Federal Judge Warren Ferguson

Do you take that "record" button on your VCR for granted? On June 25, former federal judge Warren Ferguson passed away at 87. In 1979, Judge Ferguson decided a three-year-old case in which Universal Studios and Walt Disney Productions sued the Sony Corporation to keep it from marketing and selling the Betamax, an early home recording device that the movie companies contended would curtail the value of television reruns and facilitate copyright infringement. In a decision that portended the explosion of home entertainment choices, Judge Ferguson said that recording television programs was lawful under existing copyright law and that it constituted fair use of the recorded material so long as it was confined to private homes and not exploited commercially. He made other significant decisions as well: In 1971 he defied the attorney general, John Mitchell, ruling that wiretapping without a warrant, even for reasons of national security, was unlawful. In 1976, he chastised the Federal Communications Commission and its chairman, Richard Wiley, in deciding that the agency’s urging of the broadcast networks to restrict programs with sexual or violent content to certain hours was tantamount to government censorship.
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