Former MPAA head Jack Valenti’s famous remarks comparing the VCR to the Boston Strangler get alluded to pretty often these days, and Valenti has been at some pains to explain away his remarks as if they weren’t really demonizing the VCR. So it’s helpful now that Valenti’s remarks are more widely available online to quote some of them here. Readers can judge from the context whether Valenti is characterizing his 1982 remarks accurately. (And note the fear-mongering about the Japanese!)

Jack Valenti, “Home Recording of Copyrighted Works,” Committee on the Judiciary, United States House of Representatives, April 12, 1982

But now we are facing a very new and a very troubling assault on our fiscal security, on our very economic life and we are facing it from a thing called the video cassette recorder and its necessary companion called the blank tape. And it is like a great tidal wave just off the shore. This video cassette recorder and the blank tape threaten profoundly the life-sustaining protection, I guess you would call it, on which copyright owners depend, on which film people depend, on which television people depend and it is called copyright.

Because unless the Congress recognizes the rights of creative property owners as owners of private property, that this property that we exhibit in theaters, once it leaves the post-theatrical markets, it is going to be so eroded in value by the use of these unlicensed machines, that the whole valuable asset is going to be blighted. In the opinion of many of the people in this room and outside of this room, blighted, beyond all recognition. It is a piece of sardonic irony that this asset, which unlike steel or silicon chips or motor cars or electronics of all kinds — a piece of sardonic irony that while the Japanese are unable to duplicate the American films by a flank assault, they can destroy it by this video cassette recorder.

I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.

[T]his becomes a devastating problem for both advertisers and producers, who will get less for their programs on the air and that is what I am talking about. When less revenues are available to the networks and less revenues are available then to the producer — Mr. Ferris and his people will tell you, oh, the marketplace will adjust, as if some tooth fairy hovers over the place and says whenever you lose here, we will be glad to pay for it. Nobody pays for value they don’t receive and that is an axiom of the business marketplace.

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