Steve <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> had written,
> Nope, not here. It's legal to copy shows on your VCR or other
> recording device hear. It's not legal to unscramble the shows.
> Federal Copyright law, case law, time shifting. Sounds silly I know.
The untarnished rodent rejoined,
| I think the technical issue is not the decoding but the theft of service.
| If you steal cable or satellite, with a decoder box or otherwise, it falls
| under theft of service and the carriers hit you with that, not copyright
| infringement.
That makes sense: copyright law would not apply because descrambling does not
in itself make a replayable copy. Descrambling and recording the descrambled
signal on a VCR might involve copyright law, because the timeshifting exemp-
tion applies, I believe, only to broadcasts that one could have lawfully
viewed when they were aired.
But descrambling a broadcast illegally only to watch it on the screen and
hear it over the speaker(s) is like playing a stolen CD: the infraction is
not against copyright law.
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