Ed Felten’s Rip/Mix/Burn lecture. With a transcript here.

This shows the movie industry’s revenues from the year 2000 and nearly half come from the sale and rental of prerecorded videos played on a VCR or DVD player. And although the studios fought like crazy to block the VCR or control it, it in fact turned out to be a huge profit center for them.

Now I chose to start the lecture with this story because it not only is an important decision of the Supreme Court and an important choice in the history of our copyright policy, but it also illustrates two issues that are going to recur throughout the rest of the story. The first issue is the struggle for control over technology and the struggle for control over how consumers are allowed to use recorded media. The second issue is the role of multi-use technologies, technologies that have both legal and illegal uses, and how our copyright policy is going to deal with them.