Re: VHS Tape Copyright Protected??

You are the attorney.

Please cite a case where someone was prosecuted for copying their OTA
tape to another tape, CD, or DVD for their private viewing. I have
read and seen many cases where people have been charged with illegal
distribution. I don't doubt that one could be sued, but I doubt that
even a conservative Supreme Court would condone the invasion of a man's
castle to wrest a marginal personel memory based upon vague copyright
claims. And they are just that, claims.

Fair Use is an affirmitive defense. There are countless reasons to
want to maintain a copy of that broadcast. It might be the last
football game that he and his father watched together. It may be that
there was someone in the broadcast that he knew. These are personal
reasons. I have no reason why the OP would want to keep an old ABC
broadcast, and would never pry. Nor would I condemn.

Historicaly, copyright is not the exclusive right to copy material, it
is the exclusive right to distribute material. This goes back to the
days of the first printing presses. School children used to learn to
read and write by hand copying copyrighted material from books that
they could not legally distribute.

Copyright laws were made to serve the public good, not to serve the
private greed. Certainly greed can be a postitive influence on the
marketplace, but the laws were never meant to create intellectual
property or condone the hoarding of material from the public. As I
recall, when "Laurence Of Arabia" was remastered by David Lean back in
the late 80's, many of the frames used in the mastering process came
from private copies, and some were unauthorized copies that had been
released to theatres and never picked back up. The studio had let
their copies rot in tin cans on the shelf. No one prosecuted those
private owners, and they had less claim on their material than someone
who copied an ABC broadcast 20 years ago onto their own video tape.

Personaly, I wish that everyone was an archivest, at least of those
things that they found the most dear, for whatever silly human
sentimental reason. History and posterity are both served by this. I
sincerely hope that the OP successfully trasfers his tape for whatever
historical or personal purpose that he has.

Transporting ones legally obtained memories from ones own property to
ones own property is nothing more than ones own business. This is not
anarchism, it is simply liberty.

Cheers...

P.S. Isn't there some Latin phrase that says that the law does not
trifle with trifles?

.

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