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Comment by WarmWash | Hacker News Reader

Given that that judgement was made in 1981, it's possible that the judges (who were likely a bunch of depression era old dudes) had zero knowledge or exposure, and had never even thought much about, personal video recording before a bunch of lawyers tried to explain it to them during the case.

We have see this happen repeatedly with modern tech cases.

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Judges asking things that are obvious to us make for great headlines and quotes, like "what is a website?" or "what is an API?" and "shows" how out of touch they are, but like a judge (trying to) define pornography, making sure the plaintiff, the defendant, and the judge are on the same page seems to me (I am not a lawyer) just good procedure. First everyone has to agree on what a website or an API is before passing judgment on legal matters concerning them that all parties will abide by.

Yeah, that makes sense. For the purposes of this court case we’re trying today, is an FTP server a website because you can view it in a browser? An Nginx server pointing to an empty directory? One that only returns 404s? One that only accepts POST and not GET? And is a website an API, because an automated client could send a request and get back a machine-parsable result? Is a JSON response an API? An XML response? An XHTML response? An RSS feed? An RSS feed that’s dynamically generated in response to query parameters?

Lots of things seem facepalmingly obvious until you start exploring the edges.

I worked with a team of developers who were totally confused by my attempt to call the thing we were creating a library or SDK and not an API. We built and released a JavaScript client library that talked to a proprietary server product. But if you were a customer, and you used it to build a JavaScript app, you would write code against the library’s API, right?

In the course of that discussion we definitely had some “what is an API” questions.

I doubt that. Home video recording, while a new thing in 1981, was not substantially different from making personal mixtapes on tape from radio or vinyl records which had been popular for decades. My grandfather had dozens of 4 track mixtape reels he made in the 60s. You could even go further back and say it wasn't any different than taking a photo of artwork for personal use. You didn't have to be that young in 1981 to understand what home video recording is.

They had the ability to record video at home LONG before 1981. People had handheld "Super 8" film cameras ages before this, which they used to film their own home movies. Of course, this is a little different from videocassettes, just like LPs are different from audio cassettes, but it didn't take a genius to see that home video was going to move to videocassettes before long, they just needed cameras that could record directly to them instead of to film.

And in fact you had big video cameras attached to battery packs going back to at least the 70s. The tech existed. It was just clunky and barely suitable for consumers.

Even complete legal novices like me know about the Sony/Betamax case, FWIW. It would shock me if a judge ruling on copyright implications of a technology didn't know about it.

They’re talking about the judges on the Sony/Betamax case, not the new one.

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