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By Root 2077 0

complainants made less than 1o percent of the programs that came into households, and that others had declared their openness to this kind of duplication. In a "rule of reason" balance, a positive benefit outweighed a speculative harm. Marshall dissented, along with Blackmun, who decried a blow against copyright itself. The opinion, if it were applicable to books and other media, would imply a potentially radical expansion of the fair use criterion.

The outcome reinstated the domestic threshold in intellectual property There was definitively no basis for "extending commercial copyright law into private homes." It ended any prospect that citizens in general might be denounced as "pirates." From now on, the Washington Post declared, when companies sent film and music into your house they had no right to tell you what to do with them. Some felt a profound shift in the moral and political economy of creativitywas in the offing: "artists," it was said, "are going to be paid once for the work and then all humanity will have access to it."36 These implications would become clear when digital media arrived. File-sharing and peer-to-peer networks like Napster and MP3.com would exploit them in the first Internet generation, followed by Grokster and Kazaa in the second, and the Pirate Bay in the third.

SAMURAI IN THE DEN!

With the prospect of outlawing home copying as piracy now ruled out, the MPAA followed the RIAA's lead and tried to tax it. A lobbying campaign lurched into action for a levy on tapes. Even the New York Tunes came out in support. Banding together as the Home Recording Rights Coalition, video manufacturers and others countered with their own claims of restrictive practices and price fixing (prerecorded videos then sold at $70).37 What ensued was an early example of the kind of lobbying arms race that has since become familiar. As in later cases, the tactics quickly descended to a brutal level. A quickly notorious example was a direct-mail letter sent over the film star Charlton Heston's signature to constituents in key congressional districts. The letter urged them to exhort their representatives to support the culture industries. But it did so by appealing crudely to nationalism. `A group of wealthy, powerful Japanese electronics firms" had "invaded" the country, it warned. They were "trampling" laws and "threatening one of America's most unique and creative industries." The levy was vital to hold them back. Nationalistic overtones had always existed in the home taping contest, but they had grown markedly louder as the Betamax case wound on. Almost routinely, now, one side was identified as `American" and "creative," the other asJapanese and, implicitly, imitative. Valenti announced that as the United States lost its global economic and technical lead, "the American movie is the one thing the Japanese with all their skills cannot duplicate or clone"; presumably his implication was that if Sony won, householders would clone it for them. He also likened video recorders to "tapeworms" in the body politic. The American people apparently faced the prospect of surviving in a postapocalyptic "entertainment desert."38

Remarks like these sound hyperbolic in retrospect, but at the time they played upon an anxiety about economic and technical decline that was almost universal in the United States. In the wake of the oil crisis, and facing huge and growing trade deficits, the country convinced itself that it was about to be eclipsed. AndJapan was the most plausible candidate to supplant it. A sizable literature ofjeremiads fueled fears that an imminent contest for supremacy with Japan was already as good as lost. Chalmers Johnson's MITI and the Japanese Miracle, published in 1982, sounded the first of the warnings, with a relatively well-researched investigation culminating in the testimony of Sony's own chairman. It was at length joined by Clyde Prestowitz's TradingPlaces: How WeAllowedjapan to Take the Lead (1988), Pat Choate'sAgentsoflnfluence (1990), and journalistJames Fallows's widely cited article in Atlantic Monthly