I don't know anyone who sold television recordings, it was always for personal use. How could the lower court get this so wrong? Was this just one uninformed judge? Or was this actually less certain at the time?
The Supreme Court ruling for this case found that time-shifting was fair use, but only by a narrow 5-4 margin. Fair use could have gone in a completely different direction over the last 40 years if just one judge had voted differently on Betamax.
Camcorders and such devices where you could make your own content were very rare, if available at all.
By the involved professionals laws are commonly understood as norms, i.e. what is established through judgement in court when the instructions from the sovereign (and sometimes sources like common sense) are interpreted and applied to so called facts presented to the court during proceedings.
In this sense, what the politicians have their minions type down into some document isn't actually the law. Common law systems give judges more leeway in how to frame and interpret the sources of law than e.g. the swedish system, where politicians apply a process that produces a series of documents that explain and teleologically ground the text that parliament then votes on. This gives the sovereign a larger degree of influence over the instructions that judges use when creating law through their judgements.
As I understand it, this leeway in common law systems is thought to balance the latent tyranny of the sovereign, and function similar to constitutional courts in that judges can take the view of the people into account to a larger extent.
Not that I'd trust US jurisdictions in anything but certain business law settings, but some clever people thought and deliberated a lot when designing what they have over there.
How does this work in Civil Law jurisdictions? Do you get the opposite of precedent, similar cases having different outcomes until the legislature resolves it?
(it is something of a problem for the US that most of its really big important freedoms come from courts against more repressive legislatures, though)
I'm trying to understand how a judge would say that the only practical use of backups were copyright infringement, since that is completely contrary to both my experiences and what I believe to be common sense. If the answer to my confusion is that this actually was the major use case and my experiences were rare, then that's fine. Otherwise, I can't help believe this is yet another case in recent history where judges are completely backwards on technological understanding, or maybe even under influence from copyright holders.
I don't think I can understate the amount that I hate this line of reasoning.
Suppose we apply this logic to writable CDs. Some drives could only read but not write CDs and those devices cost less than the ones that could write. Moreover, the early writable drives were stupid expensive and because of that most people in those days only had readers.
Then in those early days, the usage of the drives would skew more heavily towards piracy, because it would be more common to spend $1000+ more on a CD writer if you're operating a commercial piracy operation and keeping it busy than if you just want to write something to a single CD instead of an entire $20 box of floppy disks once or twice a year.
A few years later the price of the writable drives has come down to almost as low as the price of the read-only drives and everybody has them and is using them for all kinds of legitimate things. But that doesn't happen if pointing to a high initial rate of piracy can get them banned before they get widely adopted for other purposes.
There's a reason why they said "substantial non-infringing use" instead of asking what percent of existing use it is at some specific point in time.
To be clear, this was the only way to get most of the stuff being traded and sold. TV shows or films with no VHS release, or anime with no official dub or American format release.
They sold them under the counter. I just wanted to know what was going to happen ahead of all my friends haha.
There are no standards for lower court judges. They frequently do things that are grossly illegal.
Here's a US lower court judge who spontaneously ordered that a child's name be changed because of the judge's religious beliefs: https://volokh.com/2013/08/12/judge-orders-that-childs-name-...
The claim was that recording for personal use was still copyright infringement
We have see this happen repeatedly with modern tech cases.
Lots of things seem facepalmingly obvious until you start exploring the edges.
In the course of that discussion we definitely had some “what is an API” questions.