Battle of the Airwaves
KAPLAN, CARL S.
Battle of the Airwaves Fast Forward: Hollywood, the Japanese, and the VCR Wars By James Lardner Norton. 344 pp. $18.95. Reviewed by Carl S. Kaplan Contributor, the "Nation, "...
...Two years later, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed the District Court's verdict on all counts...
...I quickly discovered why: The first speaker of the morning was Charlton Heston, of all people...
...Then, in October 1979, the Los Angeles Federal District Court ruled in favor of Sony and its customers...
...They're saying, 'I'm not happy with the gravy...
...Other bills asserted that VCR owners who taped programs for later viewing were not airwave buccaneers, since their activity was private and noncommercial...
...Sony's lawyers argued that home taping was permitted under the "fair use" doctrine—the same concept that allows students to photocopy portions of books for study...
...I admire (and envy) James Lardner's energy...
...But before the next year was out two Hollywood studios, Universal and Disney, brought a suit against Sony, its advertising agents, retailers, and one consumer...
...When Heston and Sills left, the television crews and most of the Senators followed...
...For instance, the "national obsession with smallness" spurred them to produce transistors...
...Reading Fast Forward is too much like reading a long New Yorker piece (which it, in part, originally was): The feeling that the author has interviewed 200 people and read 100 periodicals about his subject predominates...
...My own view is that the "death of copyright" group is a rather gloomy fraternity whose self-interest fuels its overstatements...
...I am not an expert in the law," he intoned, "nor am I knowledgeable about legislative language and the—to me—mysterious processes from which emerges a Congressional bill...
...The question of the hour was whether using a VCR to tape a television broadcast violated the particular program's copyright...
...As if on cue, the dozen or so video dealers in the audience started whooping and clapping, only to be silenced by an angry look from the chairman...
...Home recording qualified as "fair use," the court said, because the defendants made the tapes in the privacy of their own homes, and because Universal and Disney "voluntarily" transmitted their products over the "public airwaves...
...This section includes the history of Sony since its founding after World War II, and bits of superficial nonsense on the sociology of Japan...
...After the testimony of the show biz crowd, lobbyists hired by a coalition of VCR and blank tape manufacturers offered their own studies showing that Hollywood benefited from home taping...
...Reviewed by Carl S. Kaplan Contributor, the "Nation, " "Esquire" I remember vividly my first visit to the great videocassette recorder (VCR) political circus, held in various Washington hearing rooms, law offices and swanky restaurants from 1981 to 1984...
...The controversy actually began in May 1975, when the Sony Betamax was introduced in the United States...
...Throughout, Lardner, a trustworthy guide to the low comedy of the Important Issue, introduces us to a gallery of interesting characters...
...Standing outside the Senate hearing room six months later, I made a mental checklist of the various legal tenets relating to "fair use" and the copyright law as well as the thrusts of the numerous bills in the hopper...
...As I tried to find my seat, television crews and lobbyists in $600 suits jammed into the room...
...To look at him in his maturity," Lardner writes, "with his brass-rimmed, tinted sunglasses, his slick silver-black hair and his fasttalking, chain-smoking spiel, one would never imagine he lived anywhere else [but Los Angeles...
...Several bills had been submitted in Congress saying that this was a form of piracy, that consumers should pay royalties to Hollywood on the VCRs or blank cassettes they purchased...
...To do otherwise risks creating a fragmented work that only approaches the truth...
...The first is Lardner's thesis that the VCR has subverted the precious concept of the copyright—which he never states explicitly, but which can be inferred from the way he presents facts and depicts leading characters...
...Sony also insisted it was no more liable for the actions of purchasers than Xerox would be if someone misappropriated one of its photocopiers...
...Writing for a 5-4 majority, Justice John Paul Stevens proclaimed home taping lawful: "One may search the Copyright Act in vain for any sign that the elected representatives of the millions of people who watch television every day have made it unlawful to copy a program for later viewing at home, or have enacted a flat prohibition against the sale of machines that make such copying possible...
...Little that happened on the VCR battlefield escapes Lardner...
...While on the legal front, Lardner provides an informative primer on the development of the copyright laws in this country...
...The public responded by buying this expensive VCR at a rate unprecedented for a new product...
...They were intent upon destroying the American movie industry, he said, and presented a study purporting to show the economic harm that home recording had done Hollywood...
...The plaintiffs charged that the unauthorized reproduction of their programs constituted an infringement of copyright...
...it is merely a convenience...
...My favorite is George Atkinson, founder of the nation's first video retail store, The Video Station...
...One spokesman for the coalition, Jack Wayman, accused Hollywood of being a greedy goliath eager to tax innocent consumers...
...They sought an injunction to prevent the further importing of VCRs that would have effectively shut down the fledgling industry, plus the fining of Sony for selling the machines...
...Clearly, taping a record on an audiocassette deck or copying an expensive computer program onto a floppy disk is an infraction of the first order and a danger to intellectual property...
...Further on, he traces the rise of the home video industry and its maverick retailers...
...As prices started to drop, sales boomed...
