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Posted on 05/09/2002 6:12:41 PM PDT by hauerf
What if the owners of TV shows and movies had the right to come into your house and find out what you watched? What if they told you not to skip over commercials, warning that it amounted to stealing their property? What if they thought that even going to the bathroom during a commercial was a technical violation of copyright law?
This is pretty much the insane state of copyright disputes, circa 2002.
Content owners have convinced a judge that SonicBlue must hand over any data it has on how its subscribers use its ReplayTV broadband digital video recorder. The content guys are looking for proof that viewers use ReplyTV to share recordings with friends or to skip over commercials, a feature they claim violates the implicit license with which the programming is distributed.
Central District Court Magistrate Charles F. Eick told SonicBlue to send "all available information'' about how consumers use the device to the film studios and television networks suing the firm for copyright infringement. "We've been ordered to invade the privacy of our customers,'' said Ken Potashner, SonicBlue's chairman and chief executive.
Meanwhile, the new chairman and CEO of the Turner Broadcasting System, Jamie Kellner, told an industry magazine that bathroom breaks only get "tolerance" from the network suits. "Any time you skip a commercial…you're actually stealing the programming," Kellner said. "I guess there's a certain amount of tolerance for going to the bathroom. But if you formalize it and you create a device that skips certain second increments, you've got that only for one reason, unless you go to the bathroom for 30 seconds. They've done that just to make it easy for someone to skip a commercial."
As wacky as all this sounds, it is simply a continuation of the assault on the fair use rights of consumers that has been under way for nearly 20 years now. That doctrine held that if you weren't trying to resell something and make a buck off it, you could pretty much do whatever you wanted with copyrighted material.
The content owners, helped along by the courts and Congress, have just about extinguished fair use in the digital age. In fact, big media companies have explicitly said that fair use does not exist for digital media. They maintain that final and complete say on how copyrighted digital material may be viewed, listened to, distributed, and stored always and forever resides with the copyright holder.
From that position it is a straight shot to saying that, no, you may not go to the bathroom during a commercial. Your license permits you to pause the program and watch the commercial when you return. And your viewership records indicate you haven't been doing that.
RadioFR on NOW!
"Unspun" with AnnaZ and Mercuria!
Tonights guests...RON PAUL, GARY ALDRICH, SHEMANE NUGENT and JEFF HEAD!
ON NOW!
Flipping to another channel during commericals will soon be illegal too.
Sounds fair to me...
the infowarrior
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