riverside edit   kevin kevin's studio: June twenty eighth, nineteen eighty-three, the Supreme Court in Washington, DC, eight days before the justices break for the summer. Sandra Day O'Connor is the newest of the nine justices and the first woman ever to sit on the court. Right now, she's reading a letter from Justice Harry Blackman. The letter is about a lawsuit over the Betamax, a machine Sony sells that records TV shows onto a tape cassette. In 1976, Sony advertised it by telling people they could watch Kojak while the machine taped Columbo. Both shows belong to Universal Studios, so its lawyers sued Sony. Universal argues that a family that tapes one of those shows is making an illegal copy, and Sony is to blame for selling them the machine. In 1981, a federal appeals court agreed with Universal. Under that ruling, every Betamax owner who tapes a Universal show is breaking the law. Sony appealed, and at the Supreme Court, a ruling needs five of the nine justices to sign the same opinion. Justice Blackman has written one upholding the ruling against Sony, and right now he has three signatures. Justice O'Connor agrees that home taping breaks the law, but she wants the studios to have to prove it costs them money. In his letter, Justice Blackman refuses to change another word. He writes that five votes are not that important to him when proper legal principles are involved. Justice O'Connor has two choices sign Justice Blackman's opinion and give Universal its win. Or refuse and leave him short of a majority. She refuses, so the court puts the case off and hears it argued again that fall. On January 17, 1984, it rules 5-4 with her vote that taping a show to watch later is legal, and so is selling the machine that does it. But what if Justice O'Connor signs? What if she joins Justice Blackman and the court rules against the Betamax? Let's hit Ctrl-Z. Welcome to Control Z Rewritten, the podcast where I take the biggest decisions in history and ask, what happens if they go the other way? One decision, we try it the other way and see what changes. In 1975, a television show airs once. A family that's out that night waits for the summer rerun or they miss the program for good. That November, Sony puts the Betamax on sale in America. It sits inside a teak console called the LV1901, with a 19-inch color TV built in the same cabinet. And it sells for $22.95 or $14,000 in 2026. With it, A family can record a show off the air and play it back later. Early in 1976, Sony starts selling the recorder by itself for about $1,300, and a blank one-hour cassette costs almost $20. Then comes the ad about Kojak and Columbo, both of them Universal shows. Sydney Scheinberg has been president of MCA, the company that owns Universal, since 1973. MCA has spent years developing a laser video disc called DiscoVision, a disc that plays movies on a TV but can't record anything. So Scheinberg tells the studio's lawyers that a home recorder shouldn't be sold at all. MCA wants Sony to manufacture the disc players. When Scheinberg meets Sony's chairman, Akio Morita, about a deal that next week, he tells him to pull the Betamax off the market or be sued. Harvey Schein, who runs Sony's American company, Says later that it was no accident the studio leading the fight against the tape recorder owned the video disc. On November 11, 1976, Universal and Disney sue Sony, its American company, and the agency that made the Kojak ad. The studio's lawyers had sent a private investigator to catch clerks in electronic shops taping Universal shows, and four stores that sell the Betamax are named in the lawsuit as well. Universal's case says the illegal act is taping a show at home. So the studios also need someone who has done it. The last name on the complaint is a Betamax owner called William Griffiths, a client of their own law firm. He agreed to be sued on a promise that Universal would seek no money from him. His 100 tapes hold a Universal sitcom called Holmes and Yo Yo and a rerun of the Nixon Kennedy debate from 1960. In November of 1977, a businessman named Andre Blay pays 20th Century Fox for the right to sell 50 of its older films on tape. He sells them by mail through a two-page ad and TV guide at $50 to $75 each, so a family with a recorder can now own a studio movie. In Los Angeles, George Atkinson rents out home movie projectors for parties. In December, he buys two copies each of Blaise's 50 films, one on Betamax and one on VHS, a rival tape format that Sony's machine can't play. He clears half of his 600 square foot store on Wilshire Boulevard for them. His one-inch ad in the Los Angeles Times offers membership at $50 a year or $100 for life, and movies at $10 a day. The studios threaten to sue Atkinson, but a rule called the first sale doctrine protects him. Once a store buys a cassette, it can rent that copy out as many times as it likes, and the studio gets no more money from it. So the studios back off, and by September of 1979, 42 stores are renting movies under Atkinson's name. The same month Atkinson opens, a cable company in Columbus, Ohio switches on a system called Cube, spelled with a Q. It has 10 pay-per-view channels where a subscriber orders one movie at a time through a cable box and is billed for it. So a movie can already reach a living room without a tape or a store as a go-between. The lawsuit goes to trial in January of 1979 before