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Napster plays the Betamax card
News Lawyers for the music sharing application Napster will employ the epic Sony Betamax video ruling of 1984 to defend the company from imminent closure. In its 'Friends of The Court' submission, Napster will say that Sony won by arguing that even if a...
[September 14, 2000, 8:37]
Are the betamax players modern antiques?
Talkback Should I go out a get a HD DVD player as an investment? I am sure this kind of stuff becomes collectable about 20 years down the line.
[February 19, 2008, 11:13]
VCRs erased from the high street
News The VCR first hit the shops in the 1970s, when two companies (Sony with its Betamax system and JVC with its Video Home System (VHS)) were racing to perfect incompatible cassette formats, which became a battle for the dominant format in the 1980s.
[November 22, 2004, 11:30]
Will restricting file-sharing slow innovation?
News At the heart of the case is the 20-year-old Supreme Court ruling that made Sony's Betamax videocassette recorder legal to distribute without liability, despite its use by consumers to record and save copyright movies and TV shows.
[March 2, 2005, 10:55]
Librarians issue file-sharing support
News Universal City, said Sony could continue to manufacture its Betamax VCR because a company "cannot be a contributory (copyright) infringer if, as is true in this case, it has had no direct involvement with any infringing activity.
[September 26, 2003, 11:10]
Supreme Court rules against file swapping
News With the potential to rewrite the Supreme Court's 1984 Sony Betamax ruling that made VCRs -- and by extension any technology with "substantial noninfringing use" -- legal to sell, the decision has been closely watched across Silicon Valley.
[June 27, 2005, 20:20]
Tech industry cheers Bush pick for DoJ
News For example, as Missouri attorney general, Ashcroft filed an amicus brief, supporting the now-famous Betamax decision, which allows people to record movies and TV shows on their VCRs for later use. Attorneys in the Napster file-swapping case are...
[January 5, 2001, 8:46]
US anti-piracy law gathers strength
News NetCoalition, which represents e-commerce firms and Internet publishers, said it was alarmed by the Copyright Office's call to revisit the 1984 "Betamax" VCR decision. We would vigorously disagree that Congress ought to reconsider the Betamax...
[July 22, 2004, 8:20]
The cast of the ongoing peer-to-peer drama
News Silicon Valley: Led by Intel and venture capitalists, technology leaders have been deeply worried that any changes to the 1984 Sony Betamax decision could undermine their business. Consumer electronics companies: The Consumer Electronics...
[June 28, 2005, 18:10]
Judge puts file swappers in hot seat
News Attorneys for defendants Kazaa, StreamCast Networks and Grokster had hoped to convince the judge that their products demonstrated sufficient legitimate uses to qualify for the "Betamax defense" -- a copyright safe harbour set by the US Supreme...
[March 5, 2002, 9:50]
Kazaa's parent takes another legal beating
Talkback Isn't this just the Sony Betamax case all over again: namely that companies like Sony are not responsible for end users buying Sony blank tape and then using it to make unauthorised copies? If Kazaa are responsible for any naughty behaviour of end...
[November 29, 2004, 12:00]
Anger over DVD format wars
Talkback The big difference between this and the VHS/Betamax battle is than then no-one had an alternative - If you wanted Film on demand at home you had to go one way or the other. And remember that we were looking at realprices maybe 10 times as high as...
[January 10, 2006, 14:36]
Open source groups ally to target schools
Talkback This is like re inventing betamax
[May 16, 2005, 1:42]
Microsoft awaits punitive EU judgment
Talkback Years ago Betamax was a better video system but VHS was marketted better and won the race. I'm sick to death of this modern trend for the loosers to use the courts to try and force the winners to give them a share of the market or a share of their...
[March 23, 2004, 9:17]
OpenOffice to the Rescue
Blog Comment Betamax: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotape_format_war but I think there could be a happy ending to this particular story as FLOSS makes continued inroads into proprietary markets (I say that but have no figures to back it up!
[April 1, 2009, 9:36]
history in circles
Talkback .completely agree this has been around for decades - I used to work with the same thing in the 80s too .and not as if this technology went away and has returned, the key UNIX vendors particularly have retained their own versions of these mainframe...
[March 4, 2007, 15:00]
Flaw found in Sony DRM patch
Talkback What a sad state for Sony - You would think that they would have learned from the Betamax, they had superior technology, but lost the battle over greedy licensing. I was all set to purchase a 50 inch plasma TV for my new house - I had chosen the...
[December 12, 2005, 6:23]
Winners: Plextor DivX PVR competition
News answers included: "I can't wait to burn my betamax collection"; "This will finish what the La-Z Boy chair started.and "I will be able to review all my favourite building society adverts". The ZDNet UK Plextor competition is now closed and we have...
[January 11, 2005, 16:55]
HD-DVD explodes on the launchpad
Blog Comment Sony's rep for dead formats is legendary with betamax, Mini-disc and soon UMD. PS3 sales hardly translates to Blu-ray sales. If the sole purpose of the PS3 was for Blu-ray then yes but it's a games console.
[February 19, 2008, 11:36]
Bluetooth bites back at BT home wireless system
News I'm aware of the old VHS/Betamax argument, but the fact is 802.11 is old and clunky and I don't think it will get there. TDK's Bluetooth division criticised BT's move into wireless home networking Tuesday for using dated and inflexible technology...
[September 7, 1999, 16:40]
