Ron Schenone

Your DVR Is Now 100% Legal Says U.S. Supreme Court

Posted by on Jun 30, 2009 | 6 Comments

Hooray! The United States Supreme Court has quietly upheld a previous ruling from a lower court that said it was OK to skip commercials. Some of the complainers and whiners were 20th Century Fox and cable television producers, which included CNN plus the Cartoon Network. But the consumer has won the last round in the battle and we can finally be commercial free if we wish.

That August 2008 ruling had overturned an earlier District Court ruling in March that had been a victory for the studios. Their argument was that when a cable service provider lets its customers record and play back shows at the headend — using the provider’s own storage rather than a local DVR — that constituted a retransmission, which was contrary to the terms of service.

But Appeals Court Judge John M. Walker took a hard look at the technology behind Cablevision’s RS-DVR service, and came to the conclusion that the District Court judge was in error: Since Cablevision’s servers never stored programs or movies in a form that could themselves be copied and played like programs or movies, they weren’t copies in the strictest sense. In other words, they could only be replayed in the context of each customer’s DVR service.

Yet even if they were copies — even without having determined that Cablevision buffered programming in a manner specific to the customer’s own needs and no one else’s — the motivation for violating copyright law wasn’t there, Judge Walker reasoned. In his ruling at the time, Walker cited earlier case law — especially the Supreme Court’s decision that made the use of VCRs legal — to ascertain whether the creation or use of RS-DVR constituted volitional conduct on the part of Cablevision, with the intention of violating copyright.

It is good to know that there are level heads in determining what exactly copyright violations are. Hopefully this same thinking will determine that linking to news articles are also not a violation of copyrighted material.

Comments welcome.

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  • Ryan Farmer

    Well, it doesn’t matter if it’s “legal” to skip commercials if the makers of the devices and software that powers the devices implement “Prohibited User Operations” like they did on DVD and Blu Ray, to keep you from skipping the FBI screen and the trailers.

    The sheer arrogance and audacity of these big media companies, as well as Apple, Sony, and Microsoft, in implementing DRM is astounding.

    Surely they realize that they have but a few paid engineers working for them to implement the “handcuffs” and several million hobbyists out there who re smarter than them, and will pick the lock just for the satisfaction of doing so?

    Sales of Blu Ray have so far been unimpressive, and it’s kind of easy to see why.

    Expect better sales when the anti-user crap is thoroughly hacked through and VLC or comething can play the discs.

    I won’t have any such device in my home until then.

  • mhz

    Well, I’m glad its “legal”, but we still have the problem of advertisers who stop funding our favorite programs because they know we’re recording them and skipping the commercials.

    Without a compromise somehow on this, we’re never going to get more than 1 season of a new show that we like.

  • Ryan Farmer

    Well, the demographic that tends to respond well to commercials to begin with are usually of lower intelligence and tend to prefer programming that is cheaper to produce.

    Survivor, Jerry Springer, etc.

    The types of stuff that attract more intelligent viewers typically deals with subject matter or production costs that are much higher, and since the audience is less susceptible to the ads, the show tends to wither and die anyway.

    Hasn’t anyone noticed how much worthless, replaceable, cookie cutter programming there is on TV?

    It’s all they need to do to entertain approximately, I’m gonna say, 80% of their audience, for 10% of the cost, *and* get the types that respond to the ads.

    Science Fiction has always been a genre that is hard to keep on the air, and with few exceptions, these kinds of shows come and go without lasting more than a season or two.

  • dilettante

    This has all happened before.

    Think “bread and circuses” around 400AD and what happened to society then.

  • Ryan Farmer

    @dilettante

    Yes, it may well be legal to record television shows or even (in theory) to make backup copies/rips of your DVDs or CDs.

    (Fair Use/Space Shifting are legal)

    The problem is that the DMCA immediately annuls the fair usage provisions in copyright laws by stating that it is illegal to circumvent copy protection.

    Really the copy protection they put on DVDs is so trivial that my computer can break through it given about 4-5 seconds per disc, but just by having any there at all, the mafiAA can say it is illegal for me to “space shift” the DVD to fit on my portable media player.

    This is advantageous for the movie industry because they haven’t ever (and will never) stop any “piracy”, but now in theory, I have to go buy another copy from say, iTunes, at full DVD price (even though I already own the DVD) to play on my iPod.

    (Which is one reason I refuse to buy iPod or Zune, Apple and MS are both in bed with the mafiAA)

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