JVC is marketing its digital VCR in part by claiming that it contains so much data — roughly 75 gigabytes per 30 minutes of video — that it would be too large to copy. It does have other copy protection schemes as well with the digital VCR. Its designed to work with HDTV sets and so requires and HDCP decoder as well (and JVC claims the HDCP system can’t be broken).
Ignore the central problem, which is that not only is nobody buying HDTV sets due to the huge expense and lack of HDTV broadcasts (and HDTV standards for that matter), and ignoring the fact that HDCP will be broken at some point if HDTV ever catches on, copy protection through enormous file size seems like a silly thing to claim.
I remember people making the same claim for compact discs back in the late 1980s — audio CDs were pirate-free since it was simply too difficult for the average home user to duplicate a CD (remember when a 1X CD-R and a hard drive large enough to make it useful cost upwards of $10 grand?) That mark fell pretty quickly. Pirating a CD is trivially easy today.
But this is precisely where the JVC guy is wrong — almost nobody I knows goes to the trouble of pirating CDs. Most of us don’t need the high definition 650mb version of the music, but instead are just happy with the compressed MP3 version.
This is the fallacy in JVC’s thinking. It isn’t going to happen tomorrow, but within 10 years consumers will almost certainly be able to buy hard drives capable of dealing with the 300 gigabytes or so of data on a digital VCR tape. But nobody’s going to want to trade that on the Internet, just as nobody cares very much to trade the huge files found on DVDs. Instead, people are more than willing to sacrifice quality for file size and trade MPEG-4 versions of DVD movies.