Goodbytes блогирал за развојот на настани во телевизискиот свет, па ми текна на приказната од Слободна култура на Лоренс Лесиг. Да не преведувам:
Cable TV
Cable TV was also born of a kind of piracy. When cable entrepreneurs first started wiring communities with cable television in 1948, most refused to pay broadcasters for the content that they echoed to their customers. Even when the cable companies started selling access to television broadcasts, they refused to pay for what they sold. Cable companies were thus Napsterizing broadcasters' content, but more egregiously than anything Napster ever did--Napster never charged for the content it enabled others to give away. Broadcasters and copyright owners were quick to attack this theft. Rosel Hyde, chairman of the FCC, viewed the practice as a kind of "unfair and potentially destructive competition." There may have been a "public interest" in spreading the reach of cable TV, but as Douglas Anello, general counsel to the National Association of Broadcasters, asked Senator Quentin Burdick during testimony, "Does public interest dictate that you use somebody else's property?" As another broadcaster put it, "The extraordinary thing about the CATV business is that it is the only business I know of where the product that is being sold is not paid for." Again, the demand of the copyright holders seemed reasonable enough: "All we are asking for is a very simple thing, that people who now take our property for nothing pay for it. We are trying to stop piracy and I don't think there is any lesser word to describe it. I think there are harsher words which would fit it." These were "free-ride," Screen Actor's Guild president Charlton Heston said, who were "depriving actors of compensation." But again, there was another side to the debate. As Assistant Attorney General Edwin Zimmerman put it, "Our point here is that unlike the problem of whether you have any copyright protection at all, the problem here is whether copyright holders who are already compensated, who already have a monopoly, should be permitted to extend that monopoly.... The question here is how much compensation they should have and how far back they should carry their right to compensation." Copyright owners took the cable companies to court. Twice the Supreme Court held that the cable companies owed the copyright owners nothing. It took Congress almost thirty years before it resolved the question of whether cable companies had to pay for the content they "pirated." In the end, Congress resolved this question in the same way that it resolved the question about record players and player pianos. Yes, cable companies would have to pay for the content that they broadcast; but the price they would have to pay was not set by the copyright owner. The price was set by law, so that the broadcasters couldn't exercise veto power over the emerging technologies of cable. Cable companies thus built their empire in part upon a "piracy" of the value created by broadcasters' content.
Додека нашите смислат нешто паметно (ух, сега ли сме како САД во 1948?), уште CableTel останува да ги скине А1 и компанија и да пушти преводи на странските канали.
