From: David P. Hayes
Newsgroups: alt.movies.silent
Date: Monday, July 27, 1998 4:37 PM
eric stott wrote in message <35BD0A0C.200E@albany.net>…
>And some stations seem to encourage the
>practice- my hometown public TV station used to have a column in the
>schedule called "TV Worth Taping".
They may have had the blessing of the copyright holders. One piece of testimony in the Betamax case was Mr. Rogers of "Mr. Rogers Neighborhood" who stated that it was fine with him if parents videotaped his program for playback with their children later in the day. A PBS survey at the time found that 58% of their producers found acceptable "time-shifting" by viewers. Both of these pieces of information speak to time-shifting, not permanent libraries in the hands of consumers who did not pay for the privilege of having permanent possession. What's more, no one should extend the permission given by SOME copyright-holders to make it apply to ALL copyright holders.
>Why do you thing TCM Shows good films
>at 2:00 Am- do they think anyone sits up to wait for them?
That's irrelevant. In any event, when you don't merely time-shift but hold on to the tapes, you put TCM in the position of lower viewership when the reruns are scheduled, said lower viewership resulting in reduced income to TCM (either because you cancel your premium channel tier when you realize you are no longer watching it, or because your cable company discovers that the signal is no longer being drawn and decides to make the bandwidth available to another channel). THAT is detrimental consequence for the program provider.
--
David Hayes
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