Copyright guru Bill Patry has a wonderful blog posting about the recent death of Harvey Schein, a former Sony Corp. exec who was instrumental in the development of the VCR (and in the events leading up to the seminal Sony v. Universal Supreme Court case in 1984). [He also references a book, James Lardner's "Fast Forward: Hollywood, The Japanese, and the VCR Wars," which I'm not familiar with, but which Bill P. says "everyone interested in copyright should read," so I'll probably put it on my list ...)