Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1982
ISSN
0010-1958
Publisher
Columbia Law School
Language
en-US
Abstract
In the recent and much publicized Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Sony Corp. of America (Betamax) case, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that persons who make videotapes of copyrighted television programs in the privacy of their homes should be considered to be copyright infringers. Basic to the court's reasoning was a misunderstanding of the "fair use" doctrine. Called "the most troublesome [doctrine] in the whole law of copyright," "fair use" renders noninfringing certain uses of copyrighted material that might technically violate the statute, but which do not violate the statute's basic purposes.
Recommended Citation
Wendy J. Gordon,
Fair Use as Market Failure: A Structural and Economic Analysis of the Betamax Case and its Predecessors
,
in
82
Columbia Law Review
1600
(1982).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/faculty_scholarship/588
Comments
The text of "Fair Use as Market Failure" has three times been reprinted in full: in 1 Intellectual Property and Business (Stephen E. Margolis & Craig M. Newmark, eds., Edward Elgar Publishing: Business Economics Series. 2010); in 1 The Economics of Intellectual Property 377-434 (Ruth Towse & Rudi W. Holzhauer, eds. Edward Elgar Publishing, 2002); and at 30 Journal of the Copyright Society 253-326 (1983).