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20 Year Anniversary of Home Taping Decision
jemnery writes "It's worth noting that January 17th is the 20th anniversary of the US Supreme Court's decision in favour of Sony to allow home taping of broadcast programmes. This is something we all take for granted these days, but at the time it was a close-run thing. You can read about case no. 81-1687 here." The Guardian has a commentary.
U.S. corroborating with WIPO to overturn Betamax decision and also eliminate public domain
One thing that people forget about is that the legal limit for personal time shifting is seven days unless you have written permission from the TV station. After that, you are technically supposed to blank the tape.
So really, just about every American breaks this judicial law. According to a broadcast major I knew, some people do get charged with this, but often it is simply an add-on to other charges to worse stuff prosecutors think might not stick.
Well, first of all, when this decision was handed down, those TV programs were not available for sale. The machines were taping BROADCASTS. Broadcasts (and production) that had been paid for by advertising contained therein. Then, as now, you could tape (or digitally record) a broadcast of say, a radio show, for your own personal use, and not raise the ire of the RIAA. Downloading MP3s from a complete stranger via P2P is a little different. The music is in most cases available for sale, and you are downloading it to avoid paying for it. It's not really double standard. Nor is it as annoying or frustrating as reading posts by people who don't understand why taping a program off a television broadcast is different from downloading an MP3.
What country are you from? In the US color tv's came about in the late 60s and were commonplace in the early 70s.
Well, that I did not know. I'm from Finland. I guess the same goes for the rest of the Europe - I believe colour TVs were available in Europe much sooner than 1985, but I also belive that they were so expensive that common households started to get those no sooner than in the middle of 80s. Like my family and the families I knew back then. But it's really amazing. 30 years is nothing! And so much has happened in 30 years.
...the absence of a 30-second skip button or automated skipping feature on the TIVO...
select - play - select - 3 - 0 - select
Unadvertised, but there. Voila.
Carthago delenda est!
Press SELECT-PLAY-SLECT-3-0-SELECT, now the advance button is a 30 second skip button.
I like to build things and wire stuff together.
The importance of this decision doesn't lie only in its liberal approach to fair use. It is also important because it acknowledges that even a device that can, or even is, used in an infringing way should be permitted if it also has non-infringing uses. This issue comes up over and over again, e.g. in the attempt by DirectTV to treat all purchasers of smartcards as thieves. Anything from a pry-bar to a debugger CAN be used to commit a crime or violate a copyright, so the doctrine that the possibility of infringing use doesn't justify prohibition or restriction is important for civil liberties in general.
You have to record it to a hard drive or D-VHS. Red-laser DVD isn't ready for true HD, you will have to wait for blue laser.
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
What country are you from? In the US color tv's came about in the late 60s and were commonplace in the early 70s.
NBC had the first color TV broadcast in 1953.
RCA owned NBC, and was the developer of the NTSC standard. At the time (1949-52) there was actually a competing standard called the CBS color system, which was actually the one chosen by the FCC as the one to take. Long story short and lots of lawsuits later, the CBS color system was still adopted by the FCC, but that adoption was delayed until 1953.
The CBS color system had one issue, it was not compatible with the black and white standard. If you had a black and white set, you couldn't view a CBS color program (CBS color sets displayed color with, god help us all, two spinning color disks, so if you were switching back to a black and white program, you flipped a switch on the TV that stopped the disks and moved them out of the way.)
By 1953 there were too many people with black and white sets, and therefore no interest in spending large sums of money on a new standard. The RCA standard was backwards and forwards compatible, so it was to be the clear winner.
Except...CBS was miffed about getting dissed, so wouldn't touch color. ABC saw no reason to make programs in color, as that would just mean more sales for RCA, which owned NBC. It wasn't until the mid 1960s that ABC relented, started broadcasting in color, and then CBS had no choice but to start broadcasting in color as well.
The PAL european standard has 625 lines horizontal resolution, which was a new TV standard. The BBC was broadcasting black and white at 425 lines. BBC1 broadcast at 425 for many years, but BBC 2 broadcast at 625 lines color for many years, way before BBC 1 made the switchover. If you had an older TV, you needed a converter to see BBC 2. A newer TV had a switch to go back and forth. (Obviously BBC 2 had more expensive equipment, which explans the oddity of British TV licensing, which is considerably more expensive for a color TV than a black and white one.)
PAL wasn't developed until the mid 1960's, and the fact that it was a new standard, plus the expense, made its adoption much slower than that of NTSC in North America. (I think BBC1 switched over to color 625 in 1981, so saying that most peeps had color TV's in Britain in the mid 1980's in not all that far off the mark.)