sony in Mars & Medak 2019
renia.
Schizophrenia abounds wherever the discrete and the digital
breaking barriers to access meets capitalism. One can only wonder
how the conflicting interests of different divisions get disputed
and negotiated in successful corporate giants like Sony Group
where Sony Pictures Entertainment,2 Sony Music Entertainment3
and Sony Computer Entertainment coexist under the same roof
with the Sony Electronics division, which invented the Walkman
back in 1979 and went on to manufacture devices and gadgets like
home (and professional) audio and video players/recorders (VHS,
Betamax, TV, HiFi, cassette, CD/DVD, mp3, mobile phones, etc.),
storage devices, personal computers, and game consoles. In the
famous 1984 Betamax case (“Sony Corp. of America v. Universal
City Studios, Inc.,” Wikipedia 2015), Universal Studios and the Walt
Disney Company sued Sony for aiding copyright infringement with
their Betamax video recorders. Sony won. The court decision in
favor of fair use rather than copyright infringement laid the legal
ground for home recording technology as the foundation of future
analog, and subsequently digital, content sharing.
Five years later, Sony bought its first major Hollywood studio:
Columbia Pictures. In 2004 Sony Music Entertainment merged with
Bertelsmann Music Group to create Sony BMG. However, things
changed as Sony became the content producer and we entered the
age of the discrete and the digital. Another five years later, in 2009,
Sony BMG sued Joel Tenenbaum for downloading and then sharing
thirty-one songs. The jury awarded US$675,000 to the music
companies (US$22,000 per song). This is known as “the second
file-sharing case.” “The first file-sharing case” was 2007
It decodes
the old socius by means of private property and commodity
production, privatization and abstraction, the flow of wealth and
flows of workers (140). It allows contemporary subjects—including
corporate entities such as the MIT Press or Sony—to embrace their
contradictions and push them to their limits. But capturing them in
the orbit of the self-expanding production of value, it stops them
at going beyond its own limit. It is this orbit that the law sanctions
in the present, recod
he whole of humanity. We have appropriated that objective. Given that this change has happened since we drafted the initial version
of this text in 2015, we’ll call our project in this text with a double name Public
Library/Memory of the World.
2
Sony Pictures Entertainment became the owner of two (MGM, Columbia Pictures) out of eight Golden Age major movie studios (“Major Film Studio,” Wikipedia 2015).
3
In 2012 Sony Music Entertainment is one of the Big Three majors (“Record
Label,” Wikipedia 2015).
4
Since this anecdote was recounted by Marcell in his opening keynote in the
Terms of Media II conference at Brown University, we have received another
batch o
php?title=Major_film_studio&oldid
=686867076.
Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. 2015b. “Record Label.” Accessed January 2, 2018.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Record_label&oldid=685380090.
Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. 2015c. “Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City
Studios, Inc.” Accessed January 2, 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?
title=Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Universal_City_Studios,_Inc.&oldid=677390161.
Wischenbart, Rüdiger. 2015. “The Global Ranking of the
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