For US Citizens, any shows captured off the public airwaves (ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, FOX, UPN, WB, Local Stations, etc.) should be 100% free with no restrictions for personal viewing.

If you pay for cable, you should be able to download episodes from those channels you already have legal access to, the same way. Again - for PERSONAL USE ONLY.

But if you don't pay for showtime or HBO or what not, you should not be allowed to download those episodes for free.

At least that is my first take on things.

The overseas stuff confuses me so I did not address it. :p

If you screened them in Australia the same time they were released, people wouldn't be downloading the 5th series of a TV show as the 2nd comes on air!

You only have yourselves to blame. Get up to date, and sell these small screen series to the people that want them: us. Deliver them on time, and it would be much less of a problem. God this crap s***s me!

Oh gee, another "victory" for MPAA.

God, these MPAA stunts look really pathetic...

[my 2 cents]
if they were smart, they would realize that a netflix-esque service OR the pay-2-download service would be in their best interest.

its tried and true that the more they try to regulate something, the more and more crafty internet-savvy people get. No matter WHAT they do, we will ALWAYS find a way around it... their best bet would be to compromise. But they are trying to dictate to US what we can watch and when.

GUess we should consider ourselves lucky that they ordained the internet in the first place. THey buried themselves.
[/my 2 cents]

stupid.

From what I understand, it is the DRM bill/law clinton signed that allows MPAA & RIAA to do this sort of thing. http://en.wikipedia.org/...gital_rights_management

We need to get rid of DRM.

some of us don't live in the US but want to keep up with certain shows. what about us? how about selling episodes on their official sites for viewers to download, watch and archive at their own leisure? these sharing sites exist because there's a demand. many of the tv shows like the daily show don't even have box sets. no one wins either way.

didnt we go through all this before with vcr's? Personally they should promote online downloading of episodes..
[1] - it sometimes gets people interested in watching the show on tv
[2] - it is another source of revenue. They put the episodes online on a site with banner ads and get additional revenues from advertisers there as well as the ones on the commercials on tv

I personally seldom dl tv shows. I am not a sitcom watcher and seldom turn on the tv for anything but background noise. However. someone recently showed me a few episodes they downloaded off the net for two shows. Lost and Dead Like Me. I now tune in every wednesday to watch lost because I loves the storyline I seen so they have a new viewer

You hit the nail on that one. These corp. megaminds are still so clueless as to how the world works its disgraceful. They're supplying the nails for their own coffin.

Nobody seems to care if we can borrow free music and movies from a good public library. The big chain outlets openly buy, sell or trade CDs and DVDs. So fewer new copies are made and sold by these stores. Artists get no royalties from the sale of used items.

Fascist corporations would rather sue kids who download MP-3 files on the internet. They like to raid garage sales and flrea markets too. It's easy to harass the little people.

When do these idiots go after some of the so-called legit stores who are the bigger thieves? Some other their newspaper advertising and window fliers are enough to invite some attention. I am not blind...

Tell it to the judge!

Ok i admit i download way to much stuff. I don't sell it so i feel it's ok. And i Refuse to pay 60-120 bucks for a season of a show i already watched. So downloading makes sense. Some of the more popular shows don't even need to be downloaded due to the fact they air them more then the commercials themselves. Like Stargate, star trek and others just for example. But i like doing it cause i like haveing them all. So yeah i just downloaded all 4 seasons of alias this week and i am happy i did it. I also don't feel the least bit guilty cause i watched all those shows and had to endure the commercials which paid for them, so i feel it paid for by me. Since i am not asking them to give me a copy that they would have to make then i am not costing them any money. And since i wouldnt buy it in the store, then they didnt lose money from me.
More to the point would be that untill recently they didnt even sell tv seasons. So now they wanna cry foul. People have been useing the good old vcr for years b4 this. I know people with hundreds of tapes of shows over the years. All i am doing is the same thing really. Except i put money back into their pocket. For example. I i download a music, movie or whatever that SONY owns. I have a sony dvd burner and player that cost me money that i wouldnt had spent if i didnt need to download stuff to burn. thus they made their money back before i did the downloading.

At the end of most shows and sports there is a little blurb about not reproducing it. They could care less if you copy a show of TV/Cable anywhere really, but when you distribute it, they loose control of the property. They are fighting to keep so that they can use it later or sell it to franchise.
It's not illegal to lend a friend a tape, or dvd of a taped program becuase your not altering the show, nor "Mass distributing it".

With that said, there position becomes clearer. Now, I understand why and what there trying to accomplish. Not let me say what i think, and that is... with only 1% of all broadcast material being quality enough for me to watch anything more then casually.. i will ban TV, as i have done with Music. Movies i use netflix... it's a cheap and worth the money (not an AD). if they come out with a service like that for TV i would probably find more to view.

I also, want to say in my rant that i think the sueing of these companies and individules(sp?) is not becoming of the corporations that the consumers built. But, i have found video games, Books, frisbee and other activities are more fun then 15minutes of a tv sitcom.