...In Fast Forward, an ambitious book on the history of the VCR and its American invasion, James Lardner, a writer for the New Yorker and former Washington Post reporter and drama critic, tells us much more about the passions and power maneuvers of both sides...
...By the middle of 1983," Lardner observes, "the two lobbying coalitions had assembled between them a vast Washington brain trust" that included two former Cabinet-level officials, four former top advisers to Jimmy Carter, two former Senators, five former Representatives, two former chairmen of the FCC, two former White House economists, and two former chief counsels to the Senate Judiciary Committee—all paid with funds donated by Hollywood on the one side and the electronics manufacturers on theother...
...Soon, too, a new species of retail shop, the video specialty store, was renting prerecorded tapes of movies and other popular shows...
...On the calendars of Sony executives that day in October 1981 became known as "Black Monday...
...But Fast Forward contains more than a tart chronicle of the VCR combatants in Washington, even if that is its best part...
...The achievement of this book rests chiefly on its unearthing and presenting facts...
...And far from hurting Hollywood's interests, the advent of the VCR and prerecorded tapes has in fact boosted revenues for the large studios by creating an ancillary market for their wares...
...We learn, for example, that Laurence Tribe of the Harvard Law School, hired by the MPAA, prepared a49-page treatise, with 125 footnotes, conclusively demonstrating that a law permitting uncompensated and unauthorized taping would breach the Fifth Amendment's clause on taking property without due process and just compensation...
...The home recording coalition's reply, composed by two Washington lawyers, was 25 pages and had 69 footnotes...
...Sills asked the Senators to imagine the public furor if books were subject to unauthorized copying on such a large scale...
...In the foreground is a discussion of the Universal/Disney versus Sony case, and a charting of the route it took from the Los Angeles District Court to the Supreme Court, where it was laid to rest on January 17, 1984...
...But what I saw was only the tip of the iceberg...
...In the background is much material (perhaps too much) on the evolution of the VCR as a technological marvel...
...Yet, if I may paraphrase Dwight Macdonald, an earlier star in the New Yorker firmament, to carryjournalism into literature as Agee did in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, or as Orwell did in The Road to Wigan Pier, the writer must plant himself squarely in the middle of the story· and relate the whole composition to his own quirky sensibility, to an awareness of his motivations...
...He describes Valenti, Wayman et al...
...Entrepreneurs who opened such dealerships were a hardy bunch...
...My second bone of contention is that Lardner, through either his shyness or a misguided notion of objectivity, ultimately remains too aloof from the action...
...Jack Valenti, the able president of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and former close White House aide of Lyndon B. Johnson, lambasted "Japanese" VCR companies...
...It seems a stranger had approached her and offered to sell her videotaped copies of her own performances...
...Up next was Beverly Sills, who told "a little story that happened to me not more than two years ago...
...At one point, Atkinson sums up Hollywood's position on videocassette rentals in his special fashion: "This is all gravy money [for the studios...
...debating on the Larry King Show and the CBS Morning News...
...I am not proposing that the freedom of consumers to tape must be denied," she said...
...All I am proposing is fair compensation to the creators of that music...
...As the editor of a small consumer electronics newsletter, I had been granted a choice seat at the initial Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing on home video recording in April 1982...
...But the show was not really over...
...Born in Shanghai in 1935, Atkinson at age 40 was an ex-movie actor in LA turned small-time businessman who dabbled in portable film exhibitions and slept in the back room of his office—until he saw the light...
...It was then that the circus elephants started parading up the hallway...
...I wanted to be able to follow closely what I anticipated would be quiet and scholarly testimony from learned law professors...
...I want ice cream on my gravy.'" Two aspects of Fast Forward trouble me...
...Undeterred by the legal battle, Matsushita, JVC and RCA entered the videocassette market with recorders using a less costly technology...
...He reports how both sides generated leaflets and mailgrams advocating their respective positions at a prodigious pace, and how Valenti, Hollywood's ambassador to Washington, hosted one important movie première after another for selected politicians at the MPAA's stately mansion in the capital...
...Others will better inform you and answer your questions in those areas...
...Such was my introduction to the VCR lobbying wars, a colorful and moneymotivated political struggle if ever there was one...
...Home taping, it declared, certainly was a copyright infringement, and Sony was liable for damages as a contributory party...
...He believes it has become appallingly easy to reproduce protected works, and as a result tends to side with Jack Valenti and company by giving their arguments special force and integrity...
...Lardner notes, too, the number of Congressional aides who left their jobs for higher-paying positions with one of the two sides, and concludes: " A naturalist, commissioned to do a study of the Congressional aide as a class of Washington organism, might have been tempted to classify him as a larval form in the life cycle of a lobbyist...
...But recording a free television program for later viewing—the issue at hand—is no violation of the law...
...But I do know something about filmmaking...
...Hardly any issue facing the nation in recent memory had engaged the attention of a more formidable array of elder statesmanhood," writes the author...
...many had shed their former lives to become prospectors in theelectronic gold rush...
Vol. 70 • August 1987 • No. 11
