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.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!