The Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the use of VTR technology which allowed for the recording of existing media by the end consumer, be it through direct transmission or tape duplication, was a violation of copyright and that the availability of such technology (which was, on most VTR machines sold in the United States, simply a “record” button on the control panel) would have to be eliminated. [20] At the same time, the court took pains to confirm that camcorders and VTR recording for commercial and industrial use remained legal, because these resulted in the creation of original content and did not have the potential for copyright violation. Therefore, the sale of VTR players with recording capability was to be tightly restricted, a responsibility which would later be deemed to fall under the purview of the Federal Communications Commission.
Although the verdict technically did not outright ban the existing VHS and Beta formats, their only real edge over the CED and Laserdisc formats had been eliminated. Sony, recognizing when they had been beaten, withdrew Beta from the US market. However, both the Canadian and the Mexican judiciaries would eventually rule that time-shifting was legal, allowing for the emergence of a black market which made acquiring an “old-style” VTR trivial, in an echo of the Prohibition era (to which many critics naturally compared the VTR ruling).
The collapse of the domestic VTR market was treated in many of the trade papers as the culmination of the “new order” having swept the entertainment industry by the mid-1980s, but it seemed the only true constant was change. The time for stagnation, as in most other sectors of the economy, had passed; the new (and surviving) power-brokers, having consolidated their gains and shrugged off their losses, were poised to make new strides in the years, and quite possibly the decades, ahead…