Back to 1984, to be exact. For on this day in that year, the Supreme Court announced the decision in Sony Corp. of America vs. Universal City Studios, Inc. (also referred to as the “Betamax Case”). As television critic and historian, David Bianculli summarized it on his TVWW blog, the decision “stemmed from a 1976 lawsuit filed by Universal Studios and the Walt Disney Company against Sony, developers of the Betamax video tape recording device. The companies argued that Sony’s development of a product that could be used for copyright infringement made them liable for any infringement committed by the product’s users. Sony asserted that consumers had the right to record programs for private use, citing the use of cassette tapes for recording music as a precedence.”
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“The initial case was argued in California’s District Court, which in 1979 ruled in favor of Sony. In 1981, the U.S. Court of Appeals reversed the lower court’s decision. In 1983, the case made its way to the Supreme Court.
By the time the case was argued in the Supreme Court, video recording technology had expanded with the introduction of a competing video recording format, VHS. The 5-4 ruling reversed the appellate court ruling.”
For an inside look at the formulation of the opinion in this case, see Justice Lewis F. Powell’s case file.