DMCA section 1201 is not about copyright infringement. It’s there to make things that are not copyright infringement illegal.
This is how John Deere got away with prohibiting farmers from repairing their tractors, etc. This is why time-shifting and format-shifting were just fine for OTA/cable television/CDs/etc but are practically nonexistent today.
Not like they didn’t try to make it illegal originally.
“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.“ - Jack Valenti, former MPAA president, in 1982, explaining to Congress why the VCR should be illegal
I mean, they tried desperately to make it illegal in the 80s. The Betamax case went to the Supreme Court! [1] Given the current makeup of justices, I would imagine Betamax would be decided differently today, in favor of Universal rather than Sony. Aereo lost 6-3, even though the dissenting justices cited Betamax from 30 years previous.
ReplayTV was sued and went out of business before it could be fully adjudicated. Dish was sued over its Hopper DVR that auto-skipped ads and ultimately had to settle. TiVo won some of their lawsuits but because it didn’t do automatic commercial skipping of the recordings, was spared her wrath of the networks like Replay was. (TiVo was ultimately ruined by the cable companies who sought to introduce their own inferior DVRs that they could charge a monthly fee over.)
> Aereo lost 6-3, even though the dissenting justices cited Betamax from 30 years previous.
I remember that dissent (authored by the late Justice Scalia—RIP). Here’s the citation in question:
> We came within one vote of declaring the VCR contraband 30 years ago in Sony [v. Universal]. The dissent in that case was driven in part by the plaintiffs’ prediction that VCR technology would wreak all manner of havoc in the television and movie industries.
> The Networks make similarly dire predictions about Aereo. We are told that nothing less than “the very existence of broadcast television as we know it” is at stake. Aereo and its amici dispute those forecasts and make a few of their own, suggesting that a decision in the Networks’ favor will stifle technological innovation and imperil billions of dollars of investments in cloud-storage services. We are in no position to judge the validity of those self-interested claims or to foresee the path of future technological development.
I wouldn't take Aereo as a guide to how justices would reconsider the Betamax case were it heard de novo. Aereo's business model was to redistribute over-the-air broadcast TV, and it was arguing that its technical implementation was technically not violating any laws. This cast it into the creative reinterpretation of law scenario that tends to lose out in court.
I even have a VHS VCR that does this automatically. It’s fascinating - once the recording is done it rewinds and watches the show at high speed, when it sees something in the signal that indicates that an ad was spliced in it marks the start and end. Then when playing back it fast-forwards over the commercials.
It worked brilliantly, back in the days of analog cable TV.
No it didn’t. You could skip ads with the remote at set intervals (notably, TiVo did not let you auto skip the ad even though they could have, but put 15 or 90 second intervals you could customize on the remote to get past the ads very quickly, but it recorded them). ReplayTV, which did more directly skip ads (via its remote, not via recording IIRC), was sued out of existence.
Dish’s Hopper actually DID do ad-free recordings and it was sued too (but there was eventually a settlement), not just for skipping the ads but for distributing the same copy of a recording to multiple users over a server. Cablevision, likewise, was sued (but settled) over the fact that it had a cloud DVR network that allowed the same copy of a recording to be available to multiple people, rather than storing X-Copies of the recording on their servers.
I never thought of the VCR comparison before and it's interesting. Is recording a video delivered over IP different than recording a video delivered OTA or via cable (which is probably IP these days)?
... funds OTA television. Also funds YT.
With OTA, it is okay to record OTA broadcasts using a VCR, so I'm not sure why youtube-dl would be different.