Word: vcr
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...Association of America (MPAA), was never one to mince words. As the movie industry's chief lobbyist, he knew how to portray his business's challenges in dramatic terms. Back in the 1980s, faced with new technology that supposedly threatened the studios' bottom line, Valenti once famously compared the VCR to the Boston Strangler...
Rhetoric like that took the battle against Betamax all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled against the movie industry and helped establish the right of fair-use copying. We all know what happened to the VCR: not long after that defeat, the studios discovered that tape rentals were even more of a cash cow than movie tickets...
...onslaught of movie theft. Already as many as half a million movies are swapped online every day, according to the MPAA. But a diverse chorus of critics says that Hollywood is on the wrong track and that file sharing may well hold as much potential profit as the VCR...
...industry's efforts to block the new technology in the courts aren't going well. Last month a Federal Court of Appeals declared Grokster and Morpheus as legal as a VCR or a Xerox copy machine, whose legitimate copying uses outweigh illegitimate ones. The movie industry is furious. "These are folks who hide behind a curtain of plausible deniability, like they don't know what's being traded on their networks," says Dan Glickman, a Clinton Cabinet member and former Democratic Congressman who took over the helm of the MPAA after Valenti retired...
...sharing software is already in utero. Last month computer scientists at Caltech set a new data-transmission record: they achieved the equivalent of downloading a full-length feature film in 4 sec. It's a bumpy road to acceptance for any disruptive entertainment technology, from piano rolls to the VCR. "One thing you can count on in Hollywood is fear of change," says Warren Lieberfarb, the man who launched the DVD. But as Lieberfarb's profit-rich baby continues to prove, consumers are still hungry for faster, easier entertainment--and there's always another fortune waiting to be discovered. With...