Judge Warren Ferguson in Los Angeles, and it runs five weeks. The studios have Have to show that the taping costs them money. So Disney's chairman testifies that the company turned down offers to show Mary Poppins and the Jungle Book on television because they were worried people would tape them off the air. The studio's lawyers also want to prove that Sony could have built a jammer into the Betamax for about $15 per machine. The jammer would stop the recorder from taping a show unless the studio that owned it allowed it. Ferguson refuses to hear the evidence. Sony's side wants to show that most home taping does the studios no harm. So it calls Fred Rogers, the children's show host on public television, whose program reaches more than 3 million households a day. He testifies that taping it is a service to families. Officials of the four major sports leagues say they have no objections to fans taping their games. In Sony's survey, 75% of owners say they tape a show to watch it later at least half the time. On October 2nd, 1979, Ferguson rules for Sony. He writes that taping at home is legal and that a recorder is an ordinary product like a typewriter or a camera. He says the studio spent five weeks of trial without showing any concrete evidence that the taping hurt them. Four days earlier, President Jimmy Carter had nominated him to the Federal Appeals Court for the West Coast, so by December, Ferguson has left the trial bench. Whoever handles the case next in Los Angeles will be a different judge. The studios aren't paid a cent when a store rents out a tape, and by 1981, rental shops have opened across the country. So in October of that year, Warner Home Video stops selling some of its tapes to stores. It leases the cassettes to them for six months at a time, so a shop has to keep paying the studio for the same movie. The store owners refuse to deal with Warner. And they form an association of video dealers to defend the first sale doctrine. Disney, MGM United Artists, and Fox try their own version of Warner's plan, and within two years, all four studios have given up. By the spring of 1982, more than 3 million Americans own a recorder. Selling tapes to those stores becomes a business of its own. In 1981, an HBO executive named Austin First buys the right to put the Time Life Film Library on tape. He sells those cassettes to rental stores from a company called Vestrin in Stamford, Connecticut. The same year, a Los Angeles businessman named Noel Bloom starts family home entertainment to do the same thing. In Los Angeles, the cousins Menachem Golan and Joram Globus run Canon films. To pay for each year's movies, they sell them in advance. Other companies pay for the right to show them overseas, put them on tape, and air them on TV before a frame is even shot. A Dutch bank Slavenberg sends them money until those buyers pay. Robert Shea's company, New Line Cinema, has spent years booking foreign and art films into college campuses. One of the rental stores is video archives on North Sepulveda Boulevard in Manhattan Beach, owned by Lance Lawson and Rick Humbert. Two of the clerks behind its counter are Roger Avery and Quentin Tarantino, who are paid $200 a week. On October 19th, 1981, Three judges of that West Coast Appeals Court overturn Ferguson's ruling, with all three agreeing. They rule that taping a show at home without the studio's permission is illegal copying, and that Sony, its ad agency, and the stores are responsible for it. They send the case back to Los Angeles where the trial judge has to choose the penalty. It can be money for the copies already made, a fee on every machine sold from now on, or an order to stop selling them. Period. Within three days, two members of Congress file bills to make home taping legal. The companies that make and sell recorders form a lobbying group to push those bills. It's run by Charles Ferris, who used to head the Federal Communications Commission, the agency that regulates TV and radio. In December, Senator Charles Matthias adds a catch to his version. Every recorder and blank tape sold would carry a fee for the studios and other owners of shows and music. A government panel called the Copyright Royalty Tribunal would set the amount. On April 12, 1982, a House subcommittee under Representative Robert Kastenmeyer holds a hearing in Los Angeles. The first witness is Jack Valenti, who has run the Motion Picture Association since 1966. He carries a 49 page memo by the Harvard law professor Lawrence Tribe. It argues that if Congress made home taping legal, It would be taking the studio's property in violation of the Constitution. Valenti says the VCR is to the film producer and the public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone. The Bill Valentibacks makes home taping legal and puts a fee on recorders and blank cassettes. It also lets a store rent out a movie only with the studio's permission. With that part, a studio could charge video stores for every rental or refuse to let them rent its movies. At all. On June 14, 1982, the Supreme Court agrees to hear Sony's appeal. Only four of the nine vote to take it, the fewest the court requires, and the Chief Justice Warren Berger is one of them. The other three are Justices Stevens, Blackman, and O'Connor. A young lawyer on Justice O'Connor's staff had written her in May that the court might turn the case away and