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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...
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
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 -
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!
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.
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.
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.