Word: betamaxes
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Dates: during 1977-1977
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...episode of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. And tomorrow night Upstairs, Downstairs is coming over the tube at 9 p.m.-when you will have to be at a dinner downtown. This sort of problem is easily solved by the 50,000 U.S. owners of Tokyo-based Sony Corp.'s Betamax video-tape record-and-playback system (price: $1,300 list, about $1,000 at discount). The Betamax, which can be attached to any TV, records on a $16 cartridge one hour's worth of color (or black and white) programming-either off a channel being watched or another channel...
Taping Baretta. Not in the opinion of Universal City Studios, the movie and TV show producing arm of MCA Inc., or of Walt Disney Productions. They are suing Sony, its American subsidiary, an advertising agency, a few retail stores and one Betamax owner in a federal court in California. The complaint seeks to prevent further manufacture and sale of the Betamax, and to force impounding and destruction of Betamax tapes of programs owned by the plaintiffs. Universal, which initiated the suit and invited Disney to join, argues that taping TV shows or movies violates U.S. copyright law, even if viewers...
...issue is as much financial as legal. A proliferation of Betamaxes, argues Joseph Davies, one of Universal's lawyers, "will threaten the rerun and replay market of films on TV." In other words, if hordes of Betamax owners tape Universal's American Graffiti the first time it is shown on TV, MCA might not get the price it wants for the film the second time around. Similarly, if many viewers tape their favorite Baretta segments, the show could be worth less when it is sold to syndicators. Home video-tape systems, in short, have the potential of revolutionizing...
...Betamax may be the beginning of an important new industry," says Harvey Schein, president of Sony Corp. of America. "I don't think society can countenance the retrogressive step of preventing this from happening." MCA, argue the Sony people, should be gratified because the Betamax enables people to see shows they would otherwise have missed, thus enlarging the market for MCA products. Sony contends that TV video taping is no different from home taping of radio programs, which, it maintains, is legal if no commercial use is made of the recordings. Universal's Davies disagrees: "Say you have...
Sony has one major element on its side: time. The trial is unlikely to begin before early 1978, and both sides stand ready for a long fight all the way to the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, Sony is pushing Betamax hard and hopes to have a million units in U.S. homes by decade's end. Zenith will begin selling Sony systems under its own label next fall, and RCA will be marketing a Matsushita-built system by then too. If color TVs and pocket calculators are valid precedents, the price of video-tape units should fall fast. Even if Universal...