Technology & the Law: 2nd Circuit OK’s Cablevision’s DVR System

[WSJ_law_blog]

The Second Circuit gave copyright professors a good deal to chew on this afternoon with its decision to throw out a lower court’s ruling that blocked Cablevision from introducing a new remote-storage DVR system. The Cablevision DVR lets customers store recorded television shows on a central server, rather than on a hard drive in the customers’ home, like standard DVRs.

Here’s the story from WSJ colleague Chad Bray.

Cablevision argued that there was no difference between the remote-storage system and a standard DVR, so it shouldn’t be required to pay additional licensing fees.

Judge John Walker, writing for a three-judge panel, agreed. He concluded: “Because each RS-DVR playback transmission is made to a single subscriber using a single unique copy produced by that subscriber, we conclude that such transmissions are not performances ‘to the public,’ and therefore do not infringe any exclusive right of public performance.”

Representing Cablevision were Baker Botts’s Jeffrey Lamken, Robert Kry, Joshua Klein and Timothy Macht. On the side of the content-providers, which included News Corp.’s Twentieth Century Fox; Time Warner’s The Cartoon Network and CNN, NBC and Disney were Cravath’s Katherine Forrest and Antony Ryan, as well as Arnold & Porter’s Robert Alan Garrett, Hadrian Katz, Jon Michaels, Peter Zimroth and Eleanor Lackman.