Like many of you, I’m sure, I spent the weekend gushing with friends over “Garden of Your Mind,” the Mister Rogers’ Neighbourhood remix video produced by PBS Digital Studios. (It’s okay if it made you a bit misty-eyed; I got teary too, as did everyone else I’ve talked to about the video since it came out late last week.) The video reminds us just how much has changed about children’s television programming in the past 30 years, and more importantly, is a touching tribute to Fred Rogers — a man whose empathetic nature and levelheadedness influenced generations of children.
These traits were on full display when, in 1979, Fred Rogers testified in Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc. — also known as the Betamax copyright infringement case, one of the most important decisions in the history of American IP law. In his testimony, Rogers comes out as a levelheaded yet passionate advocate for fair use and consumers’ rights:
Very frankly, I am opposed to people being programmed by others. My whole approach in broadcasting has always been ‘You are an important person just the way you are. You can make healthy decisions.’ Maybe I’m going on too long, but I just feel that anything that allows a person to be more active in the control of his or her life, in a healthy way, is important.
His perspective proved to be influential; Rogers’s testimony was cited in the U.S. Supreme Court’s majority opinion on the case, written by Justice John Paul Stevens:
Second is the testimony of Fred Rogers, president of the corporation that produces and owns the copyright on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. The program is carried by more public television stations than any other program. Its audience numbers over 3,000,000 families a day. He testified that he had absolutely no objection to home taping for noncommercial use and expressed the opinion that it is a real service to families to be able to record children’s programs and to show them at appropriate times.
If there are millions of owners of VTRs who make copies of televised sports events, religious broadcasts, and educational programs such as Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and if the proprietors of those programs welcome the practice, the business of supplying the equipment that makes such copying feasible should not be stifled simply because the equipment is used by some individuals to make unauthorized reproductions of respondents’ works. The respondents do not represent a class composed of all copyright holders. Yet a finding of contributory infringement would inevitably frustrate the interests of broadcasters in reaching the portion of their audience that is available only through time-shifting.
This decision has had an enormous impact on IP law in the U.S., and stands as one of the most important decisions ever written by Stevens. “Had Justice Stevens written no other opinion for the Court than this,” wrote University of California at Berkeley law professor and IP law expert Pamela Samuelson in the Fordham Law Review, “he would be rightly remembered for the insightful and generative decision he wrote in Sony.”
Samuelson continues:
With the benefit of twenty years of experience, Justice Stevens’s decision in Sony seems remarkably prescient. Not only did it pave the way for the untrammeled introduction into the market of iPods, MP3 players, digital video recorders, CD ripping software, CD burners, peer to peer technologies, and many others, but confirmed that use of such technologies for private and noncommercial purposes generally does not harm the interests of copyright owners. The Sony decision helped to promote competition and ongoing innovation in the computer software industry by providing guidance to courts that ruled that unlicensed software developers could reverse engineer computer software for purposes of achieving interoperability among programs. Add-on software that enhances the experience of users of digital information products also has benefited from the framework for analysis provided by Justice Stevens’s decision in Sony.
But perhaps the most important impacts of Sony have been in mitigating the significance of “non-transformative” copying of whole works made routinely in today’s digital networked environments. It is impossible to access or use copyrighted works in digital form without making incidental copies of them. Courts have recognized that to construe each incidental copy as infringement would stretch copyright law too far. ISPs, the Internet Archive, and Google would have little hope of making plausible fair use arguments for digital copying of many millions of copies of copyrighted works without Sony’s framework of analysis.
A beautiful day in the neighbourhood, indeed.