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Court: "Remote DVRs" Would Infringe Copyright
An interesting copyright case out of SDNY: a federal district court judge ruled on Thursday that Cablevision's plan to offer a "remote DVR" to customers would be copyright infringement.
Some notable things: the remote DVR would work precisely the same as today's in-home DVRs except for the fact that the hard-drive used to store the recorded content would be located on a Cablevision server, rather than in the customer's home. The court here compared this service to an "On Demand" service where the cable companies must have licenses to broadcast content on demand, but that's a terrible comparison. Assuming that in-home DVRs are legal (perhaps that's not such a safe assumption?) it's awfully hard to understand the logic of this decision from a policy perspective. Should the physical storage location of the content really be the key factor in determining whether the technology infringes copyright?
Some commentary and insight on the case from the folks at Public Knowledge is available here.
Posted by at March 24, 2007 1:42 PM
in Current Events
