Thirty years before SOPA, the MPAA was in Washington, demanding legislative protection from a new and dangerous technology: the VCR. Here’s then-MPAA head Jack Valenti, testifying before a House Judiciary Subcommittee in 1982:
“I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone…
The Mediastat’s analyst says that 67 percent of the VCR owners own no prerecorded cassettes and 72 percent plan to buy one in the coming year and 48 percent have never rented a prerecorded cassette. The major source of programing material is home recording, which thus preempts prerecorded tapes and their revenue…
The loser will be your public because they don’t have these expensive machines. And that is what I am saying, sir. The public is the loser when creative property is taken and here is the reason why. The investment of hundreds of millions of dollars each year to produce quality programs to theaters and television will surely decline.
Of course, home video (and later DVD) went on to become a hugely profitable delivery channel for movie studios. Far from decimating the industry, it grew profits, especially for studios like Disney with valuable back catalogs. It just goes to show, disruptive technologies can have different effects than you expect.
Matt Yglesias writes that content producers’ loss of control over distribution is leading to a shift from producer surplus to consumer surplus, with product quality remaining high (or improving). This is a problem for content producers, but it’s a good thing for consumers, and so Congress should butt out.
That might be right, but we shouldn’t discount the possibility that the MPAA is simply wrong again about its own members’ best interests, let alone the interests of the public. Either way, stronger legal protections for copyright holders are unwarranted.
Link:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbarro/2012/01/18/thirty-years-before-sopa-mpaa-feared-the-vcr/
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