Bootlegging the Bejing Olympics

The other day at work, where I license newsreel footage to documentary makers and the like, a filmmaker confirmed her order for some 1936 Jesse Owens Olympic material. She warned me that I might be getting a call from the U.S. Olympic Committee. She said when they were screening her piece, they couldn’t understand how someone besides their committee was licensing Olympic footage. One hour later, a representative of the USOC called. Apparently, every four, and now two, years our office goes through this with the USOC. Maybe they really don’t know the limits of their copyright or maybe they just hope that other people don’t know, but from what I could surmise they only own the rights to the broadcast footage beginning in the 1960s. They had no claim over the Jesse Owens material.

Later that day, I was reading Contested Culture by Jane Gaines and serendipitously came across her description of the suit filed against the Gay Olympic Games, a sports competition founded in San Francisco in 1982, by the USOC for the use of the word “olympics.” This case speaks to the effectiveness of trademark protection, as the Gay Olympic Games became just the Gay Games (which actually I think has a nicer ring to it with its simplicity and the alliteration). However, it changes the intended meaning, as the Gay Games were unable to appropriate the connotations that follow the word “Olympic.” Because of the right of ownership they have been granted by U.S. law over their brand trademarks, the word Olympic and the corresponding chain of rings logo are exclusively USOC property.

Which made me think about the Jesse Owens footage and the possibility that the Olympic logo might appear in these images, and that maybe this might mean that what the USOC couldn’t control through copyright law might be susceptible to trademark law. So all of this is to say that footage that might appear copyright-free, or at least freely licensable, may still not be safe for use based on its content rather than the copyright status of the actual film object itself.

One final thought occurred to me as I pondered the secondary meanings of the word “Olympics”: If the Olympic Committee cares so much about protecting their trademarks, how are they dealing with the bootleggers in Beijing? So then I came across this article from the L.A. Times, which was apparently written two days from now? I don’t know what that means, but I do know that the battle to control their trademark will be an ongoing one for the USOC, particularly now that merchandising has become such an important part of the Olympics. And especially because who wouldn’t want as stuffed animal of one of these.

Fixing the Signal

As intimated by my last (and first) post, Macrovision has a lot of patents. However, while owning patents is one thing, enforcing one’s monopoly on a particular kind of technology may prove more difficult–hence the rise of the “video stabilizer,” a device that removes the video signals that Macrovision tampers with to distort the image. My friend told me a story of how, in the wild west era of VHS tapes, his video rental store sold these out of their back room to customers who were wise to the home video underworld of illegal copying (or making legal backups, right?).  Today, they’re easily found on eBay or one of many internet retailers selling off-brand electronics.

According to what I understand of technologies that circumvent copyright protections, creating and selling this product wouldn’t be illegal. Instead, the responsibility falls on the user to employ the device in an “appropriate” manner (see the warning on the image above). However, seeing how Macrovision continued to file for patents on technologies that would circumvent their copy protection through the 1990s, it would appear that they were trying to stifle the creation of such “video stabilizing” tools. I’m sure somewhere from the back rooms of video stores to the time in between Macrovision’s patent filings there’s an interesting history of technological negotiation and adaptation, as Macrovision attempted to build walls that were constantly being torn down.

Macrovision, 1985

I’m starting to learn about Macrovision, which is a company that produces every kind of encryption and copy protection hardware/software for any imaginable type of medium. However, I’m interested in the product Macrovision–the copy protection introduced into the home video market in 1985 with the release of “The Cotton Club” video cassette. Macrovision relies on the corruption of the Automatic Gain Control signal to prohibit recording from one cassette to another.

In 1985, Macrovision applied for and received the patent “Method and Apparatus for Processing a Video Signal as to Prohibit the Making of Acceptable Video Tape Recordings Thereof.” It’s interesting to read through the patent because the language is so dispassionate about the invention that it describes. Patent applications don’t need justifications of why this object should exist or what it can be used for. Even the concept of what it means to make an “acceptable” video tape recording remains unexplored. Furthermore, the specific applicants for the patent go virtually unreferenced throughout the body of the text. The inventor’s motivations are as irrelevant as the potential consequences of the product. No one is asking whether you intend to use your product for good or for evil. Not that they should be. Still, it’s important to acknowledge that couching the technology within such descriptive and seemingly neutral language allows all of these inventions to appear equal before the law, when in fact they exist within a larger system of economic competition, monopolies, and control.

Yes, no patent is an island, and at the very least, patent applications are required to reference other patents in their quest for legitimacy. Macrovision’s 1985 Patent is referenced in Patent Number 4,695,901, filed one year later in March 1986 by Macrovision. This document, “Method and Apparatus for Removing Pseudo-sync and/or AGC Pulses from a Video Signal,” patents the means of undoing the gain signal corruption that Macrovision introduced in 1985. As far as I know, Macrovision didn’t intend to use this technology in any of their products. They just didn’t want anyone else to. In this case, patents, which were written into U.S. law to spur innovation, create stasis, as Macrovision became the unchallenged authority on video signal manipulation in video cassette recorders.