internet).

[segarule]

Which solution for acess roms in future? Underground?

[MrMatthews]

So yeah the scale is obviously different, but it's the moral attitude shifting opposite that I find absurd.

It's essentially just copying or freely sharing media, in the respective time periods, so it's essentially the same thing (with the huge difference of scale from the internet).

Alright, well... I’m not sure what you see, but from my own perspective, the attitudes are the same as ever. Back then, the attitude was “Yeah, it’s technically wrong, but I don’t really care. Who am I hurting, really?”

I think that’s the same attitude everyone has now, as you can clearly see in this very thread. And to be clear, that’s my own attitude as well. I have a ton of game roms from EmuParadise (and I’m glad I got them before it all went down), and my iPhone is full of MP3s that I didn’t pay a dime for.

I can only explain this change of attitude as just a change in the way people voice their opinions in general. The same way someone peddling pirated media can have a consumer base in the millions, now millions of people can voice their worthless opinions on stuff and have the illusion of relevance (which is why the world sucks).

Or maybe you’re just affected the same way I was, back in the 80s. It was pounded into our heads to “Say no to drugs” and “Don’t smoke” and “Don’t copy tapes.” Which is why, with no encouragement from anyone meaningful in my life, I was all over my grandma about quitting smoking and I questioned why my parents were making copies of all the movies we rented.

It’s a far bigger issue now than it was in the days before the internet, so ultimately that’s why it seems like a bigger issue.

[Sik]

Which solution for acess roms in future? Underground?

I mean, to be fair that's what people already do for everything else, for some reason we got the idea that entire ROM collections can be the exception to the rule.

[Team Andromeda]

It's irrelevant how many people copied tapes. Of course everyone did, but it was not a selling point of the VCR or tape recorder.

It was a Huge selling point. It became so huge VHS players would later have the likes LP to double your recording time, Video+ built in (just enter a code to tape all your fav shows and films) and for the system to know when adverts were playing (for it to pause the recording) never mind the huge market they were for blank VHS. No idea for the USA, but in the UK it was huge and I mean really HUGE. Everyone -who had a TV, had like at least one VHS and taped loads of content (where they never owned the IP directly) off the TV. Its what everybody did . To this day I still have tons of VHS tapes with TV recordings., its the only way I've was able have The Flight of Dragons which I taped off Childens Saturday TV . To this day I've never seen it where I can legally buy it at retail.
Shame too as its a classic and I love it and films like that made my love Dragoons and why I would go on to love Panzer Dragoon

[gamevet]

I'll just leave this here.

[MrMatthews]

It was a Huge selling point. It became so huge VHS players would later have the likes LP to double your recording time, Video+ built in (just enter a code to tape all your fav shows and films) and for the system to know when adverts were playing (for it to pause the recording) never mind the huge market they were for blank VHS. No idea for the USA, but in the UK it was huge and I mean really HUGE. Everyone -who had a TV, had like at least one VHS and taped loads of content (where they never owned the IP directly) off the TV. Its what everybody did . To this day I still have tons of VHS tapes with TV recordings., its the only way I've was able have The Flight of Dragons which I taped off Childens Saturday TV .

Honest question, do you have anything substantial to add here? I've lost count of the number of times I've stated that A.) copying movies and recording television shows are not the same thing and B.) the VCR was never ever marketed for it's ability to pirate movies. If you think I'm wrong, then please link to some advertisement of the time. Do not try to tell me again how huge VHS was in the day, and how everyone and their dog was recording Three's Company and Quantum Leap, and how your favorite VHS tape was Little Mermaid.

[Raijin Z]

Yes, VHS piracy was rare in my experience as well. I was one of the few people in my HS who bothered copying tapes, because I would be the one to cart my 15 pound VCR all over the city on foot, but I didn't know anybody who was looking to buy bootlegs. Renting a movie was enough for most people. I only knew of one household owning a massive VHS library with white labels, and a spiral notebook to keep track of their contents, but all of that was recorded from HBO, Showtime, and Cinemax.

[Team Andromeda]

Honest question, do you have anything substantial to add here? I've lost count of the number of times I've stated that A.) copying movies and recording television shows are not the same thing and B.) the VCR was never ever marketed for it's ability to pirate movies. If you think I'm wrong, then please link to some advertisement of the time. Do not try to tell me again how huge VHS was in the day, and how everyone and their dog was recording Three's Company and Quantum Leap, and how your favorite VHS tape was Little Mermaid.

DON'T think it's as clear cut as you make our. I taped Airwolf, Knight Rider, street Hawk, The Centurions, Jason and the Wheel warriors, Galaxy High, Disney the Wuzzles off free to Air TV.. I never paid for them and technically dont own them..right?

On so many Console and games system I own, I see the warning of for sale only in Japan and Asia, am I breaking any rules there?

Also the VHS main selling point was the ability to record TV, that's why the format was invented for wasn't it. I'm sure in the beginning not many films studios would support the format as they saw it as a threat to the Cinema, so at the start one of the main reasons to get VHS was to tape the TV and be able to watch another channel.

[Ecco]

Maybe the difference of attitudes re: VHS and cassette tapes might boil down to geographic area? I really don't know. I can say that back when VHS and cassette tapes were dominant (in the US, at least around here), then I don't think anyone even realized it was debatable legally or morally. It was just NORMAL. VCR's and tape decks were explicitly made to copy media, as well as play it. I think everyone just figured that of course it was legal (since we bought the machine, after all).

That FBI warning at the start of VHS tapes was interpreted as talking about copying movies being illegal for making money, like saying that we couldn't copy a tape and sell it, and we couldn't use that copy to hold a movie showing at a theater. We didn't think it applied to personal copies of things.

