I love the whole Tivo phenomenon. As far as I can figure, TV broadcasts are free because they are broadcast on public airwaves. Like if I use a walkie talkie to talk to my friend 2 miles away, I don't own the frequency, I'm just using it. Public Airwaves. They make money because they sell soap and cars on their show. Then, someone up and decides to sell those same shows to you on itunes, without the commercials. A fine idea, but just because someone decides to sell you something that was already free, doesn't mean you were retroactively stealing it, nor are you stealing it if you come by it by other means. Its free. I'm not stealing oxygen if I fail to visit the oxygen bar, and I'm not ripping off the Water Company if it rains. The service Tivo sells is very nice, and I'm happy for them, but it bears mentioning that if we privately do exactly what tivo does, having precisely the same rights and owning exactly the same license to our own TV signal, we can be considered criminals. If Tivo started out as an open source program, I think its a good chance it would be similar to the persecution Youtube is getting right now, and the criticism Bittorents are getting. Bravo to them making it so plain faced that they are still in business.
“An engineer explained to us that hundreds of ear impressions were gathered in the name of research, and while each one obviously boasted its own unique shape and size, one single characteristic remained uniform across the board: the entrance into the ear canal is not a perfect circle, it's an oval.”
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I love the whole Tivo phenomenon. As far as I can figure, TV broadcasts are free because they are broadcast on public airwaves. Like if I use a walkie talkie to talk to my friend 2 miles away, I don't own the frequency, I'm just using it. Public Airwaves. They make money because they sell soap and cars on their show. Then, someone up and decides to sell those same shows to you on itunes, without the commercials. A fine idea, but just because someone decides to sell you something that was already free, doesn't mean you were retroactively stealing it, nor are you stealing it if you come by it by other means. Its free. I'm not stealing oxygen if I fail to visit the oxygen bar, and I'm not ripping off the Water Company if it rains. The service Tivo sells is very nice, and I'm happy for them, but it bears mentioning that if we privately do exactly what tivo does, having precisely the same rights and owning exactly the same license to our own TV signal, we can be considered criminals. If Tivo started out as an open source program, I think its a good chance it would be similar to the persecution Youtube is getting right now, and the criticism Bittorents are getting. Bravo to them making it so plain faced that they are still in business.