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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.
The horse has bolted. To this day home recording is still a copyright violation in Australia. The practical significance of that is precisely zero.
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I think the smarter route would be to require that the commercials be recorded along with the core program, but have a digital flag that allows the end user to either skip them or watch them in sequence with the program.
A corollary to this would be to allow the user to watch all of the commercials in one back-to-back block as well. (I for one, actually find commercials informative from time to time).
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'I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone'.
The professor under whom I am writing my certification paper at law school wrote a seminal paper on fair use which was cited by the court in the sony opinion.
She made an economic argument in favor of fair use, basically outlining a test to determine, in general terms, where an economic perspective would favor (and disfavor) findings of 'fair use.'
As the 'law and economics' movement was just catching on amongst judges at the time, the paper gained a lot of notice and was cited by the court, and by many many other lower courts as well when issuing opinions dealing with fair use.
A problem arose from all this citation however, because judges lost sight of other, perfectly valid justifications for 'fair use.' An exclusively economic approach to these determinations is a perspective that largely works to the detriment of artists, writers and other creative types who make valid fair use of other copyrighted works because the conditions for permitting fair use in this analysis are few and far between. (A look at Professor Gordon's work will show that she is not at all happy with the current state of copyright.)
Nonetheless, the Sony Betamax case is an important one, one that was decided correctly by a court that at the time actually viewed copyright (properly I might add) as a constitutionally mandated balancing between the progress of arts and sciences and remuneration for authors for that progress.
On that note, support the EFF and VOTE!
cleetus
It's funny that alot of people in my parent's generation think nothing of video taping a television/cable program. By doing so, they are getting a personal copy of some movie or tv series, e.g. regularly video taping 'friends'. On average, if they wanted to buy a copy of such programs it would set them back $15-$20. And, technically, RIAA-ish arguments could be made that X-million dollars are being lost each year due do such video taping.
However, they generally seem to think that there is nothing wrong with video taping these programs. And, presumably many would argue that X-million dollars are not being lost, since they would probably not but the programs they tape. But, at the same time, many of these same people have serious issues with people downloading mp3s. They look at it as theft plain and simple. Further, they believe arguments that Y-million dollars are being lost due to these downloads. Anyhow, I kinda find the double standard both interesting and somewhat annoying/frustrating.
Getting back on topic, the Xerox copier went through the same thing in the '70's, I remember actually seeing authors and publishers picket against the machines at K-Mart.
C|N>K
Is it possible to record HDTV at the moment? Presumably it would be easy to set up a system with a DVD writer and hardware compression to do this. (Being in Europe I have no experience of using HDTV.)
It's the same every time. Xerox machines produced significant legal issues; I believe were the first major threat to copyrighted materials. Since then we've gotten casette tapes, VCRs, ROMs, and p2p filesharing. Do you see RIAA trying to shut down Sony for making blank casette tapes? No, because that issue was lost a long time ago. It's only the forefront of innovation which gets attacked.
Back when music video characters were cartoons, then they were real people, then they were cartoons again.
Also, back when Columbia Pictures was "A Coca-Cola Company". The Sony of today (that owns what was Columbia) is probably kicking themselves over this bit of history. On the other hand, though, VCRs and TiVo haven't seemed to hurt the sales of "Mama's Family - The Complete Nth Season" DVD sets that pack two full rows over at the local Best Buy.
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Interesting, where in the world is this?
In Finland, a few major radio channels quit their Internet broadcast on January 1st, because of licensing issues with Gramex (basically our equivalent of RIAA). Which pisses me off as I have ADSL but no radio. I used to crontab MPlayer to record one show once a week, but I guess I have to get a radio tuner and hook it up to my soundcard ;-).
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Who is more greedy? 1.) People who work to produce music, movies, etc., then want to get paid for the time, effort, and money they invested. Or, 2.) People who want to take the fruits of that labor without paying for it. I would argue that group 2 are the greedy ones. And by the way, the work I produce is not begging you to free it. It's asking you to buy it.
John Dvorak had a commentary a few years ago that I remember whenever I see this topic: People want choice! That is why there were 45RPMs in the fifties and sixties. Why buy a whole album, when all you wanted was one or two songs. The industry wants $15 for thirteen bad songs, and the one you want - They won't learn:^(
My wife doesn't listen to me either...
