Intellectual Property Law

Supreme Court Serves Up Remote-Recording Victory

By David Kravets

The Supreme Court on Monday let stand a copyright case testing whether cable operators may permit customers to store television programming on company servers to be viewed at a later time.

The issue concerns an August ruling by a federal appeals court, which lifted (.pdf) an injunction against Cablevision Systems blocking it from offering customers a recording service that stores programming on the cable company?s own servers instead of on viewers? in-house playback devices.

Hollywood and television programmers maintained Cablevision?s service directly infringes their exclusive rights to both reproduce and publicly perform their copyrighted works. On appeal, they told the high court that the copyright case was the most important lawsuit following the justices? 1984 ruling declaring American consumers had a fair use right to use videocassette machines to record copyrighted movies at home.

But don’t expect the court’s rejection of the case to be the final word. Renewed litigation over the topic is likely.

Ben Sheffner, the attorney behind the Copyrights & Campaigns blog who once worked on the case on behalf of Fox, has noted that there were several procedural problems making the lawsuit unworthy of the high court?s time.

The Obama administration, for example, wrote the justices that Cablevision and Hollywood’s agreement to take both indirect liability and fair use off the table “would prevent the court from seeing the whole fundamental controversy in this case, making it an unsuitable vehicle for clarifying the applicable legal framework,” Sheffner wrote.

The justices rejected the case without comment.

See Also:

• Obama Urges Justices to Avoid Cablevision Copyright Case
• Cablevision Scores Copyright Victory Against Hollywood
• Comcast Deflects User's Questions - Updated
• Some ISPs Still Dodging Data Retention Requests, Help 27B Get the …
• Obama: Stop Filling Administration with RIAA Insiders
• Obama, Keep Filling Administration with RIAA Insiders

Full post as published by Threat Level on June 29, 2009 (boomark / email).