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What the case was about?

Yes, and when it was.

Well, it simply was that these were our programs and that the cable operator didn't have any right to take our material and build a business against us, using our own program material. It was, I thought, grossly unfair.

Whether we made a mistake in not going all the way to the Supreme Court on it or not, I don't know, but the industry was divided at the time. A lot of the stations, who were already in the cable business in markets other than their own began to feel the benefits of cable and weren't very happy about seeing us fight the thing.

When the government finally came along and said, “You may not even be in the cable business anyplace as far as the network is concerned,” and “You can't be in the syndication business,” both of which operations were a sizeable niche business for CBS, unlike ABC and NBC I took the position that we would not get out of those businesses, but that we would give each of our stockholders a part of their stock certificate which was labeled “x”--meaning a new company--and they'd keep their CBS stock. So, in effect, we set up a new business within the family, owned by the same people who owned CBS.

I envisioned at that time that this new entity could do everything the network company was doing--own stations, do anything it wanted to do--but would not be inhibited by the same rules that applied to us. The same rules, but the limit on the number of stations you could own would be, presumably, five, the same as it was for us. I thought the shareholders would