I mean, they tried desperately to make it illegal in the 80s. The Betamax case went to the Supreme Court! [1] Given the current makeup of justices, I would imagine Betamax would be decided differently today, in favor of Universal rather than Sony. Aereo lost 6-3, even though the dissenting justices cited Betamax from 30 years previous.
ReplayTV was sued and went out of business before it could be fully adjudicated. Dish was sued over its Hopper DVR that auto-skipped ads and ultimately had to settle. TiVo won some of their lawsuits but because it didn’t do automatic commercial skipping of the recordings, was spared her wrath of the networks like Replay was. (TiVo was ultimately ruined by the cable companies who sought to introduce their own inferior DVRs that they could charge a monthly fee over.)
> Aereo lost 6-3, even though the dissenting justices cited Betamax from 30 years previous.
I remember that dissent (authored by the late Justice Scalia—RIP). Here’s the citation in question:
> We came within one vote of declaring the VCR contraband 30 years ago in Sony [v. Universal]. The dissent in that case was driven in part by the plaintiffs’ prediction that VCR technology would wreak all manner of havoc in the television and movie industries.
> The Networks make similarly dire predictions about Aereo. We are told that nothing less than “the very existence of broadcast television as we know it” is at stake. Aereo and its amici dispute those forecasts and make a few of their own, suggesting that a decision in the Networks’ favor will stifle technological innovation and imperil billions of dollars of investments in cloud-storage services. We are in no position to judge the validity of those self-interested claims or to foresee the path of future technological development.
I wouldn't take Aereo as a guide to how justices would reconsider the Betamax case were it heard de novo. Aereo's business model was to redistribute over-the-air broadcast TV, and it was arguing that its technical implementation was technically not violating any laws. This cast it into the creative reinterpretation of law scenario that tends to lose out in court.
ReplayTV was sued and went out of business before it could be fully adjudicated. Dish was sued over its Hopper DVR that auto-skipped ads and ultimately had to settle. TiVo won some of their lawsuits but because it didn’t do automatic commercial skipping of the recordings, was spared her wrath of the networks like Replay was. (TiVo was ultimately ruined by the cable companies who sought to introduce their own inferior DVRs that they could charge a monthly fee over.)
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Uni....