CCIA Cautions Court Against Misapplying Copyright to Innovative New Services

File Under: News, 2007, Copyright

Jun 9, 2007

CCIA joined a broadly supported amicus brief today in Twentieth Century Fox v. CSC Holdings, Inc. (‘Cablevision’) warning a federal appeals court against rewriting copyright rules for computer networks and online service providers.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit is scheduled to review a lower court finding that Cablevision directly infringed copyrights by offering a remote digital video recording (DVR) service to its subscribers. Rather than a typical in-home DVR such as TiVo, Cablevision’s service records and stores a requested television show at a central location and sends the programming to the consumer over the network at a later time.

The lower court declined to follow established law in finding that Cablevision had directly infringed copyright based primarily on the fact that the physical recording device is directly controlled by Cablevision and is not located in the consumer’s home.

CCIA challenges this ruling as creating an unfair rule against a specific technology for offering legal DVR services to consumers. The physical location of the recording device should have no impact on the legality of DVR services as it does not affect the consumer’s actual use of the recorded programming. Such a rule would create an unprincipled bias against remote and network-based services and would effectively stifle development and innovation in remote and network-based storage technologies.

CCIA also advised that the lower court failed to weigh the numerous non-infringing uses of Cablevision’s remote DVR. The ruling unduly endangers the consumer’s fair use rights to record television programming by broadly restricting the availability of remote and network-based technologies in the marketplace.

CCIA encourages the Second Circuit to overturn the lower court’s ruling and uphold the fair use rights of consumers to “time-shift” television programming regardless of the technology used to do so.

A copy of the brief is available here