Infringement In The Cloud

Late last year, Sony announced that it would end production of Betamax videocassettes in March 2016, 40 years after their introduction. In the tech press, the announcement was reported as a curiosity ' like an obituary for a faded star everyone thought was already dead. Today, Betamax is mostly discussed (when discussed at all) as an example of a highly restricted, closed system that lost out in the market to VHS, a technically inferior, but more open, rival. But intellectual properly lawyers know Betamax for a different reason. In 1984, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, 464 U.S. 417, 454-56 (1984), also known as the “Betamax” case. That case held that the home recording of television shows for purposes of “time shifting” was a “fair use,” not a violation of the copyright laws, and that Sony was therefore not engaging in contributory infringement by selling Betamax recorders, because those machines were capable of “substantial noninfringing uses.”