The Most Important Supreme Court Case in Copyright Law: Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios (1984)
[Editors’ note: This is the fifth in our series, What Is the Most Important U.S. Supreme Court Case in Your Area of the Law? The first four installments are here, here, here, and here.]
There have been several important copyright cases before the Supreme Court since the first, Wheaton v. Peters, in 1834 (over, appropriately enough, the copyright in the Supreme Court’s reports). But the most important to me personally is Sony v. Universal, also known as “the Betamax case.” The Sony case, as is widely known, held that recording a program at home in order to watch it later—”time-shifting”—is a fair use. It also devised a very influential test for determining the liability of manufacturers and service providers for infringement committed by users, one that asked only whether the product or service was “capable of substantial noninfringing uses.” Undeniably Sony is an important case, but then so are Bleistein v. Donaldson Lithographing, Baker v. Selden, CCNV v. Reid, Burrow-Giles v. Sarony, Campbell v. Acuff-Rose and countless others. What pushes Sony over the top is the fact that the Sony case marks the boundary between two copyright worlds: a world where copyright is solely a regulation of a particular industry sector—publishing—and a world where it regulates everyone.
