They took their case all the way to the Supreme Court, which declared in 1984 that as long as VCRs had a legitimate use, they were legal, regardless of any potential illicit uses they might be put to.
Videocassettes now account for a chunky portion of movie studios profits.
Apparently, they haven t learned anything from this because they re trying to do it again. This time, the towering menace to their livelihoods is . . . They wrote a tiny utility, called DeCSS, that allows users to make copies of DVD movies and store them on their hard drives. The program was of principal interest to Linux users because before MoRE cracked the DVD encryption, they had no way to view DVDs on their computers. The entertainment industry promptly went into major freak-out mode.