Word: mca
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...MCA bids for big bottler
...Laurentiis, or Looking for Mr. Goodbar, a Richard Brooks adaptation of the best-selling novel. Columbia is putting its big bets on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, another science adventure epic, and The Deep, a successor to Jaws, which is the highest-grossing motion picture of all time (MCA's count of the worldwide gross: $196 million). A rash of copycat productions is about to break out: Exorcist II, Jaws 2 and Sting II are either scheduled...
...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 the television business...
...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...
There may be a crucial aspect to the lawsuit that goes unmentioned in the plaintiffs' papers. MCA, with N.V. Philips, The Netherlands electronics giant, is developing a home-use video-disk-playing system that it feels could burgeon into a billion-dollar business. The MCA machine would be unable to record off the air. Says Schein: "The company that is suing us just happens to have a competing machine that only plays back prerecorded material...