The Supreme Court ruling for this case found that time-shifting was fair use, but only by a narrow 5-4 margin. Fair use could have gone in a completely different direction over the last 40 years if just one judge had voted differently on Betamax.
Camcorders and such devices where you could make your own content were very rare, if available at all.
To be clear, this was the only way to get most of the stuff being traded and sold. TV shows or films with no VHS release, or anime with no official dub or American format release.
I'm trying to understand how a judge would say that the only practical use of backups were copyright infringement, since that is completely contrary to both my experiences and what I believe to be common sense. If the answer to my confusion is that this actually was the major use case and my experiences were rare, then that's fine. Otherwise, I can't help believe this is yet another case in recent history where judges are completely backwards on technological understanding, or maybe even under influence from copyright holders.
We have see this happen repeatedly with modern tech cases.
The claim was that recording for personal use was still copyright infringement
There are no standards for lower court judges. They frequently do things that are grossly illegal.
Here's a US lower court judge who spontaneously ordered that a child's name be changed because of the judge's religious beliefs: https://volokh.com/2013/08/12/judge-orders-that-childs-name-...