Hollywood sues Cablevision over remote DVR service

Welcome to the next episode in the ongoing Copyright Wars and Hollywood's attack on fair use:

Hollywood studios and TV networks are asking a federal court to stop a video recording service that Cablevision Systems Corp. planned to start offering next month.

The companies sued Cablevision, the nation's sixth-largest cable TV provider, in U.S. District Court in New York on Wednesday, saying the service, known as a "network DVR," violated the companies' copyrights.

Cablevision announced in March that it would offer subscribers a way to retrieve recorded shows from the cable company's system, rather than from a hard drive installed on a special set-top cable box.

Other cable companies, including Philadelphia-based Comcast Corp., the nation's largest, were closely watching the experiment with an eye toward offering a similar service. The technology would vastly increase the use of such "time shifting" services because they would not require subscribers to buy or lease extra equipment.

But Tuesday, the companies that produce and broadcast TV shows said the service was illegal and that Bethpage, N.Y.-based Cablevision had refused to pay the studios a license fee or share in the revenue it would collect from subscribers for the service.

Typical DVRs record TV shows on a hard drive and allow viewers to replay those shows anytime they wish.

The network DVR proposed by Cablevision would allow viewers to choose which programs they want to record. But instead of recording on a hard drive in the home, the cable company would record the shows on a central computer, then allow viewers to watch them later.

Studios say the law, under "fair use," gives consumers the right to time shift. But it doesn't give that right to companies that license the content only for simultaneous broadcast, meaning that to store the shows and offer them on demand for a fee, companies must obtain a separate license.

This looks to be a showdown between the Sony Betamax and the Kinko's coursepack/MDS decisions. On the one hand, Sony says users have a right to time-shift TV programs.  On the other, Kinko's and MDS suggest that no one can run a business that helps users exercise their fair use rights more efficiently.

But this is exactly what Sony did when they sold the Betamax to consumers, only they did it as a sale of a product rather than a service.  Same with TiVo (which has some service components).  Same with the iPod.  Why should we discriminate against services over products that do the same thing? Isn't it in the public interest
to help users take advantage of fair use? Hopefully the court in this case will help answer these questions.

Comments

[Grey]

My guess is that it's because the TV studios see it as an "on-demand" service. However, it seems clear that it isn't such a service -- users must "tell" the cable company to specifically record the program (as opposed to having unfettered access to any and all programs). If they don't program the recording, they don't have the watching rights. And said users are the only ones who retain the rights to watch the program. Whether the hard drive is in your set-top box or miles away would seem to be insignificant.