Re: Pirating anime music in the 1980s
Posted: Mon Mar 16, 2020 3:49 pm
Classic Anime, Old School Fandom
https://www.oldschoolotaku.com/forum/
This echos a lot of other folks' comments here but I'll add to it - cassettes were super flexible because they were so widespread. Even though I didn't get into anime until the 90s, everybody and their mother had access to a cassette player of some type, most people had ones with two decks, perfect for recording. I didn't have a car with a CD player until the early 2000s but I think the couple cars my family bought in the 90s all had cassette decks.davemerrill wrote:Cassettes, on the other hand, were just about perfect. You could take them anywhere, you could listen to them privately on a Walkman, in the car stereo, in a boom box on a picnic, in a home stereo system at home. They sounded good, you could record anything you wanted on them, they even made dual-cassette boom boxes and cassette decks to facilitate copying from one cassette to another.
I personally wasn't big on them; have a couple of CD singles that used them. My friend in high school from Macau absolutely loved them.
While I agree that there should be a distinction between copies for personal use or limited distribution, the construct of copyright, particularly in the US now, is that there is no such distinction. And yes, even if the legit products weren't for widespread sale, I am sure that whatever the Japanese equivalent to the RIAA would say "yeah, it's piracy" in between determining costs of prosecution and astonishment that foreigners liked the music to their cartoons.SteveH wrote:I don't think I would use the term 'pirate' for music sharing circa the '80s. AFAIK there was never a network of people bootlegging music cassettes. Let us not forget that the music industry worked with the music publishing community to build a 'tax' into blank tape prices to cover 'lost revenue' due to recording a LP onto tape. I consider that a de facto license to reproduce for private use.
Pirate definitely fits the SM/Son May/Evergreen and whatever else they were called CDs, an epidemic during the '90s to today.