Picture Still Fuzzy on Copying Videotapes

Odd how much mystery still attaches to videotape.

There are people who believe there’s something programmed into rental movies that’s triggered if anyone copies the tape. Then the FBI comes after whoever rented it.

Others believe in fairy dust. Companies like Disney, says an otherwise intelligent consumer, put just enough image onto the film for viewing, but not enough to reproduce onto another tape. So it doesn’t copy and it destroys your tape.

This technology apparently moved too fast for understanding--at least the understanding of the average consumer as to what he can or can’t do. Home video, scarcely a decade old, already makes as much if not more for the movie industry as theater sales. VCRs are now in 70% of households, and one industry survey estimated that 5% of those have two machines, linked for copying tapes.

Commercial piracy, moreover, is widespread, ranging from the small retailer beefing up his inventory to the street peddlers already offering “New Jack City” for $15. Some say up to 15% of video store stock is pirated, costing the movie industry $500 million a year.

Given technology and marketing, the horse was out of the barn before the industry started reining it in. The bigger the market, the more copying, the greater the industry efforts to protect product sanctity--by lawsuit, police action and mechanical means.

But aside from mystique, there’s still some question about home copying, despite the FBI warning on most videotapes. On the one hand, it invokes federal law, threatening five years in prison and/or $250,000 in fines for “the unauthorized reproduction, distribution or exhibition of copyrighted” movies and tapes. On the other, it suggests that private copying, like “private home exhibit,” is acceptable.

Even the oft-cited “Betamax” decision in 1984 left some question. Suing Sony, among others, Universal and Disney sought to make VCR vendors liable for consumers copying copyrighted material off the TV for later viewing. But the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that such private taping simply “shifted” the time of viewing--a “fair use” of copyrighted material.

The decision didn’t discuss home copying of rented movies--though it was suggestive. One could reasonably extrapolate from the Betamax case, says Washington attorney Charles Ferris, figuring that “if you rented a movie for Friday night and couldn’t finish it, you could put it on your own tape to finish later, and it wouldn’t be a violation.”

The movie industry is ambivalent. “Generally speaking, if it’s for home use, no big deal,” says one industry official, echoed by others, but none for attribution. “Technically,” says a spokesman for the Motion Picture Assn. of America, “the association views it as a violation of federal copyright law.”

Even if the home copier could be identified, who would pursue him into his living room? Probably not the FBI, “even if you called and told them you were going to copy a tape,” says Ahmed Tahir, East Coast sales director for Macrovision Corp., which sells a copy protection process. The FBI investigates organized, large-scale pirating operations where there’s “a profit motive involved,” says FBI spokesman Fred Reagan in Los Angeles. “We don’t have the manpower to look at a $25 to $35 violation.”

Nor does the industry, whose concern is “the guy who has a machine taking our movies from tape or laser disc or a master,” says Tania Steele, spokesman for Disney. Disney’s concern isn’t just money, but the fact that most pirated tapes “are poor quality duplication and crummy packaging” bearing the Disney name.

The industry does have a copy protection process, and it’s not fairy dust. It’s Macrovision, which encodes a movie cassette during manufacture with an electronic signal “that essentially tricks a recording VCR into responding to incoming video signals as if they were three or four times their actual strength,” Tahir says. The result: copies with poor picture, poor color, or poor vertical or horizontal hold.

It’s not perfect, having only 86% “effectiveness”; i.e., 14% of the copies have an “acceptable picture,” with the rest ranging from “noticeable degradation” to “totally unwatchable.” It’s not even unbeatable, if one has an antidote--a black box or some other device capable of neutralizing the Macrovision and sold through rather furtive channels. And it’s not ubiquitous: Fewer than half of movie videos released today are copy-protected. More will be copy-protected if the newest technology--dual-deck VCRs--takes over the market. These machines are designed specifically to copy one tape onto another during play but by agreement with the movie industry won’t override Macrovision.

The one-upmanship of technology can be unending. At least for the home copier, there might be more lasting effectiveness in the fear of punishment or a belief in fairy dust. The movie industry should work on those.