Items related to Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright
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 toward legal transgressions and illicit pleasures. Bringing formal and cultural analysis into dialogue with industrial history and case law, Hilderbrand revisits 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 Web site YouTube. This book reveals the creative uses of videotape that have made essential content more accessible and expanded our understanding of copyright law. "Inherent Vice" is a politically provocative, unabashedly nostalgic ode to analog.
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Review:
"Inherent Vice does more than anything else I've read to bring together aesthetic analysis and intellectual property studies. It offers a beautifully conceived historical study of the 'medium specificity' of videotape and an eloquent defense of video in a world populated by film aesthetes and digital utopians. I learned a lot from this book and it helped me to think in new ways about analog media." --Jonathan Sterne, author of The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction
From the Back Cover:
"By taking up the theme of analog videotape bootlegging in an era of aggressive digital rights management, Lucas Hilderbrand provides a timely and important window on the issues at stake in the creative commons movement. At the same time, he makes extremely interesting and valuable contributions to scholarship on the aesthetics of new media through his explorations of the affective dimensions of videotape, the implications of its ephemeral quality, and the interactivity its new technologies enabled."--Timothy Lenoir, Kimberly J. Jenkins Chair of New Technologies and Society, Duke University
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- PublisherNot Avail
- ISBN 10 0822392194
- ISBN 13 9780822392194
- BindingUnknown Binding
- Number of pages348
- Rating
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