| The Philips formats were available in the US (under the brand Norelco), but made very little impact so
Betamax was effectively the first domestic video format to become available there. Its arrival shook the film studios
badly, and in 1976 - a year after Beta arrived - the mighty Walt Disney corporation, along with the equally mighty
Universal Studios, decided to take Sony to court, alleging that taping films and other programs off-air constituted
copyright infringement. This clearly threatened the whole basis of the home video revolution, as a ruling in favour
of the studios could cause an outright ban on VCR technology.
After three years, in late 1979, the court ruled that taping for private, non-commercial use was legal. The studios promptly appealed, and the appeal court overturned the decision in October 1981. For a while it looked likely that a huge levy would be forced on the manufacturers, to pay royalties for the programs being taped by taxing the machines and blank tapes. But Sony took the case to the supreme court, and finally, in 1984, home taping was legal again. Of course, by this time there were so many VCRs humming away in homes across the continent that any ruling would have been somewhat academic! Here in the UK, the problem of copyright was only partially resolved; in 1988 the law was changed to make home taping legal, provided that the recordings were erased within 28 days. This extraordinary law is of course completely unenforcable, in the grand tradition of the British legal system Later technology would cause even greater tremours amongst the film and music producers. Digital recording formats, such as DV, DAT and DVD, are potentially capable of making copies which are as good as the original. Hence most of these systems incorporate a copy-protection system of some kind, though how effective these are is open to debate. The original DAT anti-copying system, for example, was shown to distort the actual playback of the original recording! Footnote: a recent US Supreme Court ruling (June 2005) has overturned the "Betamax Defense", in the case of file sharing networks. They ruled that, unlike VCRs, the "primary use" of file sharing technology was for illegal copying...
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