A few weeks after being killed in District Court, Cablevision is taking their network DVR concept to a higher authority. Cablevision really only has three options: Broker deals as Time Warner has, drop the idea, or continue the fight. Guess what they chose? According to Multichannel News…
Hoping to revive plans to pursue a network-based digital-video-recorder system, Cablevision Systems said it plans to appeal a decision last month from a New York federal district court that found that its RS-DVR would violate the copyrights of ABC, Fox and other studios and networks.
âWe continue to believe strongly that remote-storage DVR is permissible under current copyright law and offers significant benefits to consumers, including lower costs and faster deployment of this popular technology to our digital-cable customers,â? Cablevision chief operating officer Tom Rutledge said in a prepared statement regarding the appeal, which Cablevision said it will file Tuesday at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
An industry person I chatted with suggested one of the sticking points might be that the end product (rather than the scheduling component) looks an awful lot like an On Demand service in which royalties and usage rights have previously been negotiated.