seriously-mike: > mostlysignssomeportents: > >> mostlysignssomeportents: >> >>> mostlysignssomeportents: >>> >>>> ALT >>>> >>>> **If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:** >>>> >>>> They disinvented the VCR. You might think that the reason we don’t have VCRs anymore is because VCRs were supplanted by DVDs, PVRs and streaming, but that’s not the case. They had it in for the VCR from the very start, and they never stopped trying to kill it. Eventually, they succeeded. >>>> >>>> The VCR was one of the fastest-adopted technologies in the history of the world, and it was _disruptive_. The fact that you could record shows to watch later, skip the ads, build a library of your favorites, even loan your tapes around – it drove the studios and broadcasters _nuts_. The VCR hit the market under a cloud of litigation, and the lawsuits went all the way up to the Supreme Court, culminating with 1984’s _Betamax_ decision, whose key precept is that a new technology doesn’t violate copyright law if it can “sustain a substantial, non-infringing use”: >>>> >>>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Universal_City_Studios,_Inc. >>>> >>>> As important as the VCR was as a device – creating the home video market, which begat DVDs, then streaming – the _Betamax_ decision is even _more_ important. >>>> >>>> You see, copyright is a “fact-intensive” doctrine, which means that determining whether a use is or isn’t a copyright violation can be a complex and expensive process of gathering facts, weighing conflicting expert views to arrive at a judgment. If the rule was that new technologies couldn’t be introduced unless you could prove that they would _never_ infringe copyright, we wouldn’t have _any_ digital technology. Indeed, most technologies would be illegal under that standard. You can infringe copyright with VCRs, photocopiers, hard drives, tape recorders, scanners, computers, phones… Hell, you can infringe copyright with an X-ray machine, a saxophone or a pair of ballet slippers! >>>> >>>> There’s clearly ways you can use a VCR to infringe copyright: for example, you can record a TV show to a tape, then sell that tape to someone else. There’s also ways you can use a VCR that clearly do _not_ infringe copyright: you can lug a camcorder around your kid’s birthday party, pester the kids by recording them, then watch the footage later in your living room. Then there’s an infinite universe of ways to use a VCR that _might_ infringe copyright, depending on the specifics: recording the Super Bowl while you’re at work, then inviting your workmates over to watch it after your shift ends; creating a library of kids’ shows for the day-care you run out of your living room; making a highlight reel of your favorite politician’s campaign speeches. Anyone who says, “Oh _every_ judge would _always_ call that legal‡ under _every_ circumstance” is admitting they don’t understand how copyright works. >>>> >>>> ‡ Or illegal. >>>> >>>> This is a feature, not a bug. Copyright is a fact-intensive doctrine because it is a _flexible_ doctrine. Since the printing press, new ways of mechanically reproducing and transmitting information have appeared at an accelerating pace, and judges are asked to figure out the rules for these new technologies long before legislatures come to grips with them and pass special, tech-specific laws. >>>> >>>> Copyright’s future-proofing lies in this flexibility, which the Supremes (correctly) recognized in 1984 with the _Betamax_ decision. By ruling that any technology that had “non-infringing uses” was presumptively legal to create and market, the Supremes laid the legal foundation for all the digital tools that followed since. >>>> >>>> Crucially, _Betamax_ ensured that last year’s tech lottery winners wouldn’t get to prevent _next year’s_ winners from emerging. This year’s admirals are _always_ last year’s pirates, and they insist that what _they_ did to their predecessors was progress, while anyone who tries to do the same thing to _them_ is a thief. The sheet music composers condemned the record player, recording artists decried the radio, broadcasters sued over cable and cable operators sued over VCRs. This never stopped: Sony – the company that invented the Betamax and defended it all the way to the Supreme Court – went on to sue Napster! >>>> >>>> There’s nothing inherently virtuous about “innovation.” It’s perfectly possible to “innovate” new ways to spy on people and rip them off. But if you’re trying to launch a new product in a category that already has clear winners, the best way to convince people to take a chance on you is by making a valuable and useful product. >>>> >>>> “Disruptors” are best when they move value from existing companies to those companies’ customers. The first TV remotes let people change the channel when an ad came on, making their TV better at broadcasters’ expense. The broadcasters had to struggle to adapt, which is fine. They’re not charities, after all: they’re in business to make money for themselves, and they’re only going to give you as much value as they have to. >>>> >>>> Competitors fight enshittification: any time a company that you do business with takes something away from you, a competitor can win your business by giving it back. If Youtube doubles the number of ads they expect you to watch – “charging” a higher attentional “price” – an ad-blocking competitor can bargain back on your behalf, allowing you to counteroffer with “how about if I just don’t watch _any_ ads?” >>>> >>>> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah >>>> >>>> Inside every company, there are fair, honest people, and there are greedy, shitty people. Companies that face competitors are more likely to listen to the workers who want to give customers a fair shake. But if a company has no competitors, those good people can no longer say, “This is a losing strategy because it will open the door to competitors who will make us poorer.” Without competitors, the argument against enshittification becomes, “I would feel bad about myself if we did that.” This argument always loses to the bad guys, whose argument is, “We will all get richer if we do this.” >>>> >>>> That’s why Google enshittified search: they had no competitors, so the worst ideas of the worst people at Google could be shown to make the most money, and so Google deliberately made its search results worse: >>>> >>>> https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan >>>> >>>> Of