Dave Horvath
25 May 2006 6:01
Four major Hollywood studios including the likes of Universal and Disney are suing the fifth largest cable television provider in the U.S., Cablevision. The suit is over their controversial network digital video recorder (DVR). This network DVR would enable users to store digital copies of their favorite television broadcasts over the internet in a centrally located server farm. This technology is in contrast to existing systems such as Tivo, who's solution allows users to save programs on hard drives that are located inside the device in their homes.
Television subscribers have long since been allowed to store their favorite programs for private viewing, but Cablevision's service has raised objections from the production studios in that now a third party organization will have control over licensed material they have not paid for.
"Cablevision is actually copying, storing and retransmitting it," said Kori Bernard, a spokeswoman for studio industry group the Motion Picture Association of America. "A commercial entity can't establish a for-profit, on-demand service without authorization from copyright owners whose content is used on that service," she said.
Cablevision remains confident that their service, although located on a server in their own facility, allows subscribers to access material in their own digital space that they themselves have copied. Cablevision executives have stated that "This lawsuit is without merit, reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of Cablevision's remote-storage DVR and ignores the enormous benefit and well-established right of viewers to time-shift television programming."
Source:
Reuters UK