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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?
The horse has bolted. To this day home recording is still a copyright violation in Australia. The practical significance of that is precisely zero.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Too damn bad he was totally wrong - we would have been spared the Star Wars prequels...
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."
It is breathtaking to go back 20 years and see _HOW ENORMOUSLY_ mankind has developed since then! I mean, I was having a hard time believing this story was true. I was born in 1973 and I stopped and thinked about how much have happened since I was born. Like colour television, people started to get those in the middle of the 80s! Not any sooner. Now we take it granted. Amazing... Stop and think about it.
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
'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'.
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
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.
And to this day, not a single American film producer, indeed no one at all, has been murdered by a VCR, ala the Boston Strangler.
If you're not familiar with the quote...
"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." - Jack Valenti
- c -
its amazing just to see Rehnquist and Burger failing to agree on something.
I'm laughing at clouds.
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.
U.S. corroborating with WIPO to overturn Betamax decision and also eliminate public domain
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 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.
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.
Blogging Weight Loss, Distance Education, and more at verlin.com
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....
20 Years ago.. back when Slashdot was a BBS on Rob's Commodore Vic20
"I For one welcome our BetaMax Overlords"
The More Knowledge you have the Luckier you Get- J.R. Ewing
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.
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 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.
THe only people who I think are nuts are the self-important fools who spout that "kill your TV" crap. (although I think you were being somewhat tongue-in-cheek, based on the Projector/DVD comment at the end)
Big screen movies stopped being "powerful" when the Multiplex took over.
I always wait for movies to come out on DVD. It takes less than a year for most, and I'd far rather sit in my recliner and enjoy a beer with the film than sit in a seat so small airliners will soon use them, next to overweight people who take up half of MY seat, and listen to screaming children of irresponsible parents who should have hired a sitter.
For the price of two movie tickets, I can BUY most popular titles on DVD and watch them whenever I want. Why would I wait in line at a multiplex?
BTW, they don't go off the air at all any more, that's why you don't get the Star Spangled Banner at sign off...
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
Thanks for providing a link to The Supreme Court. Now I can visit its site to find out what it is. Good thing posters on on Slashdot privide hyperlinks to every page on the World Wide Web that they reference. Otherwise we'd all be confused idiots.
Well, there it is - my first rudely sarcastic post.
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...
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
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
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.