Inherent Vice

“Inherent Vice is a lively and perceptive look at the legal and social history of videotape, with an eye toward excavating the cultural antecedents of
today’s ‘user-generated’ media. It would be well suited for courses on media studies and legal or cultural history, and would interest anyone with a curiosity about the folk culture of entertainment and technology in the late twentieth-century United States.” — Alex S. Cummings, Visual Resources

“Inherent Vice is an eloquent and provocative account of the unique possibilities of the home video format, and will be of great interest to anyone studying media policy, new media and moving image history and aesthetics.” — Lawson Fletcher, Media International Australia

“Inherent Vice is an interesting read for everyone who’s involved with (new) media studies; it reminded me to be aware of mediation, the possible differences in accessing media, the aesthetic value of a format and the importance of the preservation of cultural memory. First I focused more on the music industry when I studied copyright’s survival, but now video tape has opened my eyes to an important history that could possibly change the future access to media content.” — Marc Stumpel, Masters of Media

“Inherent Vice is not just a history of the labyrinth that is audiovisual copyright in the United States. It is an exploration of the tension between the top-down control of cultural products by their corporate producers and the (at times arguably) fair-use consumption and dissemination of these products. . . . Inherent Vice makes it clear that though the champions of access to audiovisual information have made many strides forward in the analog era, those champions must once more step up to the plate in the digital era.” — Jimi Jones, The Moving Image

“Hilderbrand not only successfully recuperates analog video to constructive ends, but he also provides a language with which to discuss it. Anyone interested in the relationships among institutions, the law, personal and cultural memory, and pleasure will be enriched by this work, while videophiles will be especially rewarded by the attentiveness it shows to the format they cherish.” — Lauren S. Berliner, Popular Communication

“Hilderbrand’s book is broadly relevant to anthropologists for the attention it gives to textual appropriation’s subversive potential. This is not a new theme, but it is one that more anthropologists need to be reminded of in the context of contemporary debates over intellectual property and cultural appropriation.” — Josh Berson, Reviews in Anthropology

“The salutary achievement of Lucas Hilderbrand’s Inherent Vice is to show that much of how we think about fair use today derives from debates over the rise of analog videotape in the 1970s and its widespread use in the 1980s and 1990s. . . . Hilderbrand’s case studies illuminate landmarks in videotape’s history of contesting copyright law to forge new repositories of memory, experience, and communication.” — Kinohi Nishikawa, The Information Society

“Written from a critical-cultural perspective and tightly focused on medium specificity, copyright, and use and distribution, the book offers valuable methodological and historiographical contributions to a field of video scholarship significantly shaped by sociological, ethnographic, and industry-oriented methodologies.” — Kit Hughes, Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and TV

“Inherent Vice, with its blend of history and legal analysis, helps place video and videotape recorders in their rightful place in the history of copyright in the U.S. and provides food for thought and continued debate over the role of copyright in the digital revolution. It is an interesting read for scholars of law and culture.” — Marc H. Greenberg, IP Law Book Review

“[A] sort of love song to the VCR—one much needed in this age of YouTube. . . . Hilderbrand presents a strong case that personal recording technologies (in both analog and digital forms) represent a crucial site for both political struggle and public action, even civil disobedience—implicitly warning that fair use is something that needs to be fought for or else it will be subsumed by copy-protection schemes and corporate enclosure.” — Gerry Canavan, Independent Weekly

“[A]n engaging, thoughtful, and thought-provoking work. . . . [T]his book . . . reveals that although a certain kind of video may be dead, it lives on in myriad related forms and remains vital to understanding our cultural identities.” — Daniel Herbert, Scope

“[An] intelligent, illuminating account of an understudied medium. . . . [I]f you, like me, are tired of having the same old present-minded conversation about illegal downloads, Hilderbrand will help change the terms of that conversation in productive ways by adding a layer of history too long ignored.” — Lisa Gitelman, Technology and Culture

“Hilderbrand . . . takes on a complex tangle of cultural history, moving-image aesthetics, and copyright law. . . . The crucial issues are those of access and interactivity. . . . These are precisely the uses that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 was desgined to suppress. This book offers a persuasive argument that we should be moving in a very different direction.” — Dave Kehr, Film Comment

"...Inherent Vice is a lively and perceptive look at the legal and social history of videotape, with an eye toward excavating the cultural antecedents of today’s 'user-generated' media. It would be well suited for courses on media studies and legal or cultural history, and would interest anyone with a curiosity about the folk culture of entertainment and technology in the late twentieth century United States."   — Alex Sayf Cummings, Tropics of Meta