Description
Book SynopsisThis eye-opening exploration of the aesthetic and legal innovations of home video revisits four decades of frequently overlooked histories of video recording.
Trade Review“Hilderbrand’s labor of love is a solid work of scholarship. A particular strength of Inherent Vice is that Hilderbrand examines VHS tape as a new media - a continuity, collaboration, and co-existing of previous and future technologies, marking the point of intersection where new media and old media briefly compete for market share.“ - Tony Fonseca,
Screening the Past“[An] intelligent, illuminating account of an understudied medium. . . . [I]f you, like me, are tired of having the same old present-minded conversation about illegal downloads, Hilderbrand will help change the terms of that conversation in productive ways by adding a layer of history too long ignored.” - Lisa Gitelman,
Technology and Culture“[A]n engaging, thoughtful, and thought-provoking work. . . . [T]his book . . . reveals that although a certain kind of video may be dead, it lives on in myriad related forms and remains vital to understanding our cultural identities.” - Daniel Herbert,
Scope“
Inherent Vice, with its blend of history and legal analysis, helps place video and videotape recorders in their rightful place in the history of copyright in the U.S. and provides food for thought and continued debate over the role of copyright in the digital revolution. It is an interesting read for scholars of law and culture.” - Marc H. Greenberg,
IP Law Book Review“[A] sort of love song to the VCR—one much needed in this age of YouTube. . . . Hilderbrand presents a strong case that personal recording technologies (in both analog and digital forms) represent a crucial site for both political struggle and public action, even civil disobedience—implicitly warning that fair use is something that needs to be fought for or else it will be subsumed by copy-protection schemes and corporate enclosure.” -
Gerry Canavan,
Independent Weekly“Hilderbrand . . . takes on a complex tangle of cultural history, moving-image aesthetics, and copyright law. . . . The crucial issues are those of access and interactivity. . . . These are precisely the uses that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 was desgined to suppress. This book offers a persuasive argument that we should be moving in a very different direction.” - Dave Kehr,
Film Comment“
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“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
“
Inherent Vice, with its blend of history and legal analysis, helps place video and videotape recorders in their rightful place in the history of copyright in the U.S. and provides food for thought and continued debate over the role of copyright in the digital revolution. It is an interesting read for scholars of law and culture.” -- Marc H. Greenberg * IP Law Book Review *
“[A] sort of love song to the VCR—one much needed in this age of YouTube. . . . Hilderbrand presents a strong case that personal recording technologies (in both analog and digital forms) represent a crucial site for both political struggle and public action, even civil disobedience—implicitly warning that fair use is something that needs to be fought for or else it will be subsumed by copy-protection schemes and corporate enclosure.” -- Gerry Canavan * Independent Weekly *
“[A]n engaging, thoughtful, and thought-provoking work. . . . [T]his book . . . reveals that although a certain kind of video may be dead, it lives on in myriad related forms and remains vital to understanding our cultural identities.” -- Daniel Herbert * Scope *
“[An] intelligent, illuminating account of an understudied medium. . . . [I]f you, like me, are tired of having the same old present-minded conversation about illegal downloads, Hilderbrand will help change the terms of that conversation in productive ways by adding a layer of history too long ignored.” -- Lisa Gitelman * Technology and Culture *
“Hilderbrand . . . takes on a complex tangle of cultural history, moving-image aesthetics, and copyright law. . . . The crucial issues are those of access and interactivity. . . . These are precisely the uses that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 was desgined to suppress. This book offers a persuasive argument that we should be moving in a very different direction.” -- Dave Kehr * Film Comment *
“Hilderbrand’s labor of love is a solid work of scholarship. A particular strength of Inherent Vice is that Hilderbrand examines VHS tape as a new media - a continuity, collaboration, and co-existing of previous and future technologies, marking the point of intersection where new media and old media briefly compete for market share.“ -- Tony Fonseca * Screening the Past *
Table of ContentsList of illustrations ix
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xxi
Part I. Videotape and Copyright
Introduction: The Aesthetics of Access 1
Video Clip: Diasporic Asian Video Markets in Orange County 27
1. Be Kind, Rewind: The Histories and Erotics of Home Video 33
Video Clip: Chiller Theatre Toy, Model, and Film Expo 73
2. The Fairest of Them All? Home Video, Copyright, and Fair Use 77
Part II. Case Studies
3. The Revolution Was Recorded: Vanderbilt Television News Archive, Copyright in Conflict, and the Making of TV History 115
Video Clip: Experimental Film on Video: A Frameworks Debate 157
4. Grainy Days and Mondays:
Superstar and Bootleg Aesthetics 161
Video Clip: Tape Art 191
5. Joanie and Jackie and Everyone They Know: Video Chainletters as Feminist Community Network 195
Epilogue: YouTube: Where Cultural Memory and Copyright Converge 225
Timeline 245
Notes 251
Bibliography 287
Index 311
