Originally Posted by
James 1077
To be honest I still haven't worked out what the difference is between recording something that is on TV to watch later and downloading something that you forgot to record when it was on TV to watch later. The former seems to be fine and the latter will bring the world's creative industries to their knees.
The difference is that recording from the TV still involves you going through a gatekeeper provider who has a business model around your use of their service. If you download via usenet or torrents there is no gatekeeper extracting money from your use of the content (via subscription, rental, advertising, licence fee... whatever) and so no trickle-down to the content creators either. Whether the activity is as devastating to the industry as they like to make out is still arguable but there is a definite possibility that revenue is being lost along the line.
Personally, I think it's just a case of the media providers catching up with reality. If there's no mechanism to pay for the content then people will switch to illegal methods. If Jose Bloggs lives in Spain and enjoys House M.D, he's going to get pretty annoyed on the 22nd of this month when all the American House fans are posting all over the internet about what happened in the season opener on the 21st and he can't watch it. Quite probably annoyed enough to swallow any twinges of conscience and load up his bittorrent client. At that point the media providers had better hope that he likes House enough to watch it again when it hits Spanish TV screens several weeks or months later.