Inherent Vice

Inherent Vice

Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright

  • Auteur: Hilderbrand, Lucas
  • Éditeur: Duke University Press
  • ISBN: 9780822343530
  • eISBN Pdf: 9780822392194
  • Lieu de publication:  Durham , United States
  • Année de publication électronique: 2009
  • Mois : Mai
  • Pages: 352
  • DDC: 346.7304/82
  • Langue: Anglais
In an age of digital technology and renewed anxiety about media piracy, Inherent Vice revisits the recent analog past with an eye-opening exploration of the aesthetic and legal innovations of home video. Analog videotape was introduced to consumers as a blank format, essentially as a bootleg technology, for recording television without permission. The studios initially resisted VCRs and began legal action to oppose their marketing. In turn, U.S. courts controversially reinterpreted copyright law to protect users’ right to record, while content owners eventually developed ways to exploit the video market. Lucas Hilderbrand shows how videotape and fair use offer essential lessons relevant to contemporary progressive media policy.

Videotape not only radically changed how audiences accessed the content they wanted and loved but also altered how they watched it. Hilderbrand develops an aesthetic theory of analog video, an “aesthetics of access” most boldly embodied by bootleg videos. He contends that the medium specificity of videotape becomes most apparent through repeated duplication, wear, and technical failure; video’s visible and audible degeneration signals its uses for legal transgressions and illicit pleasures. Bringing formal and cultural analysis into dialogue with industrial history and case law, Hilderbrand examines four decades of often overlooked histories of video recording, including the first network news archive, the underground circulation of Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, a feminist tape-sharing network, and the phenomenally popular website YouTube. This book reveals the creative uses of videotape that have made essential content more accessible and expanded our understanding of copyright law. It is a politically provocative, unabashedly nostalgic ode to analog.

  • Contents
  • List of Illustrations
  • Preface
  • Acknowledgments
  • Part I Videotape and Copyright
    • Introduction: The Aesthetics of Access
    • Video Clip 1: Diasporic Asian Video Markets in Orange County
    • 1. Be Kind, Rewind: The Histories and Erotics of Home Video
    • Video Clip 2: Chiller Theatre Toy, Model, and Film Expo
    • 2. The Fairest of Them All? Home Video, Copyright, and Fair Use
  • Part II Case Studies
    • 3. The Revolution Was Recorded: Vanderbilt Television News Archive, Copyright in Conflict, and the Making of tv History
    • Video Clip 3: Experimental Film on Video: A Frameworks Debate
    • 4. Grainy Days and Mondays: Superstar and Bootleg Aesthetics
    • Video Clip 4: Tape Art
    • 5. Joanie and Jackie and Everyone They Know: Video Chainletters as Feminist Community Network
  • Epilogue: YouTube: Where Cultural Memory and Copyright Converge
  • Timeline
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • Index

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