Inherent Vice

In an age of digital technology and renewed anxiety about media piracy, Inherent Vice revisits the recent analog past with an eye-opening exploration of the aesthetic and legal innovations of home video. Analog videotape was introduced to consumers as a blank format, essentially as a bootleg technology, for recording television without permission. The studios initially resisted VCRs and began legal action to oppose their marketing. In turn, U.S. courts controversially reinterpreted copyright law to protect users’ right to record, while content owners eventually developed ways to exploit the video market. Lucas Hilderbrand shows how videotape and fair use offer essential lessons relevant to contemporary progressive media policy. Videotape not only radically changed how audiences accessed the content they wanted and loved but also altered how they watched it. Hilderbrand develops an aesthetic theory of analog video, an “aesthetics of access” most boldly embodied by bootleg videos. He contends that the medium specificity of videotape becomes most apparent through repeated duplication, wear, and technical failure; video’s visible and audible degeneration signals its uses for legal transgressions and illicit pleasures. Bringing formal and cultural analysis into dialogue with industrial history and case law, Hilderbrand examines four decades of often overlooked histories of video recording, including the first network news archive, the underground circulation of Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, a feminist tape-sharing network, and the phenomenally popular website YouTube. This book reveals the creative uses of videotape that have made essential content more accessible and expanded our understanding of copyright law. It is a politically provocative, unabashedly nostalgic ode to analog.

“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