OPINION: Testing ground
By Paul Sweeting -- Video Business, 7/11/2008
JULY 11 | DESPITE THE BILLIONS it has made for the studios over the past three decades, the home video business has never gotten a lot of respect, either from Hollywood or from the self-anointed “visionaries” who have been predicting the demise of packaged media since at least the Reagan Administration.
Paul Sweeting is editor of Content Agenda
There are many reasons for that, as much cultural and sociological as financial, which I won’t bother going into here. But the odd disdain with which it is sometimes regarded has often blinded people to the industry’s important role in the economic, technologic and legal evolution of the entertainment industry in general.
Its most important legal contribution, of course, was the seminal “Betamax” case (Sony v. Universal), which led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling in 1984 on the limits of copyright law.
The case established the legal principle that technologies with “substantial non-infringing uses” cannot be banned simply because they can also be used to infringe copyrights.
More important, it established that technology developers, in this case Sony, could not be held liable for the infringing activities, so long as the technology has substantial non-infringing uses.
The ruling paved the way legally for everything from the personal computer, to the digital video recorder to the iPod, all of which can be used to infringe copyrights but are perfectly legal to sell and own.
Read the full column at ContentAgenda.com.
