Obama Administration Sides With Technology Over Hollywood In Cablevision Case

from the finally! dept

It's no secret that those of us who have been in favor of pushing back against the worst abuses of intellectual property law have been disappointed by the Obama administration -- which brought in a number of entertainment industry lawyers and seemed to side with IP holders over the public at almost every turn... until now. We've talked about the importance of the lawsuit over Cablevision's remote DVR system, and whether it represented copyright infringement. The appeals court had ruled that just because the DVR was hosted at Cablevision's datacenter instead of in a house it wasn't infringement. This makes perfect sense. Yet the entertainment industry has been claiming that allowing Cablevision to host DVRs on its own premise is infringement and Cablevision has to pay extra for the right to offer the same exact TiVo-type service that anyone can use in their home. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court asked the new Solicitor General to weigh in. At the time, we noted that this could be a good thing, since one of the last things Solicitor General Elena Kagan did before leaving Harvard to join the administration was recruit Larry Lessig to Harvard.

And, indeed, it appears that Kagan has not succumbed to entertainment industry's tortured logic on this issue and has recommended that the Supreme Court not take the case, saying that the appeals court ruling reasonably resolved the issues in the case. Either way, it's nice to see that the administration hasn't been totally taken over by those who believe in twisting copyright law to protect obsolete business models.

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