[YPPH]

As sidpatil says, that's a write-protect tab. If you bought blank VHS tapes and recorded something you could rip the tab off to stop you or someone else accidentally overwriting, say, your wedding video. Of course, all retail tapes were tab free.

And you could simply use masking tape to bypass it, because it was only designed to stop unintentional overwriting, not intentional overwriting.

I'm pretty sure as a kid I wrote over a few (bad) retail VHS movies this way, tapes that served more value as blanks.

[nebula8804]

>I'm pretty sure as a kid I wrote over a few (bad) retail VHS movies this way, tapes that served more value as blanks.

Now that I think about it, I've never gotten a Blockbuster/Hollywood Video rental that was damaged in this manner. This method of property destruction never even crossed my mind. It seems so obvious given how easy it is to disable write protection. Was I just lucky or were people more considerate back then?

[YPPH]

Just to clarify, I meant retail tapes I (read: my parents) owned. I never overwrote rented tapes.

I recall rental shops would have rewind machines, but I don't remember them ever checking the content of the tape.

Maybe people were just considerate. Maybe the threat of having a whopping fine when the the next unhappy renter returned and complained about the tape, causing the shop to check the rental history, dissuaded such behaviour.

Or, maybe people respected the institution. I used to really like video stores as they offered affordable access to entertainment and were just nice places to visit.