The 80's and 90's were the Blockbuster generation. Everyone had a VCR. An entire industry was born because of ubiquitous video players. Films no longer died the day the left the theaters, they could live again on the movie shelf. All of this is because of recordable video tape, and the devices which could use it. The installed base of millions of players was required for a viable industry, which never would have materialized if not for the ability to record and re-watch television broadcasts. Again and again we see industry associations trying to prevent through legislation the inevitable, rather than setting the trend through sound business practice based in market research. High-quality downloadable music surfaced around 1997. Large corporations missed the boat because they were too busy trying to tell customers what they should want instead of listening to what the people wanted. It is 2004, and I want quality music on my computer now, and in my car, on my stereo, and on my walkman, and I want it to be cheap. $20 per copy of shitty music on flimsy media that I have to drive 10 miles to get, or wait for in the mail? They gotta keep up with the times. Its stupid. If you are at odds with your customers, you have to change, not your customers.
Waiting for ad.doubleclick.net...
And the networks have a legitimate claim here. Their entire existence is based on advertising revenue, and if people don't watch the commercials anymore, companies won't want to pay to have their commercial aired.
That does not make it a legitimate claim. Neither networks nor advertisers have any right for their shows or ads to be watched how, or by whom, they please. The best they can do is to be able to prevent people from seeing them.
If advertising supported TV can't keep itself together, then the best thing to do is to have it end. Their business model may in the long run turn out to be as poor as that of the dot-coms of yore.
Personally, I hate advertising. I filter it out when possible, avoid it otherwise, and would be quite happy to somehow magically never have to perceive an ad again unless I expressly wanted to (e.g. to compare prices) be it a tv commercial, billboard, or even logos on clothing.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
OK, you may be right. I had a reference in the past, but since I can't find it I'll concede for now.
g ht_and_Fair_Use _Overview/chapter0/0-e.html
I did find something very similar for educational institutions:
http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyri
Picture in Picture? Are you insane???
The _last_ thing I want is an advert coming up while I'm trying to actually enjoy my TV! At least with ad breaks I can chat to someone else and it's nto stopping me from seeing/hearing the program I'm actually trying to watch!
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I very much like the rhetoric of calling Sony "the Home Taping Decision," and will probably adopt that in the future, but it is important to focus on what the case was ultimately about -- it does not bless home taping, just time-shifting, and not in ever case either.
The case was about this: whether Sony is liable to the studios for manufacturing and selling the Betamax, when consumers (allegely more than 50% were) can use the machine to engage in copyright infringtement. The question wasn't whether some users were infringing (there was evidence undisputed by Sony that they were), but rather whether Sony should be able to sell the machine to the "good apples," without liability. Betamaxes don't infringe, people do!
The Supreme Court set up a rule: the seller of a mechanism that can be used to infringe is not contribution if the mechanism is even capable of a substantial non-infringing use. The question isn't 'how things were used," but how it was possible to use them. Thus, the Court considered, if there exists the possibility of a substantial noninfringing use, the studios lose.
So how can you use a VCR that's non-infringing? The Court considered the practice of 'time-shifting," that is, setting the machine to record something at one time, to be viewed at another time.
THAT WAS THE ONLY PRACTICE OF CONSUMERS THAT WAS DISCUSSED.
At any rate, the Supes found time shifting, as they described it, to be fair use. Fair use is not infringing, and so Sony was free to own the Betamax market. (Talk about Phyrric victory!)
So the case was, indeed, a landmark for technology regulation using the copyright act, but it really was limited in terms of what it said about home recording. The only conduct blessed was, essentially, recording the news to play it back later. Left unaddressed was recording a tape for an archival library to be played more than once, making a tape of another's for home use, and so forth.
For the longest time, solid IP lawyers thought that Sony would dispose unceremoniously of the RIAA's claims in Napster. (Ironically, Sony was a co-plaintiff in Napster!). Alas, the 9th Circuit (the same 9th circuit reversed for its "substantial infringing uses" test in Sony) didn't see it that way. Even more alas, Napster didn't survive to appeal the Circuit court opinion to the Supreme Court.