Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc.

From Internet Law Treatise

Sony v. Universal Studios, 464 U.S. 417 (1984), often called the Betamax case, was a landmark 1984 copyright decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. The defense defined by Sony has sheltered a wide array of technology innovators from lawsuits at the hands of the entertainment industries. In fact, it is thanks to the Betamax ruling that the makers of not just VCRs, but also every other technology capable of being used for infringement (e.g., photocopiers, personal computers, Cisco routers, CD burners, and Apple's iPod) can continue to sell their wares without fear of lawsuits from copyright owners.

In the Betamax case, the Supreme Court ruled that a company was not liable for creating a technology that some customers may use for copyright infringing purposes, so long as the technology is "capable of substantial non-infringing uses." In other words, where a technology has both legal and non-legal uses, the public cannot be denied the lawful uses just because some people (or many or most) may use the product to infringe copyrights. In Sony, the Court found non-infringing use in several forms. First, the Court determined that individuals used the Betamax for fair use purposes such as time-shifting. Essentially, users recorded TV programs originally offered to them for free because they couldn't watch them at the time the shows were broadcast. Furthermore, some programmers had no problem with such time-shifting because it actually increased their audience. The Court also concluded that the defendants were unable to prove that time-shifting impaired the commercial value of their copyrights or created any likelihood of future harm.

The Betamax was a new product at the time, and the Sony Court understood the tension between a desire to encourage new technology and a desire to protect the copyrights granted by the Constitution. In Sony, because the Court found the Betamax useful for legal purposes (i.e., fair use time-shifting), society had a greater interest in the device than in copyright protection. Copyright advocate Jack Valenti famously stated, "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."

Today more than 50% of the film industry's profits come from video and DVD sales and rentals. (ENTERTAINMENT MEDIA AND THE LAW 425 (Paul C. Weiler, ed. 2006)).

More on this case is available here (http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/betamax/)