Why constrain your response to the arguments above? Why not try to answer by covering the whole spectrum and the gist of what I tried to convey?
The gist of my argument was about the scalability of today's piracy vs the old time VHS piracy. And that doesn't change just because you could "watch the show you copied" too so "that time wasn't wasted".
The "watched while recording" part only makes sense for a show you already wanted to watch. And you just got one copy out of it. And the "do something else" part still takes a few minutes.
On top of those you still needed the physical giving of the tape to the other person, PLUS to cover the non-insignificant cost of the tape. And lets not even get about how much selection you could produce or store at your home.
In contrast, today you can download and share 10,000s of shows without having watched any of them and without wanting to watch them in the fist place, in just the time it takes to make an upload or share a link. And not just to one person, but to the WHOLE internet.
Only the original pirate needs to do any real-time capture (and that's only for some special cases, like camera captures of movies or VCRed shows -- more often than not, they can just rip something in a few minutes).
And even them, after the capture can immediately share the digital copy with BILLIONS of people, instead of the just one person you got in the VHS days.
In Germany for example there is a specific amount of money you have to pay on devices or storage capacity regarding devices or mediums which reproduce or store data.
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauschalabgabe
If you buy a external drive with less than 1TB you pay 7€ extra taxes.
The gist of my argument was about the scalability of today's piracy vs the old time VHS piracy. And that doesn't change just because you could "watch the show you copied" too so "that time wasn't wasted".
The "watched while recording" part only makes sense for a show you already wanted to watch. And you just got one copy out of it. And the "do something else" part still takes a few minutes.
On top of those you still needed the physical giving of the tape to the other person, PLUS to cover the non-insignificant cost of the tape. And lets not even get about how much selection you could produce or store at your home.
In contrast, today you can download and share 10,000s of shows without having watched any of them and without wanting to watch them in the fist place, in just the time it takes to make an upload or share a link. And not just to one person, but to the WHOLE internet.
Only the original pirate needs to do any real-time capture (and that's only for some special cases, like camera captures of movies or VCRed shows -- more often than not, they can just rip something in a few minutes).
And even them, after the capture can immediately share the digital copy with BILLIONS of people, instead of the just one person you got in the VHS days.
There's really no comparison.