• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2134 0

allegations of piracy and the concoction of a tradition of U.S.-Japanese rivalry. An upstart California company, Ampex, had developed the technology in the mid-i95os as a tool for television studios, at that time still mainly constrained to live broadcasting. Video had enjoyed a rapid success in that market, even though machines cost $5o,ooo each. Ampex had applied for patents in Japan too. But there it ran into a company called Totsuko. Totsuko developed and patented audiotape systems, the profits from which it was reinvesting in novel transistor designs licensed fromAT&T's arm, Western Electric. It was adapting the transistors for high frequencies and deploying them in small, portable radios for which it coined the name Sony. The radios sold in the millions. So successful were they that the American market was soon awash with knock offs bearing nameplates like Sonny- the first of many U.S. imitations of Sony devices (and something forgotten amid the i98os charges of Japanese industrial imitation). As Totsuko negotiated, the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), aghast at the prices Ampexwas chargingTV studios, inaugurated its own program to produce a videotape technology, beginning with straight copies of Ampex machines. Sony, as it was now called, trumped this in 1965 withwhat it claimed was the world's first home VTR-a monochrome reel-to-reel machine that, Sony said, householders would buy to record programs while they were out. Soon a rather more practical unit called the U-matic was on sale, followed by the Betamax. Ampex's inevitable piracy suit went nowhere.26

InAmerica, by this time the press was widely predicting the imminent arrival of some kind of home video recorder. Several manufacturers had designs in the offing, all of them mutually incompatible: CBS's EVR, RCA's SelectaVision, the independent Cartrivision, and several others. Universal's ally MCA invested in a video-disc system to which it gave the very seventies name DiscoVision. Cartrivision was the only one really to reach the market, appearing in 1972 as a machine for recording TV programs and watching rented tapes (which employed the simple intellectual property-protection device of being impossible to rewind). When it arrived, therefore, Betamax landed into a receptive environment, and one rich in potential competitors. Its name reflected that: it derived from the Japanese for a satisfyingly rich brushstroke in calligraphy, and referred to the fact that the Sony technology alone used the whole width of the tape. There were those who suggested that the real reason why Universal now decided to assail Betamax was to protect its partner's stake in DiscoVision. 27

Soon after Betamax arrived, Universal and Disney decided to fight it. They filed suit against Sony, a number of its retailers, and one token Betamax user (a volunteer named William Griffiths who was an employee of the plaintiffs' law firm). The Hollywood behemoths sought damages and an injunction against the sale and use of the technology For the first and defining time, home taping itself was to be placed in the balance. At the initial trial in California, District CourtJudge Warren Ferguson dismissed their contention. Home taping was fair use, Ferguson decided, and even if it were not it would scarcely warrant an injunction against an entire technology. But in October i98i the Ninth Circuit Court ofAppeals overturned Ferguson's decision and made Sony liable for massive damages.28 By now the clashwas already set to become the greatest "communications squabble" of the age, and "one of the biggest knock down, drag-out legal wars in American history." The only point of comparison anyone could find was the mid-century contest over AT&T and patent pooling. The potential consequences of a victory by either side stirred huge public controversy.

VTRs were by now commonplace, and home recording was a routine practice in hundreds of thousands (soon to be millions) of American homes. Yet, as the New York Times declared, the court had discovered it to be "piracy, even in the privacy