CDT on Friday joined with a substantial group of public interest advocates and industry associations — from EFF to the U.S. Telecom Association and many others — in filing a brief in the federal appeal concerning Cablevision’s plan to deploy a “remote digital video recorder” service. The service would act just like a TiVo or other DVR device, except that it would store recorded programs on a server at a remote location instead of on a hard drive inside a small black box sitting next to the consumer’s television. But a lower court held that Cablevision can’t deploy the service because it would violate copyright.

Hopefully the participation of so many signatories on the brief will send a message to the court that there’s more at stake here than just the fate of a particular DVR product. The lower court’s decision in this case runs roughshod over the important distinction between a person who makes a copy himself and a person who provides the means — say, a xerox machine or a VCR — for someone else to make a copy. That may sound technical, but it’s an important distinction. Those who offer machines or services with perfectly lawful uses shouldn’t be on the hook every time someone uses them in an illegal way. Unfortunately, the lower court’s decision implies that this key principle of copyright law shouldn’t apply to modern services that deliver some capabilities remotely.

That kind of remote capability isn’t some kind of rare quirk. We’re living in a networked world. Services and devices of all kinds will connect to and be offered over the Internet, with little regard for geography. So there is no reason that the law should fixate on the physical location of the machines used to deliver a service. Location really isn’t important; liability for a machine that uses remote components connected by the network should be evaluated under the same principles that apply to any other machine with copying capabilities.

So the precedent here is important. With any luck, the court will see the serious implications of the decision below and reject its flawed reasoning. Check out our Policy Post from April for further details on this critical case.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 11th, 2007 at 4:43 pm and is filed under Digital Copyright. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.