hope Congress would just fix the law. Congress waits for the court instead. In January of 1983, Matthias and Representative Don Edwards split the studio's package into three bills: one for home taping, one for renting records, and one for movies. At the argument on January 18, 1983, Sony's lawyer Dean Dunlavy tells the justices that the appeals court's ruling makes every one of the 5 million Betamax owners a lawbreaker. The studio's lawyer, Stephen Croft, answers that ruling against Sony wouldn't Span the machine because the court could make the company just pay a fee on each one sold. Three days later, the full court meets in private to vote, and Justice Blackman's handwritten notes record it. Justices Blackman, Thurgood Marshall, William Rehnquist, and Lewis Powell side with the studios. So does Justice O'Connor, who says that if she were in Congress, she would vote to make home taping legal, but the House and Senate haven't done it. Justice Stevens alone says the law was not meant to stop a person from making one copy for himself at home. Justice Blackman gets the job of writing the court's majority opinion. Justices Blackman and Stevens send their first drafts around the court on june thirteenth. Three days later, Justice O'Connor writes that she has trouble throwing out Ferguson's finding that the taping did the studios no harm. On june eighteenth, she proposes a test of her own. A machine is legal if people can use it for a lot of things that don't break copyright law. Justice Powell writes her that he shares her concerns. Justice Blackman takes her test on June 23rd, but he keeps his rule that the studios only have to show that the taping might hurt them, not that it did. The same day, Justice Stevens sends around a draft that gives her both things she asked for her test and a rule that the studios have to prove the harm. Then, Comes Justice Blackman's letter of June 28th, refusing to change another word. Justice Byron White asks for the case to be held over to the fall, and Justice O'Connor agrees. On July 6th, the lobbyists and reporters in the courtroom learn that the case will be argued again. At the second argument in October, Dunlavy tells the justices 9.5 million households will own a recorder by the end of the year. When Justice O'Connor asks whether the court can rule for Sony without deciding if home taping itself is legal, he answers that there are two roads to Rome. He means the justices can get there either way. The court rules for Sony five to four the following January. And here is where we press Ctrl Z. From here until the end, everything I describe is the alternate timeline. It's the last week of June 1983, and Justice O'Connor has decided to sign on with Justice Blackman. On June 21st, she told Blackman in writing that she would join his next draft if he made her changes. His next version, two days later, took her test for when a machine is legal, but kept his rule on proof of harm. Even with only half her changes, she signs it. Justice Powell told her on June 20th that he shares her concerns, so he signs the same afternoon. And Justice Blackman now has his five votes. On July 6th, the last day before summer break, the lobbyists and reporters fill the courtroom and Justice Blackman reads out the decision. Taping a show at home without the studio's permission is illegal copying. A company that sells a machine is responsible when nearly everything people do with it is illegal copying. The case goes back to the trial court in Los Angeles to decide what the company owes. In the opinion, Justice Blackman points out that Sony could build a recorder that TV stations are able to stop from taping their programs. Then, Justice Stevens reads his dissent. He says the studios are asking the courts to build a bigger system of rules and payments than Congress has set up for copyright. And they want it so they can tax a brand new industry. In Universal City, Sydney Scheinberg has waited seven years for this, since the Kojak ad. MCA's lawyers in the Black Tower, the company's headquarters, write up what they want from the trial court. First, Sony has to build in their $15 jammer that Ferguson refused to hear about so the studios can stop their shows from being taped. Second, Sony has to pay a fee on every machine it's sold since November of 1976, the payment Croft offered the justices in January. On Capitol Hill, Jack Valenti goes back to Congress with the Tribe Memo and the Studios three bills. He tells every senator who will see him that the court has agreed with the studios. So, the only thing left to settle is how much the recorder makers pay and what the video stores are allowed to do. Charles Ferris's lobbying group for the recorder makers fights the part of the bill that lets the studios stop video shops from renting their movies. The store owners fight it too. But a court order against the machines is coming from Los Angeles, and the recorder makers need a law to keep selling them at all. So they argue over the size of the fee and give up the fight over rentals. In the spring of 1984, a federal judge in LA has to decide what Sony owes. Ferguson is on the appeals court now, so this judge did not hear the original trial, but the studio's $15 estimate for the jammer is in the record. He orders that every recorder sold after a set date have a chip in it. The chip stops the machine from recording whenever a