Word: disneyized
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...rather than simply calmly stating their grievances before Congress, which makes the copyright law, the studios dragged out their big legal guns who in turn dragged out their most twisted legal logic. The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 against Disney and Universal--but the decision should never have been that close...
...CANT IMAGINE anyone trying to deny folks in their home the right to tape off a common carrier," said Ed Asner, head of the Screen Actors Guild But Walt Disney Studios and Universal City Studios could imagine all that and more. When Sony corporation first introduced video cassette recorders (VCR's), the same people who brought you Peter Pan and Donald Duck and his alleged "nephews" hauled Sony, four Betamax retailers, an advertising agency, and an individual Betamax owner into court for copyright infringement...
Stephen A. Kroft, the lawyer representing Disney and Universal, claimed that Sony effectively "contributed" to copyright infringement since the Betamax could be used for unfair use. Under the fair-use doctrine certain forms of reproduction of copyright material are acceptable--as Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976 says: "for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship or research...
...value of the copyrighted work." At the very least, the reproduction used by teachers and scholars may be useful for showing examples of television shows in a television criticism class for scholarship, teaching or research as defined by the copyright act itself. Whatever the original fears of Disney and Universal over the uses of Betamax, the remaining 90 percent or more of the industry has yet to express any legal challenge...
...effective defenders (see box), and has inspired a spirited game on Wall Street: guessing which firms might be next. One frequently named takeover candidate is RCA (1983 revenues: $8.98 billion), whose sickly profits have not been helped by the dreary ratings of its NBC television network. Others include Walt Disney Productions, whose movie business has been floundering, and United Cable Television, a Denver-based cable-TV operator with 615,000 subscribers in 18 states. Says Michael Franson, an analyst for Boettcher & Co., a Denver securities firm: "If you broke up United into pieces and sold them all separately, they would...