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casters’ content, but more egregiously than anything Napster ever did—
Napster never charged for the content it enabled others to give away.
Broadcasters and copyright owners were quick to attack this theft.
Rosel Hyde, chairman of the FCC, viewed the practice as a kind of
“unfair and potentially destructive competition.” 13 There may have
been a “public interest” in spreading the reach of cable TV, but as Douglas
Anello, general counsel to the National Association of Broadcasters,
asked Senator Quentin Burdick during testimony, “Does public
interest dictate that you use somebody else’s property?” 14 As another
broadcaster put it,
The extraordinary thing about the CATV business is that it is the
only business I know of where the product that is being sold is not
paid for. 15
Again, the demand of the copyright holders seemed reasonable
enough:
All we are asking for is a very simple thing, that people who now
take our property for nothing pay for it. We are trying to stop
piracy and I don’t think there is any lesser word to describe it. I
think there are harsher words which would fit it. 16
These were “free-ride[rs],” Screen Actor’s Guild president Charlton
Heston said, who were “depriving actors of compensation.” 17
But again, there was another side to the debate. As Assistant Attorney
General Edwin Zimmerman put it,
Our point here is that unlike the problem of whether you have
any copyright protection at all, the problem here is whether copyright
holders who are already compensated, who already have a
monopoly, should be permitted to extend that monopoly....The
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