Is it stealing to record.

[JoshIcedogs]

Things like football games / tv shows / Hockey games ?

 

[LadyNRA]

From what I understand, by law, you can tape these programs but have a limited time to watch them later and then you are supposed to delete them/copy over them. I was told the time period is about a week. HOWEVER, the average person will not erase something they love dearly. Like tapes of programs going back to the 80s which never made it to DVD. In such cases, no one knows you have it and since you aren't making money off of it, no one would get on your case. Again, however, I have been told that anything recorded off-air (like from a tv station over the airwaves) is free. Once it's out there for anybody to access, they can't legally regulate who tapes it, and again, as long as you aren't reselling it for a profit, no one cares enough to go after you for it.

I'm not sure what the BIBLICAL position on this would be. If you tape stuff off air or off satellite/cable and you make no money from it, you aren't cheating anybody out of money nor are you taking money out of their pockets (the producers), so I wouldn't view it as stealing but I could be wrong from a biblical perspective.

Bootlegged copies sold for profit would be a different matter.

 

[HeyHomie]

The broadcast industry went to court over copyright issues when VCR's first came out to consumers. The issue went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled that using VCR's was NOT stealing.

So the Supreme Court of the United States says "no."

 

[bill'swife]

I have stuff DVRed that I haven't had time to watch and some of it is over a week old.....I don't see anything wrong w/it, even if I were to copy any of it to CD after I've watched it.

 

[MikeMcKinney]

No. It isn't stealing.

It's only considered stealing if you use it to make a profit somehow.

 

[LadyNRA]

right...that's what I said, they won't look your way unless you are profitting. However, supreme court or not, people in the industry that I know maintain that while copying off air isn't illegal, keeping it after viewing it can be. In any casy, they aren't going to come after you unless you try to sell what you copied.

 

[Dean Anderson]

Yeah, I work for a used goods store, and anytime I see recorded stuff like that, I toss it in the trash, since we can't legally sell it. Unfortunately, however, we get people doing community service, so a lot of it goes on the shelf. If I see it, it gets tossed. Blank tapes are okay though.