Copyright Alliance files Amicus Brief with U.S. Supreme Court.
This week the Copyright Alliance issued a press release that it had filed an Amicus Curiae Brief with the United States Supreme Court. The Alliance asks the Court to review a Second Circuit ruling in the case of Cartoon Network v. CSC Holdings, Inc. According to the press release, “the Copyright Alliance has never before filed a brief in any court, but is impelled to do so in this case because the decision below could be so detrimental to the health of our copyright system…Although this case arose in the context of reproduction and public performance of audio-visual works by a cable systems operator, its potential impact across copyright industries is much broader.”
The case was complicated, but boils down to this: cable operators may record on their own servers content for their customers to watch at a later time. DVRs that provide time-shifting of content don’t have to sit at your home, cluttering up your entertainment center. They can exist in the “cloud” on Internet server farms owned by cable operators such as CableVision. (TiVo is already wincing…)
The Copyright Alliance argues that the Second Circuit’s decision in Cartoon Network fundamentally undermines the laws protecting content owners. In fact, the holding was recently used successfully to challenge the Copyright Office’s guidelines for mechanical royalties applicable to Internet radio. The new Interim Rulewas released for comment on November 7, 2008, and states that “a Server-end copy that is the source of a transmission of a performance that does not result in the making and distribution of a [Digital Phonorecord Delivery] would not fall within the scope of compulsory license.” For those of you who don’t read Governmentese, that means that listening to music on Pandora is not the same as buying the same music from Rhapsody. Or in the real world, listening to the radio isn’t the same as buying a CD.
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