[my 2 cents]
someone said something about control... i agree fully. They want to know who is watching what and when they are watching it.
Lets take "Riverworld" for example. I aired on SciFi and i missed it... BOTH times i have EVER known it to air, i missed it. Now perhaps if there was a way to request and immediately watch ANY show that has ever aired WHEN i wanted to watch it, i might sympathize with them, but there isnt.
Point of the matter is, its not about whats free and whats not, its not about dvds... its simply about being able to watch the shows you want WHEN you want. Lets face it, even TV on demand doesnt let you do that. Mostly, they let you watch recently aired movies and some recently aired shows... who the F@#$ cares about recently airs stuff. 90% of the shows i download are shows that havent even aired in the last 5 years.

They just wanna moan and groan about something else that they have been robbed of.
[/my 2 cents]

If cable companies didn't rob most people blind to begin with I might actually care.

Give me a break. What next? Gonna sue me for recording some of my favorite Sitcom's to VHS tape?

Go ahead and try.......you freaking total losers.

These people make me mad. They are the absolute scum of the earth.

MPAA and RIAA should both rot in a dumpster somewhere.

Broadcast TV is free to begin with so what's the big deal of swapping TV shows when anyone can watch them on TV anyways? The MPAA has nothing better to do, and its too bad its come to this.

I would think if VCR, Digital Cable DVR's, TiVo, etc. are legal, they can't do anything about it.

They aren't digital quality, and they don't BY ANY MEANS take the place of watching the real thing -- they just provide a way of watching an episode you've missed from work and stuff. ... kind of like VCR's, DVR's, TiVo, etc. do. I hope they get shot down like a bad habit.

It could be a number of things they are worried about. No ads – but you can skip the ads with a vcr/tivo as well. Maybe the quality is better than what you could get free with a broadcast for some people. But if you have cable that may not be the case.

My guess is its all about ratings and money. I believe if you don’t watch it on tv in the right timeslot you aren’t counted in the ratings. Lower ratings may mean lower profits from ads in the future since companies won’t want to pay as much for less viewers. But the bigger issue may be the MPAA is worried about this affecting future DVD sales.

Would be interesting to see this one play out in court. Say you missed a show this week, download and watch it, and delete it when finished. Sounds almost like using a VCR to me, and this could be viewed as legal by many people. But if you collect entire seasons of episodes and archive them for later viewing instead of buying the DVD box sets, thats a different story.

Actually, many of them are VERY high quality, IMO. Then again, my cable reception is horrid, so anything looks better. :)

I'd be willing to agree with you if all the shows were on broadcast television, but they aren't. Many of them are cable only shows.

That being said, I still don't like it. I don't like the MPAA in general because they are NOT a law enforcement agency, and they are NOT a government agency. They, like the RIAA are a bunch of thugs wearing suits. They don't lose revenue from tv shows which A) Aren't aired in the US to begin with, and B) Played by people who do not have a TV. (ME). I got sick of paying $60 a month to watch an hour long show, which is only 40 minutes because it's inturrupted by 20 minutes of commercials. This is the real problem they have, the MPAA is upset because people have found yet another way to keep themselves from being force-fed marketing feces.

These shows are not availible for download until after they have aired, in fact they don't even show up for a day or more afterwards in some cases. The only way I can see them really losing out on this deal is maybe from the season dvd sales. But guess what, I still buy them, so do many others. It's higher quality, has bonus features..

/rant

ratings wouldn't be affected as those come from the neilson set top boxes and whatnot which would only work if you had a tv in the first place.

With the raitings stuff I was assuming there are people who have tvs, cable, etc who would watch a show on tv (and count in the ratings) if there were no alternatives. But instead they see downloading as a better option - decent quality and less crap (no ads - kind of like a popup blocker or spam filter). Since these are people who would watch and could watch on tv but simply don't, these people would hurt the ratings.

If you ask me, about 90% of the tv shows on now deserve the bad ratings.

As far as the neilson stuff goes, my father in law turned it down after much consideration. The reason why? Because he didn't want to deal with the pressure of deciding which show is good, and which show was bad by watching them.. He just wants to watch the shows he wants to, when he wants to.

So he bought a tiVo instead lol.

because they cant control you. That's why....

when i download tv, it is regular network tv...i do not download from cable networks like hbo, or mtv...what is bad about that? i put an antenna on my house and get the same shows for FREE that i donwload, but when i download them, i can watch them when i want. the waves are FREE floating around our heads everyday so why now is it illegal to download the same FREE stuff?

No, you are right. Most of the videos are in AVI format, some are even DIVX compressed which makes it look very good. I have seen some shows, such as Arrested Development, that are on the internet and the HDTV version of the show was downloaded and distributed.

a wake up call...
Neilsons etc.. tivo and cable and dish and direct tv.

They all send you a signal in some manner.. that manner is trackable and why bother keeping track of it unless you were selling that info back to the thugs... thats how they really find out who's watching what... not the silly neilsons

So if I have cable TV service, why should this be illegal?! Im still paying for the episode by paying Comcast or whoever! ..idiots.

If only the MPAA realized this. I think if the MPAA goes up against smart enough people, then the case is going to be thrown out in court.