[written by claude.ai leveraging the new archive.org Supreme Court collection]
Eight years before Jack Valenti called the VCR a “Boston strangler,” America’s publishers told the Supreme Court that the office copier would extinguish the printed word. A field guide to the doom prophecies of Williams & Wilkins Co. v. United States (1973–75) — verbatim from the briefs.
“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.”
— Jack Valenti, president, Motion Picture Association of America, testifying to the House Judiciary Committee, April 12, 1982
That line is famous because it was so wrong: within a few years, home video was the single biggest revenue source the film industry had ever known. But Valenti’s Boston strangler had an older cousin. Eight years earlier, in the first case to ask whether a library’s photocopying counted as fair use, the nation’s publishers and authors filed a wall of amicus briefs at the Supreme Court warning that the Xerox machine would destroy scholarly publishing, the free press, and the marketplace of ideas.
The case was Williams & Wilkins Co. v. United States. A Baltimore medical publisher sued the National Institutes of Health and the National Library of Medicine for making single photocopies of journal articles for researchers. The publisher lost — but barely: the U.S. Court of Claims held the copying to be fair use by a vote of 4–3 (1973), and the Supreme Court affirmed by an equally divided 4–4 Court (1975). Read today, the briefs on the losing side are a museum of incumbent-industry catastrophizing. Here are the exhibits.
The exhibits
Exhibit A — the photocopier is a printing press
“Xerography and other copying techniques have already turned every office mailroom into a publishing house.”
Quoting a 1966 Newsweek article literally titled “Good-by to Gutenberg,” the brief argued a Xerox is a “plateless printing press” — so a library’s single-copy service was really mass publishing. (American Society for Testing & Materials et al., amicus brief, 1974; counsel Robert B. Washburn.)
Exhibit B — the journals will simply die
“Periodicals and journals are neither immortal nor immune from the laws of economics… periodicals — e.g. LIFE, LOOK, Saturday [Evening] Post, etc. — were forced to terminate their existence… it is only a matter of time before the same fate overtakes some of these periodicals.”
If magazines that big could fold, the argument ran, photocopying would finish off the scientific and technical journals next. (The Authors League of America, amicus brief, 1974; counsel Irwin Karp.)
Exhibit C — one copy replaces all copies
“‘Sharing’ is a euphemism which in library terms means that by the systematic use of photocopies one published copy of a work can take the place of many.”
The core economic claim: every photocopy is a subscription that will never be sold. (Association of American Publishers & Association of American University Presses, amicus brief, 1974; counsel Charles H. Lieb.)
Exhibit D — a censorship apocalypse
“…the public may well be the loser… because government functionaries, rather than independent copyrightees, will determine what may or may not be published.”
Kill the independent journals, the brief warned, and government publications fill the vacuum — recasting a fair-use ruling as a First Amendment threat. (Magazine Publishers Association, amicus brief, 1974; counsel Alfred H. Wasserstrom.)
Exhibit E — the slippery slope to the end of publishing
“…it would not be difficult to foresee a time when but one copy of a poem or short story or even a novel need be published and be readily made available to all free of charge.”
If a science article, then why not a poem, a story, a whole novel — one copy for everyone, forever. (Associated Councils of the Arts, amicus brief, 1974; counsel Howard M. Squadron.)
Exhibit F — death of the marketplace of ideas
“It further will disrupt and be destructive of the economic relationships on which this nation’s distinctive competitive marketplace of ideas depends.”
The largest possible stakes, for the smallest possible act: one library, one copy, one researcher. (Information Industry Association, amicus brief, 1974; counsel Paul G. Zurkowski.)
The verdict of hindsight
Scholarly and scientific publishing did not collapse. It became one of the most profitable industries in the world — operating margins widely reported in the 30–40% range — and journal subscription prices exploded over the following decades, the library “serials crisis” that is the precise opposite of death-by-photocopier. The Government’s own brief had already pointed out, in real time, that the plaintiff’s own subscriptions were rising: Medicine went from 2,864 to 5,444 over the decade at issue, and Gastroenterology from 4,132 to 7,006.
The Xerox turned out to be a rounding error next to the pricing power the publishers themselves would later wield. “The Xerox will kill journals” aged about as well as “the VCR is the Boston strangler” — and for the same reason. Both were copying technologies an incumbent industry swore would destroy it; both industries proceeded to monetize the technology and thrive. The publishers even got the compensation mechanism they wanted: the Copyright Clearance Center, founded in 1978, turned photocopying into a licensing revenue stream.
The one they got right
To be fair, not every prophecy missed. The American Chemical Society’s brief looked past the copier entirely:
“…the printed journal may someday be obsolete to be replaced by instant around-the-world dissemination of information through video display tubes.”
— American Chemical Society, amicus brief, 1974
That one came true. It just wasn’t the office copier that did it — and when the network did arrive, it made the journals richer, not extinct. The lesson of the copying-machine panics isn’t that new technology is harmless. It’s that the industries most sure a machine will destroy them are usually the ones about to make a fortune from it.
Sources. All amicus quotations are transcribed from the digitized briefs in Williams & Wilkins Co. v. United States, 487 F.2d 1345 (Ct. Cl. 1973), aff’d by an equally divided Court, 420 U.S. 376 (1975) — Internet Archive item micro_IA40385001_1623 (U.S. Supreme Court records & briefs); OCR lightly corrected, bracketed text supplied. “Good-by to Gutenberg,” Newsweek, Jan. 24, 1966, pp. 85–88 (as quoted in the ASTM brief). Valenti testimony: Home Recording of Copyrighted Works, House Judiciary Subcommittee hearings, 97th Cong. (Apr. 12, 1982); the technology reached the Court in Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, 464 U.S. 417 (1984). Publishing margins / “serials crisis”: RELX/Elsevier reporting; see Stephen Buranyi, The Guardian, June 27, 2017. A full case guide (briefs, the 4–4 deadlock, counsel) is attached to the Internet Archive item as a PDF.