I also did not make huge use of copying things with either VHS or cassettes, so that's not where I'm coming from. I'm really talking about the sense of morality that has developed about these things in the 2000's, when there was no sense of morality about it, before then.

Mostly I just remember one music tape being copied for me by a friend, for free, and I promise the legality or morality never crossed my mind. I tried copying radio music but then you'd have to mess around with the radio commercials in between songs.

People didn't copy movies much because it needed 2 VCR's. It also took the full time of the original video, so it wasn't fast or convenient.

Most copying was done by my family to record trashy TV shows like soap operas, and talk shows like Oprah, if we were not going to be home. (Copying TV while not home was a very common use of VCR's, at least the idea of it: Never miss a TV show again!) Other families were probably recording the news or sports games, just anything that they wanted to see, but wouldn't be home. People also re-recorded over them, once they saw them, because they weren't trying to make permanent copies, as much as they just wanted to catch TV shows that they wouldn't be home for.

Anyhow it's the shifted moral attitude that I find nonsensical, the same people think it's morally sinful to copy things now, when their morals felt good back when they were taping Oprah every day lol.

Corporations essentially changed people's morals and they don't even realize it. It's not directed at people in this thread, I'm thinking mostly about my family members.

The whole idea of morality, though, is supposed to be unrelated to other things like scale -- for example, it's morally wrong to rob 1 bank or 5 banks. So copying tapes was essentially the same as today's free-sharing of media & info, just with the scale flipped from very small to the internet reaching everyone.

[Eep386]

Back in the 80s, we were dirt freaking poor so we videotaped everything* on TV when we had the chance. (Miraculously, though we didn't even have an automatic dishwasher, we wound up with an old Hitachi-made JCPenney VCR back in the 80s.) Of course those tapes (well, about 98% of them anyway) are long gone now, since we threw out most of our VHS stuff going to DVD. We obviously never sold any tapes and only sparingly lent them out to others. Also, my dad was a teacher who sometimes needed to tape stuff for relevant events at his job.

For its time, VHS was an absolute godsend to the poverty crowd.






*Well okay, not everything, but you get the idea. It was a way to get neat things like the Garfield specials.

[MrMatthews]

Honest question, do you have anything substantial to add here?

DON'T think it's as clear cut as you make our. I taped Airwolf, Knight Rider, street Hawk, The Centurions, Jason and the Wheel warriors, Galaxy High, Disney the Wuzzles off free to Air TV.. I never paid for them and technically dont own them..right? On so many Console and games system I own, I see the warning of for sale only in Japan and Asia, am I breaking any rules there?Also the VHS main selling point was the ability to record TV, that's why the format was invented for wasn't it. I'm sure in the beginning not many films studios would support the format as they saw it as a threat to the Cinema, so at the start one of the main reasons to get VHS was to tape the TV and be able to watch another channel.

A simple "NO" would have been a much more succinct response.

This is literally the dumbest discussion I have ever had. Since this whole debate is retarded and you are incapable of moving the conversation forward, I'm going to just stop engaging you.

But just to wrap up:

This entire worthless exchange only happened because I stated that it has always been illegal to copy media that some company is trying to sell you (music, books, movies, games, etc). For some reason you thought that this was disputable and you keep bringing up how people were recording television shows. That's not the same goddam thing, because no one was trying to sell you those programs.

You should really read this whole article on the history of video cassettes, but here's a relevant snippet ... and good day, sir.

Home video sent the movie industry into a spin. Television had already stolen a big part of their market, and they saw the VCR as a massive new threat. Copyright, they argued, was at stake. Did not the mere recording of a television show constitute an infringement of the copyright owner’s rights over reproduction? The studios took the issue to court. In 1976, the year after Sony’s release of the Betamax VCR, Universal City Studios and the Walt Disney Company sued Sony, seeking to have the VCR impounded as a tool of piracy.

New communications technology – then as now – has always challenged previous assumptions and jurisprudence in the area of copyright. Just as the printing press, by making possible the mass reproduction of books, led to the first copyright laws, and cinematography raised the question of authors’ rights to derivative works, now it was the turn of the VCR. The first court decision in 1979 went against the studios, ruling that use of the VCR for non-commercial recording was legal. The studios appealed and the decision was overturned in 1981. Sony then took the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In a landmark judgement in 1984, the Supreme Court ruled that the home recording of television programs for later viewing constituted "fair use."1 An important factor in the Court’s reasoning was that "time-shifting" – i.e. recording a program to watch it at another time – did not represent any substantial harm to the copyright holder, nor did it diminish the market for the product.

By then, the VCR had become a popular consumer product, and, contrary to their fears, the film studios found themselves to be major beneficiaries of the technology as the sale and rental of movie videos began generating huge new revenue streams. In 1986 alone, home video revenues added more than US$100 million of pure profit to Disney’s bottom line. The television stations, on the other hand, having found that the "useless" recording option was a big hit with viewers, faced a different problem. They had to find new ways to keep their advertisers happy now that viewers could fast-forward through the commercial breaks.

http://www.wipo.int/wipo_magazine/en...icle_0003.html

[Team Andromeda]

Dublication is making multiple, The clue is in the name..
And you pretty much backed up what I said. In how the movies studios saw VHS as threat to cinema sales and how VHS became so massive it actually was a huge money spinner for the film studios and how at the start VHS was sold on its ability to record TV shows and films.

Why you want to act so hostile over a subject matter is beyond me. WHEN you just pretty much confirmed what people having been saying here in your link