January 17, 1984—By the narrowest of margins, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that video cassette recorders (VCRs) did not infringe on Hollywood studios’ copyrights. The ruling in Sony Corp v. Universal City Studios, representing the opening skirmish in a long-running war pitting new technology versus copyright of artists, paved the way for Blockbuster Video and similar businesses.
“Fade in to Murder,” the 1976 season-opening episode of the Peter Falk detective series Columbo, featured a VCR (called at the time a video tape recorder, or VTR) costing $3,000—a price illustrating the affluence of the owner of the device, the killer.
It seems appropriate, then, that the great VCR battle between Sony and Hollywood was sparked by an ad for Betamax, the first compact, affordable VCR available to consumers, noting that viewers no longer had to choose between watching Columbo and its Sunday night competitor Kojak: Through the concept of “time-shifting viewing,” fans of the shows could look at one show while taping the other for later.
Sensing a threat, Universal City Studios and Walt Disney Productions went to court to stop distribution on the grounds that they copyrights had been infringed. The case wended its way through the lower courts, even being decided against Sony at one point. But the Japanese firm pressed on until it achieved victory before the Supreme Court.
Most of the time, not long after individual Supreme Court justices begin to issue their rulings, you can predict with a fair degree of certainty how they’ll decide cases. Not in this instance, however. Consider the motley crew of dissenters in this case: the court’s most conservative member, William Rehnquist, joined by centrist Lewis Powell and two liberals, Harry Blackmun and Thurgood Marshall.
Given the narrowness by which Justice John Paul Stevens’ favorable ruling was decided, it might seem surprising that its results were far more quickly accepted than those involving rights issues such as abortion and gay rights. This might be because, however, businesses rapidly assess that the continual costs of litigation are prohibitive and counterproductive. It might also be due to the fact that consumers cast their own votes on products.
In fact, though Sony won its eight-year legal battle, its victory proved Pyrrhic because of this very consumer decision. By the end of the Eighties, its Betamax standard lost out to JVC’s rival VHS standard—not really because of quality, but because VHS tapes at 3 hours lasted longer than the half-hour Betamax tapes.
The Sony decision had several consequences: it broke the hegemony of network programmers, putting consumers more in charge of what they would watch and when; once Hollywood figured out that it could take advantage of the new format, it provided a new distribution channel for the industry; and it further defined an issue that would become increasingly contentious, for librarians such as myself as well as consumers: the “fair use” aspect of copyrights.
From the Internet to the new digital formats for film and music, we are living today in the aftermath of the Sony decision.
“Fade in to Murder,” the 1976 season-opening episode of the Peter Falk detective series Columbo, featured a VCR (called at the time a video tape recorder, or VTR) costing $3,000—a price illustrating the affluence of the owner of the device, the killer.
It seems appropriate, then, that the great VCR battle between Sony and Hollywood was sparked by an ad for Betamax, the first compact, affordable VCR available to consumers, noting that viewers no longer had to choose between watching Columbo and its Sunday night competitor Kojak: Through the concept of “time-shifting viewing,” fans of the shows could look at one show while taping the other for later.
Sensing a threat, Universal City Studios and Walt Disney Productions went to court to stop distribution on the grounds that they copyrights had been infringed. The case wended its way through the lower courts, even being decided against Sony at one point. But the Japanese firm pressed on until it achieved victory before the Supreme Court.
Most of the time, not long after individual Supreme Court justices begin to issue their rulings, you can predict with a fair degree of certainty how they’ll decide cases. Not in this instance, however. Consider the motley crew of dissenters in this case: the court’s most conservative member, William Rehnquist, joined by centrist Lewis Powell and two liberals, Harry Blackmun and Thurgood Marshall.
Given the narrowness by which Justice John Paul Stevens’ favorable ruling was decided, it might seem surprising that its results were far more quickly accepted than those involving rights issues such as abortion and gay rights. This might be because, however, businesses rapidly assess that the continual costs of litigation are prohibitive and counterproductive. It might also be due to the fact that consumers cast their own votes on products.
In fact, though Sony won its eight-year legal battle, its victory proved Pyrrhic because of this very consumer decision. By the end of the Eighties, its Betamax standard lost out to JVC’s rival VHS standard—not really because of quality, but because VHS tapes at 3 hours lasted longer than the half-hour Betamax tapes.
The Sony decision had several consequences: it broke the hegemony of network programmers, putting consumers more in charge of what they would watch and when; once Hollywood figured out that it could take advantage of the new format, it provided a new distribution channel for the industry; and it further defined an issue that would become increasingly contentious, for librarians such as myself as well as consumers: the “fair use” aspect of copyrights.
From the Internet to the new digital formats for film and music, we are living today in the aftermath of the Sony decision.
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