Equipment Analysis: The Videotape Recorder - Text 5
The arrival of any new technology involves rethinking commercial logic and legal systems. For this reason, discourses around the risks presented by the VCR for the television and film industry, the risk of piracy and lost advertising revenue, began to appear in the late 1970s. In 1976, after Sony’s launch of Betamax, Universal City Studios and the Walt Disney Company brought legal action against the company.[10]
Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and influential copyright lobbyist, remarked at the time: “I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.”[11] In this speech, he underscored the extent to which the ability to record a film playing on television threatened the very structure of commercial television, based on commercial breaks, and how this equipment would end up harming production, and thus the viewer’s experience also, because program quality would suffer.
With video, audiovisual culture entered a transformative phase in which relations with information and culture took on an archival and collections aspect within the logic of postmodernism. This necessitated revision of capitalist market logic and forced an opening towards multiple remix practices, to recording techniques on videocassettes by individuals and to forms of reused images, as the images of popular culture had become a “shared vocabulary.” From this perspective, insistence on piracy and the traditional modes of regulating copyright had become obsolete.[12]
The Supreme Court finally consented to the use of VCR devices to record programs at home, as it did not harm the industry. On the contrary, history has proven that the VHS market (for film sales and rentals) profited Disney and other media conglomerates immensely.