TV broadcast includes a hidden signal the studios put on their shows. In May, Robert Shea of New Line Cinema is weeks from shooting a horror film by Wes Craven called A Nightmare on Elm Street on a budget of about $1.1 million. An English investor who was putting up 40% of the money has now pulled out, and the line producer, John Burroughs, Is paying bills on his own credit card. So Shea asks Media Home Entertainment to cover the missing money. Media sells movies on tape and has already put up 20%. Media makes its money selling tapes to rental stores. Those stores now face a court order on the machines and a bill in Congress that would let studios shut them down. So media's owners won't put more money into a movie whose tapes they may have nowhere to sell. And production shuts down. Shay goes back to booking art films into college campuses. On September 11th, the House passes the record bill and adds the studio's three demands to it. Those are the fee on recorders and tape, the chip, and the veto over renting movies. President Reagan signs it on October 4th. Taping a show at home is now legal as long as it doesn't carry the studio's signal. Every new recorder must have the chip. Every recorder and blank tape sold includes a fee that goes to the studios and other copyright owners. And a store can rent out a movie or a record only with the permission of the company that owns it. The studios own the movies and most of the shows in prime time, so the networks put the signal on those. They leave it off of sports, news, and public television, which the studios don't own. The studios and Ferris's recorder makers can't agree on the size of the fee. So in 1985, the copyright royalty tribunal in Washington sets it at 2% of what a store pays for each recorder. And 3% of each blank tape's price. Once the rule for records passed, the music companies refuse to let any shop rent out their albums. The studios in Burbank and Universal City do the same with movies. Smaller tape companies let stores rent out their own movies, but customers come in for the hits, and a shop can't stay open without them. So the stores close, and the smaller companies lose the customers who bought their tapes. In Manhattan Beach, Lance Lawson and Rick Humbert can't rent out studio videos anymore, so they close video archives late in 1985. Roger Avery and Quentin Tarantino are behind the counter on their final day. In Dallas, David Cook has built computer databases for oil companies since 1978. He and his wife Sandy have spent the year planning a chain of giant video rental stores, but the studios won't let anyone rent out their movies anymore. So he shifts and puts his money into Amtec, a company that makes radio tracking tags and drops the stores. And this is the beginning and end of Blockbuster video. Austin First's Vestrin in Stanford sold its tapes to rental stores and those shops are gone. So in 1986, he sells Vestrin's tape library and closes the company. A script by Eleanor Bergstein called Dirty Dancing, which Vestrin's new movie studio had been reading was Goes back to her agent. By the end of 1986, the studios collect 2% on every video recorder sold in America and 3% on every blank tape. No shop can rent out one of their movies without permission. George Atkinson's store on Wilshire Boulevard and video archives in Manhattan Beach are now closed. On November 27, 1985, Showtime starts Viewer's Choice, a cable channel where a subscriber pays to watch one movie at a time. Arrival called Request TV, owned by Liberty Media and Fox, starts the same month. With the rental stores closed, a new movie goes from theaters to pay-per-view, then to HBO, and then to regular television. So on a Friday night, Family that wants a new movie at home orders it through the cable box, the way Cube's customers in Columbus have done since 1977. In the spring of 1986, MCA gets its first check from the fee on recorders and blank tape. The tribunal splits the money by how much of each studio's programming people tape. So the more Americans tape Universal Show, the bigger the check Scheinberg gets from the machine he sued to stop. With no rental stores left to buy tapes, the studios sell them straight to families at prices people at home will pay. In 1987, Paramount puts out Top Gun on Tape at $26.95, with a Diet Pepsi commercial before the movie starts. At Canon, Goulan and Globus used to sell the tape rights to the movies before they made them. Now, the tape companies have no rental stores to sell to, so they stop buying those rights. Canon's lender, the French bank Credit Lyonnais, had been advancing it money against those sales. So the bank cuts them off and Canon stops making movies. One of the projects Canon drops is a movie called Bloodsport, a martial arts film starring a Belgian man named Jean-Claude Van Damme. Scheinberg's MCA follows Paramount the next year. On October 27, 1988, it puts out ET on tape at $24.95 or 1995 with a rebate from Pepsi, a price meant for a family to buy and keep The studio signal goes on their shows, but a tape from a camcorder, a video camera with a recorder built in, doesn't carry it. So home movies are the one kind of video every recorder in America will copy. On November 26, 1989, ABC airs a special built on those tapes called America's Funniest Home Videos, produced by Vin Debona and hosted by Bob Sagitt. It becomes a weekly show in