Word: vcr
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...Barney's Russell Leavitt: "The disc players were using up too much of the company's resources." RCA can take consolation in the fact that it hedged its bet on SelectaVision. The company is the biggest U.S. marketer of its disc player's chief nemesis, the VCR. RCA is expected to sell 1.5 million cassette machines this year, up about 100% from 1983. -By Stephen Koepp. Reported by Lawrence Mondi/New York
...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...
...evening-"time-shifting," as the original District Court decision characterized it. When he comes home to watch the show, he can escape the repeated ads for Golden Hits of the '60s and gold-plated Ginzu knives just by a timely manipulation of the last-forward button on the VCR. As Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, says. "If you're an advertiser and suddenly the message you're paying millions of dollars for is being eliminated in maybe two thirds of the audience before it even has a chance to view it, then...
...Mitzvah. To ask for an injunction banning Betamaxes because the have the potential for abuse seemingly deviates little from the mythical feudal prince who rips out his subjects' tongues. If we cannot ban handguns even with their great and proven potential for abuse, then how absurd to ban VCR's solely for their potential for abuse...
Just what market harm is at stake? Blackmun suggests that writers and producers may lose some of their constitutionally-sanctioned incentive to create if VCR use goes unfettered. But the concerns over reproduction of the tapes center largely around fears of top producers--how many people outside of lowa would bother to tape the morning farm report on the local news? Given the multimillion that many of these top producers make, it can hardly be that Larry Hagman of al. will ditch Dallas because some people might pass over the commercials or skip the rerun syndication because the tapes...