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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.
...that the FCC could find a way to overturn in the blink of an eye. We should remain vigilant about this.
Why can television/advertising companies prevent PVRs like TiVo from having features to skip advertising in their products when it is perfectly legal to store the data and fast forward or rewind? Why is automation of this process illegal?
which would be overturned in an instant if the MPPA and RIAA get their way
yep, good ruling (blah blah blah)... but instead of just respecting the ruling the media conglomorates keep trying to work around it... I'm still waiting to see how all this HDTV stuff is going to pan out, but I imagine we wont know for a few years yet. Who knows, maybe we'll get another ruling saying that they can't give over the air stuff a "no copy" bit and that we should have the SAME RIGHTS with the new digital content as we do with the analog content (wishful thinking, I know)...
BUT I'M NOT SURE I CARE ANYMORE!!! My dad, my mom, they used to watch lots of TV. No more, now they spend their time on the internet same as me. My dad might watch an hour of TV a week (that's probably a stretch)... My mom maybe 4 hours a week (thats like half an hour a day lol).
As much as i dont wanna see big copy protections in the new HDTV stuff, I DONT CARE because there is NOTHING WORTH COPYING!!! I'd rather spend my time on the net (or gasp, outside or hanging with friends!) and reading things that I actually LEARN from while talking to my friends in other states on various chat protocols and listening to music that *i enjoy*...not to mention not spending 1/4-1/2 the time staring at adds (thanks firebird and setting ad servers to localhost!)
so in closing, great ruling... but to me and most of the people I know, TV is a thing of the past. If they care about staying in business they shouldn't worry about copy protection, they should worry about making content that i'd actually WATCH (babylon 5 anyone, but of course, a thing of the past!). (family guy? nope, gone but they might bring it back) (reality shows? I'd rather kill myself)
replacing it with NEW Folger's Crystals! (lets see if they notice the difference)
I'm not (legally) able to record my favorite songs from a streaming radio station for "listening at a later time."
The article said that the supreme court decided people video-taping TV at home was not the same as people downloading from the internet, and I agree with this. Although I think downloading music is a bad thing, it is quite different from video-taping a TV show. Since the TV was pretty much the only means of watching the TV show, if you wanted to watch it at any other time it was impossible. You couldnt go to a store and buy your favorite TV show. However, music is not confined to the radio only. There have been records for a long time, tapes, and now CDs are all over the place. So the argument that you just wanted a more convienent time is bullshit and was a dumb thing to argue.
My two cents: they should have argued that it was boosting sales and that the music industry should just be happy and not shoot itself in the foot.
It was the end of TV. No more money from re-runs.
Woldn't ba able to sell or rent video tapes cause they all be copied.
heh.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
20 years since the decision to give people the right to record tv shows, and we're now in a time when our civil rights to record things are at an all time low.. Never bring a camera to a concert, might as well forget using your awesome Tivo when HiDef tv comes along (DRM tv.. what a great station), MP3's.. pleease, you can get fined out the ass for those.. Face it, the Courts need to use this case as a Precendent and not just completely ignore it. Knowledge and entertainment is begging us to free it... it's the people who are greedy who holds it back.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
At one time, it was illegal to privately own and take down channels with a satellite dish here(nothern europe). Because it was only the national(goverment owned) telegraph and broadcasting who was allowed to do that which ment you were forced to buy into the national cable system(where available)
Of couse that didn't stop companies from selling dishes and renting out decoders for movie channels etc. And it didn't stop me from buying one and installing it.
The law was later removed.
The biggest problem I have with commercials, particularly during specials like the "movie of the week" or sports events is the way they hammer the same one at you over and over. It's not unusual in a 3-hour broadcast block to see the major sponsors included in every break. Do I really need to see the same breakfast/car/deoderant/tampon advertisement 12 times, six of which are in the last half-hour of the movie?
If the PVR industry wants to include commercials to keep the broadcasters happy, I'd really like to see some sort of AI that recognizes duplicates and links back to the original. That way they would take up less disk space, and it could present the commercial the first time and skip it after that for the rest of the current recording....
Let us envision an alternate history in which the ruling had turned the other way, and VCRs were outlawed. How would things have played out from there? Of course, we can't really know for sure, but I think this is a plausible scenario:
On January 17th, 1984 (funny, that), the U.S. Supreme Court decided in favor of Universal City Studios, Inc., and preserved the status quo by banning the use of devices known as "Video Cassette Recorders." Some time later, in the 90's, a new technology was developed called DVD. DVDs were shiny disks that contained entire movies or television shows and could be played on DVD players at the user's liesure. Unfortunately this technology never really took off, for without customers in the habbit of buying video content to view at home, nobody produced such content, and without such content being produced, consumers did not bother buying DVD players.
Now back to reality, why did the legalization of VCRs prevent this fate? Because it filled in a gap. With VCRs people could not only watch videos produced by others, but record their own videos. Since people were buying VCRs anyway, a market for videos developed, and by the time DVD appeared people were in the habbit of buying stored video. Sure they had to transition to a new technology and buy new players, but the prior use of VCRs probably made that easier and smoother. It solved the chicken and egg problem by selling chickens and eggs bundled together.
Of course, this is just speculation. We have no way of being certain of what would have happened, but at the very least it seems plausible that banning VCRs would have hindered the acceptance of DVDs.
Not any real difference between taping a tv program and downloading an mp3. However, illegally distributing copyrighted works is a different matter.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The Guardian article suggests that UK law was influenced by US law in this matter. However, key aspects of the legal status of home recording dates back to a 1970's case where a studio sued the comedian Bob Monkhouse for copyright infringement after they discovered that he showed some of his extensive collection of films to friends.
While it did not legalise time-shifting per-se, it did establish that individuals were entitled to hold and use media for personal use without permission from the copyright holder.
I do like some content though. I prefer to watch it when I want. That's why I use a PVR. One of the odd things that I use my ReplayTV for is to snag every fishing show that runs (that doesn't conflict with Enterprise or some other show that I watch) and spool it up in case I want to see it. I recently took up fishing again, and that's useful to me.
Gotta differ on one thing, though...
I'm not interested in Pay for Play, particularly when it is going to involve DRM that won't be compatible with my OS of choice. I'd rather archive the content that I want myself, and watch it when I want. If it becomes available on DVD (at a reasonable price, never mind this $25 for a 1 hour History Channel show) then I'll buy it and clear some space in the spool. even if I only watch it one more time, it's more efficient for me to spool it myself than pay the cable company even MORE money to access it later.
Yea some people will say that's contrary to "fair use". As long as I'm not selling it, I don't really care. Offer it to me at a reasonable price, for a ONE TIME PURCHASE, where I can watch it whenever I want from then on, and I'll buy.
Main reason I won't "Kill my tv" though is that I need it for a display for my game consoles
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
I submitted the article, so no problem ;-)
I live in the UK, and would probably never have visited the Supreme Court website otherwise. Posting
a hyperlink was not intended to be an insult to intelligence, but rather an easy way for the curious to research further without a Google search.