Chapter 13

What's Happening Here?

In the early 1970s, RCA was experimenting with a new technology for
distributing film on magnetic tape -- what we would come to call video.
Researchers were keen not only to find a technology that could reproduce
film with high fidelity; they were also keen to find a way to control the use
of the technology. Their aim was a technology that could control the use of
film distributed on video, so that the owner of the film might maximize its
return from the distribution.

The technology eventually chosen was relatively simple. A video would
play once, and when finished, the film would lock into place. If a renter of
the video wanted to play the video again, he or she would have to return the
video to the video store and have the tape unlocked. In this way, the owner
of the film could assure that it was being compensated for every use of the
copyrighted material.

RCA presented this technology to the Disney Corporation in the early
1970s. In a room with just five of the senior executives from Disney, a young
RCA executive, Pat Feely, demonstrated RCA's device. The executives were
horrified. They would "never," Feely reports their saying, permit their con-
tent to be distributed in this form. For the content, however clever the self-
locking tape player was, was still insufficiently controlled. "How could they
know," a Disney executive asked Feely, "how many people are going to be
sitting there watching" a film? "What's to stop someone else coming in and
watching for free?"[13-1]

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