ABSTRACT
This statement, excerpted from the 1984 Sony Corporation v. Universal City Studios, Inc. case, is as relevant today as it was a decade ago. This was the so-called “Betamax” case in which the Supreme Court decided that off-air taping of a television broadcast for viewing at a later time was a fair use. This was an important decision for many reasons, but most importantly because it emphasized the importance of fair use by redefining it to be compatible with a new technology. Since the Sony case, technology has advanced at a truly astonishing rate. It is indeed ironic, but not surprising, that the Betamax is now obsolete. In 1984, the IBM Personal Computer was less than five years old, and the Macintosh had just been introduced. The precursor to today’s Internet, the government sponsored ArpaNet, was in place and being utilized by the Department of Defense, government contracted scientific research laboratories, and increasingly by scholars. Today the network spans the globe and gives us access freely and often without limits to
a variety of information only before imagined. But as with the Betamax, the activity on the Internet and the World Wide Web and the computer applications which give us access to them, have shown that the law of copyright is once more in need of redefining. Many fear, though, that in this redefinition fair use will cease and be supplanted by a pay-perview system for digital materials.
