Back when we would record onto VHS, is that considered piracy? Found a super bowl XXXI tape from my Uncle circa 1997. I'm curious lol.
Also side note, have any of you dabbled in digitizing old VHS? Have quite a few home videos on VHS and I'm wanting to preserve them for the future. I've done a bit of research and have come across a wide array of information. I know that doesn't really qualify as piracy, if there's a better comm for this, please direct me there!
The VCR was invented, marketed, and sold to do this very thing. When the VCR first came out (same for betamax) they didn't sell pre-recorded tapes because the only way they had to make those was to manually record them individually in real-time which was prohibitively expensive. That's also why movie rental places caught on: early VHS movies were too expensive for most to afford. But not too expensive for a business to rent hundreds of times.
Suffice to say: if recording TV was piracy, it wasn't illegal and the people bitching had no way to enforce their will.
People did end up copying rentals too. Not just for videos but also games.
Pre-recorded tapes usually had a primitive form of copy protection called macrovision. It would make the copy pretty much unwatchable, but it was fairly simple to remove. You could build or buy a device that would strip it out.
Yup, those little inline filters. Even building the circuit for $5-10 in RadioShack parts was pretty simple.
My modded original Xbox was magical. Rent a game from Hollywood Video, rip it straight to the Xbox hard drive, return it.
We had one of those thingies that would allow you to rip SNES cartridge roms onto floppy disks.