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VCRs, MP3 players and other technologies that made it possible to experience a copyrighted work in a new way without permission. There\'s one battle that serves as the archetype for the rest: the fight over the VCR.

The film studios were outraged by Sony\'s creation of the VCR. They had found a DRM supplier they preferred, a company called Discovision that made non-recordable optical discs. Discovision was the only company authorized to play back movies in your living room. The only way to get a copyrighted work onto a VCR cassette was to record it off the TV, without permission. The studios argued that Sony -- whose Betamax was the canary in this legal coalmine -- was breaking the law by unjustly endangering their revenue from Discovision royalties. Sure, they *could* just sell pre-recorded Betamax tapes, but Betamax was a read-write medium: they could be *copied*. Moreover, your personal library of Betamax recordings of the Sunday night movie would eat into the market for Discovision discs: why would anyone buy a pre-recorded video cassette when they could amass all the video they needed with a home recorder and a set of rabbit-ears?

The Supreme Court threw out these arguments in a 1984 5-4 decision, the \"Betamax Decision.\" This decision held that the VCR was legal because it was \"capable of sustaining a substantially non-infringing use.\" That means that if you make a technology that your customers *can* use legally, you\'re not on the hook for the illegal stuff they do.

This principle guided the creation of virtually every piece of IT invented since: the Web, search engines, YouTube, Blogger, Skype, ICQ, AOL, MySpace... You name it, if it\'s possible to violate copyright with it, the thing that made it possible is the Betamax principle.

Unfortunately, the Supremes shot the Betamax principle in the gut two years ago, with the Grokster decision. This decision says that a company can be found liable for its customers\' bad acts if they can be shown to have \"induced\" copyright infringement. So, if your company advertises your product for an infringing use, or if it can be shown that you had infringement in mind at the design stage, you can be found liable for your customers\' copying. The studios and record labels and broadcasters *love* this ruling, and they like to think that it\'s even broader than what the courts set out. For example, Viacom is suing Google for inducing copyright infringement by allowing YouTube users to flag some of their videos as private. Private videos can\'t be found by Viacom\'s copyright-enforcement bots, so Viacom says that privacy should be illegal, and that companies that give you the option of privacy should be sued for anything you do behind closed doors.

The gutshot Betamax doctrine will bleed out all over the industry for decades (or until the courts or Congress restore it to health), providing a grisly reminder of what happens to companies that try to pour the entertainment companies\' old wine into new digital bottles without permission. The tape-recorder was legal, but the digital tape-recorder is an inducement to infringement, and must be stopped.

The promise of access to content and the threat of legal execution for non-compliance is enough to lure technology\'s biggest players to the DRM table.

I started attending DRM meetings in March, 2002, on behalf of my former employers, the Electronic Frontier Foundation. My first meeting was the one where Broadcast Flag was born. The Broadcast Flag was weird even by DRM standards. Broadcasters are required, by law, to deliver TV and radio without DRM, so that any standards-compliant receiver can receive them. The airwaves belong to the public, and are loaned to broadcasters who have to promise to serve the public interest in exchange. But the MPAA and the broadcasters wanted to add DRM to digital TV, and so they proposed that a law should be passed that would make all manufacturers promise to *pretend* 
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