January. To an American in 1990, Home video means the tapes people shoot themselves. Matsushita, the Japanese company that makes Panasonic recorders, pays a fee to the studios on every machine it sells, and everyone has their chip in it. Sony bought Columbia Pictures in 1989, so it now owns a studio that collects the fee. So on November 26, 1990, Matsushita buys MCA. Scheinberg, who sued Sony to stop the Betamax 14 years earlier, negotiates the sale of his studio to a company that makes recorders. Matsushida's president, Akio Tani, says the machines and the movies are like two wheels of the same car. He means a company that makes one needs to own the other. In Los Angeles in 1991, Tarantino and Avery are planning a movie made of several crime stories, and they have each part written of it. Tarantino's part is a script called Reservoir Dogs. The actor Harvey Kaitel signs on to help the producer Lawrence Bender raise $1.5 million to make it. The company most likely to pay for a cheap crime movie like that is Live Entertainment. It grew out of family home entertainment, the tape business Noel Bloom started in 1981. With no rental stores to sell tapes to, Live has stayed a small company with no money for a first-time director. So Bender and Kaitel spend the year asking for the money, and the script stays unsold. Justice Marshall, who voted with the studios in 1983, has died, and in May of 1993, the Library of Congress opens his files from his first years on the court. Chief Justice Rehnquist, who took over the court in 1986, writes a public letter calling the release bad judgment. The Betamax file holds Justice O'Connor's June 1983 letters, and reporters print them publicly. They show that she doubted the studio's case when she signed the opinion against Sony. Siegram, the Canadian liquor maker, buys MCA from Matsushita in July of nineteen ninety five and Scheinberg leaves after twenty two years running the company. For ten years, the buyer of every recorder sold in America has paid a fee to his own studio. For five of those years, MCA belonged to a company that builds recorders. On a Friday night, In an American living room, a movie comes through the cable box. The tapes on the shelf under the television were bought, not rented, and the company that made the recorder paid the studios two percent of its price. In the spring of 1998, Mark Randolph mails a Patsy Klein Greatest Hit CD in a pink envelope from the Santa Cruz post office to Reed Hastings' house. He wants to know whether a disc survives the trip. On April 14th, the two of them open Netflix.com from Scotts Valley, California, with 30 employees and 925 movies on DVD, the new discs that are replacing tapes. They want to rent the discs by mail. But the studios say no, as they have to every store since 1985. So every title on Netflix.com, instead of being for rent, is for sale. That summer, Jeff Bezos, who runs Amazon, the online bookstore in Seattle, calls them, and Randolph and Hastings fly up to meet him. Amazon's office is cramped and messy, Bezos' desk is a door set on legs, and the company has about 600 employees and close to $100 million in book sales. On the way out, Amazon's chief financial officer Joy Covey tells them the offer would be in the low eight figures, so somewhere around $10 million. On the flight home, Randolph and Hastings work it out. The studios only let them sell discs, and Amazon is about to open a DVD store too. If they don't sell the company, they'll be up against Amazon in the only business they are allowed to run. So Hastings calls Seattle back and sells. And on November 17th, Amazon opens its video store with about 60,000 VHS titles and 2,000 DVDs. In August, Disney refuses to pay for a Lord of the Rings project that its studio Miramax had been developing with the director Peter Jackson and his partner friend Walsh. So Miramax puts the project into turnaround, meaning another studio can buy it. A buyer has to agree fast and they have to make all the films at once. Robert Shea's New Line Cinema is the same small company it was the year media turned him down booking art films into colleges. So Shea can't promise $130 million. And as a result, the project stays on Miramax's shelf. On March 31st, 1999, the night of a blue moon, a company called TiVo ships its first recorder. It's a box that records shows onto a computer hard drive and lets the viewer skip through them. Until now, the studio signal had two settings, record or don't record. The networks add a third that year, which lets a program be recorded only if the ads play and switch their primetime shows to it. Ativo has the chip like every recorder sold since 1984, so a viewer is not allowed to fast forward through the ads. Senator Fritz Hollings of South Carolina introduces a bill on march twenty first, two thousand two requiring every computer. Phone and digital TV to obey the studio's signal. The chairman of the Chipmaker Intel, Andy Grove, attacks it in a Wall Street Journal. But the chip has been the law for recorders for 18 years, so the bill passes pretty easily. From then on, every computer, phone, and television sold in America refuses to copy a show with the signal, and its maker pays the fee on every single one. Jawed Karim stands in front of the elephants at the San Diego Zoo on April 23rd, 2005, and he talks about their trunks for 19 seconds. This is the first video on