Surviving to Download Another Day

Do we really own our media? Sometimes I wonder, since there are those out there that firmly believe that the DVDs and CDs that we buy should remain in their original form, what implementations will this mean to the media of the future?

The ghost of Betamax continues to haunt Hollywood and music producers. America’s entertainment industry has been fighting fiercely to rein in companies like Groskter and StreamCast Networks that provide software that computer users often use to download illegal music, films, and TV shows from the Internet.

But on Aug. 19, the San Francisco-based U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed at least part of their argument, citing the landmark 1984 U.S. Supreme Court decision that it’s O.K. for consumers to tape movies and TV shows for their personal use.

The irony is that Hollywood, which fought the introduction of Sony’s (NYSE: SNE) Latest News about Sony Betamax video-cassette recorder in the early ’80s, is today a big beneficiary of that case. While its Betamax format eventually lost out to the more popular VHS technology Relevant Products/Services from Intel Enterprise Solutions, Betamax was the pioneer for both the VCR and more recently the DVD player. Together, the DVD and video-cassette businesses this year are expected to generate $17 billion in sales, according to a recent report by PricewaterhouseCoopers.