Apparently there was a massive lawsuit between Sony and TV and Movie producers that basically shaped the 20th century as we know it. Sony's VCRs, maybe the Betamax ones, could be programmed to start recording at a specific time and stop recording at a specific time. The idea was that you could record a show off of TV (They literally worked like recording you screen, just whatever was on the TV was written to a magnetic tape) and then play it back at your leisure.
The TV and movie companies said this was a copyright violation. They wanted to sue Sony out of existence and either have the process made illegal or charge ruinous fees per use to make recordings for personal use. Fortunately the SCOTUS, in one of it's rare wins, decided that recording media for your own later use wasn't evil piratical piracy and so we got to have an entire couple of decades between the invention of home recording technology and Google and MSFT locking down the entire media landscape with hardware and firmware censorship regimes.
Apparently there was a massive lawsuit between Sony and TV and Movie producers that basically shaped the 20th century as we know it. Sony's VCRs, maybe the Betamax ones, could be programmed to start recording at a specific time and stop recording at a specific time. The idea was that you could record a show off of TV (They literally worked like recording you screen, just whatever was on the TV was written to a magnetic tape) and then play it back at your leisure.
The TV and movie companies said this was a copyright violation. They wanted to sue Sony out of existence and either have the process made illegal or charge ruinous fees per use to make recordings for personal use. Fortunately the SCOTUS, in one of it's rare wins, decided that recording media for your own later use wasn't evil piratical piracy and so we got to have an entire couple of decades between the invention of home recording technology and Google and MSFT locking down the entire media landscape with hardware and firmware censorship regimes.