YouTube, the site that he started with Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. A computer won't copy a TV show that carries the signal. So the only videos people can put on YouTube are the ones they shot themselves: birthday parties, school plays, or the elephants at the zoo. YouTube becomes the new America's funniest home videos. Brian Roberts has run Comcast, the biggest cable company in America, as CEO since 2002 and as chairman for the past five years. On June 24, 2009, he and Jeff Buchus of Time Warner announce a test called TV Everywhere. About 5,000 of Roberts' customers get to watch TNT and TBS online. Once they log in with their cable account. The studios let their shows play over the internet only for people who log in with a cable account. So this is the one legal way to watch a studio show on a computer. HBO's version for its cable subscribers starts in February of 2010. In March of 2024, the Library of Congress opens Justice O'Connor's files from the court. The Betamax file holds the 1982 memo from a lawyer on her staff telling her not to take the case. It also holds her June 1983 letters and her handwritten note that taping the show at home doesn't create anything new. A copyright lawyer named Jonathan Band writes up how close she came to voting the other way. Today, most American homes pay a cable bill. A family watches its shows in the cable company's app. It rents a movie through the box on top of the television. The way Cube's customers did in Columbus 49 years ago. The recorder under the television plays every single ad. The receipt for a phone or laptop has a line for the copying fee Congress set in 1984, the one Justice Stevens called a tax on a new industry. YouTube is for birthday parties and home videos. In the real timeline, Justice Blackman wrote that five votes were not that important to him, and he lost his majority. In the alternate timeline, Justice O'Connor signs anyway, and the studios get the law, Valenti wrote. Valenti told Congress in 1982 that the VCR was the Boston Strangler. In 1987, Americans spent $7.46 billion buying and renting tapes against $4.2 billion on movie tickets. ET alone sold 15 million tapes for $227 million. Americans spent more on tapes for the machine Valenti wanted jammed than they did at the box office. The rule letting a copyright owner block rentals did pass, for records only, on October 4th, 1984, and American music shops stopped renting albums as a result. But the version for movies never passed. So Video stores kept renting, and Blockbuster opened its first location a year later. It grew to about 9,000 of them and it filed for bankruptcy in 2010. In 1998, Hastings and Randolph turned Bezos down and they switched Netflix.com from selling discs to renting them by mail to stay out of Amazon's way. In September of 2000, they offered the company to Blockbuster for $50 million and were refused. At the end of 2025, Netflix had more than 325 million paid memberships. Money from tapes sold to rental stores paid for the movies the alternate timeline loses. Media Home Entertainment paid for A Nightmare on Elm Street, which earned $57.1 million and built new line into the company that spent $130 million on Lord of the Rings. The trilogy brought back $2.92 billion. Vestron Paid for dirty dancing, which took in about $214 million. Live Entertainment financed Reservoir Dogs, which led to Pulp Fiction and the Palme d'Hor, the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Everyone in the story, from Scheinberg to Justice Stevens, argued about whether the machine hurt the studios. Justice Blackman gave up his majority over who had to prove it. In 1994, In a case about the rap group Two Live Cruise parody of the Roy Orbison song Pretty Woman, the court put that burden where he had wanted it. It also took his idea that a copy is more likely to be legal when it creates something new and gave it a different name, transformative. At the end of 2025, fewer than half of American homes paid for a package of TV channels, down from nearly 90% around 2010. In May of 2026, streaming was 48% of all television watched in America, and YouTube alone was 13%. A copying fee on phones does exist in one country. Apple raised iPhone prices in Germany in 2016 to cover a charge of 5 to 7 euros apiece. After the real decision, Tom Shales of The Washington Post wrote that 1984 had been marked down to 1776. 1984 being George Orwell's novel about a government that watches everyone, and 1776 being the year of American independence. In the alternate timeline, the decision came out on July 6th, 1983. And the fee Justice Stevens called a tax on a new industry is on every receipt in America. In our timeline, Sony stopped making Betamax recorders in 2002 after selling 18 million of them. And the opinion that saved the machine. Remains the law to this day. Decisions don't get do-overs, but on this show they do. If you like the show, please rate and subscribe wherever you happen to be listening. And if you really like it, tell a friend or two. Until next time, I'm Kevin Perez Allen. Thanks for hitting Ctrl Z with me. Control Z Rewritten is hosted, written, researched, edited, and produced by me, Kevin Perez Allen. If you've got a coin flip decision from history you want reversed on a future episode, find the show on Patreon. That's CTRLZ Rewritten, all one word, and leave it in the comments.