Cory highlights the argument that
Sorry if I’m stating the obvious, but it’s television. Signals broadcast through the air. Sorry to burst the bubbles of the folks in Hollywood, but you can’t control the genie if you’re throwing it out of the bottle at the speed of light. Accept the fact that people have the right to record their television shows, and don’t complain when they trade them.
I think it helps to remember a key difference in how the TV markets are structured in US and the rest of the world. In the UK (and in Canada, at one time, perhaps even today), TV set owners were required to buy a TV license for their receivers. Those fees paid for commercial-free television of a quality unknown in the US market (Upstairs, Downstairs, Monty Python, the Hitchhiker’s Guide . . . ). While here in the US, advertisers pay for the programming and make a lot of the decisions about what get shown (ever wonder why the networks copy each other so aggressively? It’s not based on audience response alone. Does the name Jamie Kellner mean anything to you?). So yes, the signals are broadcast through the air, but in one market, people subscribe directly through their licenses, and in the other it’s an indirect relationship.
Britain leads the world in piracy. We are responsible for 38.4% of TV downloads in the EU and 18.5% worldwide. Australia is second with 15.6% and the US a poor third on 7.3%. The reason is simple. The pirated programmes are mainly made in English by US companies and released earlier there than here. Top of the piracy charts is 24 (95,000 downloads an episode) followed by Star Trek: Enterprise (90,000).
This looks more like a business opportunity than a problem: if I was a cable operator or ISP, I would be trying to find a way to get that stuff into my network for resale, rather than have people jamming the network with duplicated outbound requests. I would be looking at what gets traded and trying make sure I have better quality versions on hand, as soon or sooner than the “pirates.” <aside>This is a big problem with the p2p nets: the quality is so variable, it’s not always worth bothering to look for stuff. If music files are so chaotic, how frustrating are video files?</aside>
This has always been a puzzle to me, how people assume that every market is structured identically. Ten years ago, I remember having to explain to people that free local phone calls were not the norm around the world. Imagine paying a per-minute charge for calls to a local access number for dial-up service, as well as the rates for the ISP service. And people wondered why internet usage was low outside the US.