Posted by Barlow Keener

A recent copyright case held that Cablevision would violate the rights of the content producers if Cablevision allowed its customers to store the video remotely in a “Remote Storage DVR System” (“RS-DVR”) which is basically at TiVo located outside the house.  The U.S. District Court, Southern District of NY found  for Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation and The Cartoon Network (click here to view Judge Chin’s order).    Relying on a 1967 opinion finding a copyright violation where a hotel allowed customers to remotely access videos, the court found that by allowing customers to remotely record television shows on servers outside the home, Cablevision was “copying” and then “transmitting” “to the public” in violation of the Copy Right Act.  Law.com has a good article on the case.   The photo on the right shows a pre-historic video recording system that may have been the type used by the hotel.

In many respects, this decision is troubling.  In the year 2007, consumers are storing documents, and videos, on hard drives or servers located outside the home.  This is our life and our future.   If the Cablevision customer owned a Tivo and copied television shows on the Tivo would this be a copyright violation?  No.   If the customer leased the Tivo, would the lessor of the equipment be violating the Copyright Act?  No.   If the customer stored  the television show, for the customer’s personal use, on a server she owned located in a carrier hotel there would be no violation.   But if a third party owned that server, Judge Chin would have held, and did hold, that the third party owner of the hardware violates the copyright laws.  

Does this opinion mean that there is a violation of the copyright laws when an end-user copies any copyrighted information – a book, a poem, a movie – on a remote server, solely controlled by the end-user like a RS-DVR?   I hope this is not the future.  I think that relying on pre-historic 1967 video tape case law when dealing with an internet issue – which this is – will lead only to confusion and market stagnation.  The U.S. will be left behind if the courts are not careful to give end users the flexibility to copy what they want – when it is for their own use – and to let them store it for retrieval where they want.