course, companies can also face consequences from the government, but the fewer competitors a company has, the easier it is for that company to capture its regulators: >>>> >>>> https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/ >>>> >>>> Competition makes companies weaker, giving the public _and_ democratic institutions more power. Competition makes the public richer at the expense of corporate shareholders, who have less money to spend on the project of subverting democracy. >>>> >>>> That’s the VCR story all over. The VCR shook up a sclerotic, stagnant TV and film industry, created the home video market, and opened up new distribution channels that allowed all kinds of new creative workers to reach new audiences, either directly or through a fiercely competitive new constellation of distributors who fought each other to offer them the best possible deal. >>>> >>>> The media companies who were forced to adapt to the VCR never forgave it for forcing them to develop new, multi-billion dollar businesses without permission. As a Hollywood executive once put it to me, his goal was “a polite marketplace” where no one ever rudely forced him to disgorge more value to viewers and performers: >>>> >>>> https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/02/the-internet-heist-part-i/ >>>> >>>> The executives who made billions after losing their bid to ban the VCR wanted to ensure that no one would ever be so “impolite” as to force them to make billions of dollars against their will ever again. They partnered with electronics firms to ensure that the VCR’s successor technologies would only have those features that they approved. >>>> >>>> That’s why DVD _players_ are not DVD _recorders_ : the consortium that developed the DVD embedded “hook IP” in the technology. “Hook IP” is a term of art: it means any trademark, copyright or patent that is incorporated into a technology so that anyone who wants to implement that technology must license the hook IP; under the terms of those licenses, doing anything that disrupts the business plans of the consortium is banned. >>>> >>>> The DVD consortium’s hook IP had all kinds of bizarre licensing terms, like “region coding” – a requirement for DVD players to register the country in which they were sold and to check whether the DVDs you tried to play were from a compatible country. If not, the license terms required the DVD player to refuse to play your discs. >>>> >>>> Region coding is an “anti-feature,” a technology developed at great expense _for which there is no market_. Sure, some DVD player owners who had never shopped abroad for a DVD didn’t care about region coding. But for customers who bought a disc on vacation, or moved from one country to another: region coding was _terrible_. >>>> >>>> So there were customers who didn’t care about region coding, and customers who hated region coding, but there were _zero_ DVD player owners who _wanted_ region coding. No DVD manufacturer could advertise that their products come with region coding. If there were two equivalent DVD players in the market, identical except that one had region coding and the other didn’t, the “region-free” player would win. Region-coding is an anti-feature. >>>> >>>> Anti-features aren’t the only deliberate defects we find in DVD players. The consortium’s hook IP licenses didn’t just _require_ anti-features, they also _banned_ useful features…including recording. Long after the price of read/write optical drives plummeted to pocket-change, there was still no such thing as a home DVD recorder that would let you stick a spindle full of discs next to the TV and use them to record all your favorite shows. >>>> >>>> Shortly after the DVD player emerged, Congress created the most powerful hook IP of all: “anti-circumvention law.” Under anti-circumvention law, it’s a literal crime – a felony – to modify or reimplement a technology without permission from the manufacturer. In 1998, Bill Clinton signed America’s landmark anticircumvention law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, section 1201 of which establishes a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for “bypassing an access control”: >>>> >>>> https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/14/sole-and-despotic/#world-turned-upside-down >>>> >>>> After DMCA 1201, all a manufacturer had to do was add an “access control” (like a password or an encryption key) to their device, and modifying that device in _any way_ could land you in prison. As microchips plummeted in price, all kinds of devices and services acquired these “access controls,” so that it became _a crime_ to refill an ink cartridge, fix a tractor, or connect your insulin pump to your glucose monitor. Congress never passed a law criminalizing this conduct: rather, they gave companies the ability to write their own criminal code. Simply by adding an access control to a device, they could felonize any conduct that displeased them. >>>> >>>> Keep reading >>> >>> ALT >> >> ALT > > Even worse, they enshittified the internet too. With all the content crammed onto sites run by three companies that are interested, first and foremost, in stuffing ads before, over and after it, the experience is an even worse nightmare than it was at the turn of the millennium, when people had to invent adblocks. Mostly because everything is an app now, and if you try to adblock an app now, you can get jailed for five years and have to pay half a million dollars.

Attached: 1 image They disinvented the VCR. You might think that the reason we don't have VCRs anymore is because VCRs were supplanted by DVDs, PVRs and streaming, but that's not the case. They had i...

Thursday. 9 PM Eastern. Set your PVRs to “national embarrassment.”

Thursday. 9 PM Eastern. Set your PVRs to “national embarrassment.”

Thursday. 9 PM Eastern. Set your PVRs to “national embarrassment.”

Thursday. 9 PM Eastern. Set your PVRs to “national embarrassment.”

Thursday. 9 PM Eastern. Set your PVRs to “national embarrassment.”

Thursday. 9 PM Eastern. Set your PVRs to “national embarrassment.”

Thursday. 9 PM Eastern. Set your PVRs to “national embarrassment.”

Thursday. 9 PM Eastern. Set your PVRs to “national embarrassment.”

Thursday. 9 PM Eastern. Set your PVRs to “national embarrassment.”

Thursday. 9 PM Eastern. Set your PVRs to “national embarrassment.”

Thursday. 9 PM Eastern. Set your PVRs to “national embarrassment.”

Thursday. 9 PM Eastern. Set your PVRs to “national embarrassment.”