I just got an email from the Center for Democracy and Technology about a case in NY where a U.S. District Court issued a ruling blocking the cable television provider Cablevision from rolling out a “remote storage” digital video recorder (DVR) system.
DVR is the “on demand” service that allows you to watch previously recorded shows. I don’t have it because TV-wise I’m stuck in the Twentieth century (and not the last decade) but I know it’s a popular service because like TiVo it allows you to store up a bunch of programs until you have time to watch. The difference with the DVR that has been blocked is that normally the saved programs are stored on the customer’s location; remote DVR would save programs on the servers at the provider’s location.
The television and cable producers (such as Twentieth Century Fox, The Cartoon Network, and others) were the ones who didn’t like the idea of remote storage. Again the distinction is who is recording the programs and where it is stored and whether DVR is considered a device (as is the case when it locally stores programs) or a service. (You can learn more on the Center for Democracy and Technology web site.)
This reminds me a lot of the common carrier issues that faced Internet service providers in the 1990s. The issue back then was any issues of censorship and culpability of the service providers. The decision back then was to think of ISPs as being akin to phone providers. They just provided the forum not the format or content for information.
What I think is difficult in these situations is that the nuances are lost on the consumer but are big issues to the providers. In the short term it makes sense to the consumer to want to remotely store programs or to blame the ISP for censoring or not censoring materials – but in the long term these are big issues about civil liberties and intellectual property.
