Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright (review)

For readers who enjoyed or who may be interested in Joshua M. Greenberg's From Betamax to Blockbuster: Video Stores and the Invention of Movies on Video (2008), this book by Lucas Hilderbrand offers the perfect complement. Both are intelligent, illuminating accounts of an understudied medium, and neither duplicates the strengths of the other. Greenberg's is more of an industry study from the ground upward, with STS roots, while Hilderbrand's Inherent Vice is aimed at more sidereal circulations—at bootleg—and the ways that video recording has both challenged and informed copyright law in the United States. He is interested in the kinds of things that got passed hand-to-hand on videocassettes, and part of his analysis is aimed broadly at what he calls the "aesthetics of access," the look and meanings of used videotape as it gradually wears and degrades (p. 6).

Video recording isn't "new media" according to current academic designations; nor is it precisely "old" or fully "dead": it's middle-aged (p. xii). Hilderbrand is an engaging writer who makes the persuasive case that video recording and the copyright provision known as "fair use" are mutual constructions of one another, since the first statutory provision for fair use (in the Copyright Act of 1976) was interpreted first and most explicitly by the Supreme Court's decision in Sony v. Universal (1984). The Sony decision acknowledged that "time shifting," or recording programs off of television to watch later on, was a non-infringing—"fair"—use of television programming. To make his argument, Hilderbrand renders some of the contexts of video, including audiotape precedents and the format war between Betamax and VHS, and he is also clear about the stakes his argument has. This is a book about analog video, but it is aimed squarely at present conversations about digital media and copyright. Copyright guru Lawrence Lessig is only mentioned a few times in passing, but his work and the "copyleft" movement generally haunt between the lines in productive ways.

Hilderbrand's first two chapters outline the history of video in relation to intellectual property. He is at pains to distinguish bootleg from piracy. Bootlegging is often aimed at texts that are scarce or unavailable on the open market, and it is typically an amateur, amatory practice—something that mere "watchers" of television did to become "users" of television, Hilderbrand might say, and something that media-studies professors, collectors, and aficionados have long depended on to "take" the filmic and televisual texts that "make" them who they are. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 each offer a different case study that helps to elaborate these points. Chapter 3 is about the Vanderbilt Television News Archive, which began as a rinky-dink, off-air taping project in Nashville, battled CBS in the courts, and ultimately saw its work enshrined in law as a copyright exception granted to archives and libraries. The following case studies are less centrally about intellectual property. Chapter 4 considers the underground circulation of Todd Haynes's cult classic Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987), unavailable otherwise because Haynes didn't have rights to the music he used. Here Hilderbrand's interest in media aesthetics comes to the fore, as he pushes a provocative reading of the film as it has been rendered on video in nth-generation copies. It becomes a film about video as the bootleg contexts of its circulation work to tip responsibility for its meanings from Haynes toward viewers: "Materially, the fall-out of the image and soundtrack mark each successive copy as an illicit object, a forbidden pleasure that has been watched and shared and loved to exhaustion. Furthermore, the de-resolution of the tapes formally reflects the story of Karen's [own] wasting away"! (See p. 176; Carpenter died of anorexia.) Chapter 5 considers a feminist video collective or "chainletter," begun in 1995 via VHS and the postal service, which leads Hilderbrand to...