Fox Appeals the Hopper Decision

[LKellerIII]

I understand why "ad-hop" would scare the pants off the commercial TV industry, but somebody please explain to me how skipping commercials can be considered "copyright infringement." Seems like a stretch to me. Does that mean if I get up during a commercial break to get a snack, I'm infringing on somebody's copyright? Granted I'm stretching the premise a little, but the whole thing is ludicrous.

I don't know how ad-hop works, technically speaking, but my DVR and On-Demand from Comcast already has a feature that lets you skip 5 minutes forward or backward. It seems to me that all you would have to do is adjust that skip feature to the length of a commercial break, and you'd essentially have a crude version of ad-hop.

And are people really too lazy to fast-forward thru commercials? It's not a problem for me.

Try watching some on-demand content from the broadcast networks on Comcast or Verizon. The fast forward is disabled. The networks don't want you fast forwarding though the commercials. Last time I watched something from FOX, it's like they just recorded the half hour commercials and all and will not let you fast forward through it.

Only some networks disable fast-forward for On-Demand - Fox, NBC, and ABC come to mind. They supply their programming to Comcast voluntarily, of course, so as far as I'm concerned, it's their right to do so. But programming I record on my DVR is a different matter. People have been recording shows and skipping commercials for over 30 years now, since the early days of the VCR. But DVRs make it so much easier.

Regarding the post above that recording shows, then burning them on a disk and selling them to friends is "piracy" - I agree. But who does that? Practically nobody, I would guess. The vast majority of people DVR shows so they can time shift them and watch them at their convenience. Being able to skip commercials is a bonus.

 

[Nate Wesley]

Did he forget that they scored that Usinger's Sausage touchdown while in the Heinz Red Zone?

I don't watch enough sports to know if that was a joke or not but the SEC on CBS does have the "Verizon Red Zone".

Spend enough time on SportsCenter, and you'll be asked to provide "Coors Cold Hard Facts". And if you fail, you'll be placed in the "Budweiser Hot Seat"!

 

[landtuna]

Regarding the post above that recording shows, then burning them on a disk and selling them to friends is "piracy" - I agree. But who does that? Practically nobody, I would guess. The vast majority of people DVR shows so they can time shift them and watch them at their convenience. Being able to skip commercials is a bonus.

In our house, if someone needs a show recorded and stored for any length of time it goes onto a flash stick. Burning a DVD takes too much time and usually wastes much of the media. The only burning I do anymore are those shows I want to save for posterity and there are very few of those.

 

[ding12]

The legal question probably becomes, who's doing the recording? A case can be made that it's you, the subscriber, doing the recording, in which case it's OK. A case can also be made that it's Dish that's doing the recording. Again remembering that I'm not a lawyer, I would think that if you're leasing (not buying) the Hopper and/or any necessary commercial-spotting service, it would greatly bolster the case that it's Dish doing the recording.

From here:
http://dishtv.com/blog/2012/08/03/what-is-primetime-anytime-from-dish/

The Hopper is more than a leased DVR.

Dish automatically records the primetime network content through PrimeTime Anytime™, assuming the user has this feature turned on, and there is AutoHop™ which can be enable commercial free viewing. With those settings on, the device has edited the content, which I don't believe is permitted regarding the redistribution of it.

 

[LKellerIII]

Regarding the post above that recording shows, then burning them on a disk and selling them to friends is "piracy" - I agree. But who does that? Practically nobody, I would guess. The vast majority of people DVR shows so they can time shift them and watch them at their convenience. Being able to skip commercials is a bonus.

In our house, if someone needs a show recorded and stored for any length of time it goes onto a flash stick. Burning a DVD takes too much time and usually wastes much of the media. The only burning I do anymore are those shows I want to save for posterity and there are very few of those.

Me neither. I still have 2 of those old VHS drawer units full of shows from the 80s that I either "kept for posterity" or just never got around to watching. My VHS still works, and I keep meaning to go through them, but I'll probably never get to it. My kids will probably throw them away after my death...hopefully 40 years from now. ;D

In these days of You Tube and everything on line, I feel no compulsion to record big news events for posterity, and I rarely watch any shows more than once, so I haven't kept any shows or news events for years now.

 

[nomadcowatbk]

Did he forget that they scored that Usinger's Sausage touchdown while in the Heinz Red Zone?

I don't watch enough sports to know if that was a joke or not but the SEC on CBS does have the "Verizon Red Zone".

it's the "Case IH Red Zone" at Mizzou games

 

[w9wi]

Is the Supreme Court ruling in the Betamax case on home video recording in the 80's being totally ignored in all this?

I don't think so -- I think there's a discernable difference between the Betamax case & what's happening here. Obviously Dish disagrees, or they wouldn't have spent that kind of money developing the thing. I guess we'll know someday!

 

[Poledo]

When I switched from MediaCom to UVerse the installer told me that they planned to soon offer an external USB hard drive to archive shows and movies. It's been bout 5 years now and I haven't seen as much as a rumbling of such a feature coming soon. Anyone know anything?

 

[LKellerIII]

Did he forget that they scored that Usinger's Sausage touchdown while in the Heinz Red Zone?

I don't watch enough sports to know if that was a joke or not but the SEC on CBS does have the "Verizon Red Zone".

it's the "Case IH Red Zone" at Mizzou games

My favorite here in the Bay Area is in the SF Giants broadcasts on Comcast Sports Net. Every time either team changes pitchers, the play-by-play announcer says; "Time for a change - brought to you by Speedy Oil Change..."

During the recent World Series broadcasts (on Fox), there was no Speedy Oil Change when the teams changed pitchers. I kind of missed it.

 

[ngriffin]

Betamax will probably play a big role in this case. One thing that is different than traditional VCR or DVR recording, though, is with most home recording, you initiate it. With the Hopper, the prime time feeds are automatically recorded, without any intervention from you.

Another, mentioned above, is Dish sending down the timing information on commercials. In the early days of DVDs, there was a company that licensed a feature that would "censor" a DVD for bad language, sex, violence, etc. I forget the name but I think RCA had it on some other DVD players. The way I remember it was that the DVD player was loaded with the timing information so that when the standard movie-company issued DVD was played, the player knew which parts to skip over. There were some lawsuits over that feature, but I don't remember how they turned out. The similarity would be that one company is sending out timing cues to affect playback of another company's intellectual property with the featured turned on or off by the end user.

 

[vchimpanzee]

Me neither. I still have 2 of those old VHS drawer units full of shows from the 80s that I either "kept for posterity" or just never got around to watching. My VHS still works, and I keep meaning to go through them, but I'll probably never get to it. My kids will probably throw them away after my death...hopefully 40 years from now. ;D

In these days of You Tube and everything on line, I feel no compulsion to record big news events for posterity, and I rarely watch any shows more than once, so I haven't kept any shows or news events for years now.

I used to feel the need to record a lot of stuff on cassettes, and when I tried to listen to a 40-year-old cassette it din't work. Turns out the tape recorder was just broken, but it was a nice one from Radio Shack and that shouldn't have happebned. I bought a cheap one from Kmart so we'll see. I've been afraid to try up until now.

But in recent years I haven't felt the urge to keep stuff. I still do it with some newspaper articles but I've got way too many and need to throw stuff out.

Ironically, if you want to keep stuff for posterity, you WANT to keep old commercials.

I fast-forward through a lot of commercials, but I watch just enough TV live that I've seen the Amica commercials with the "Deck the Halls" music many, many times. I've seen every Amica commercial numerous times. I've had it up to here with T-Mobile's Kalamazoo commercials, especially since one of my email addresses forced that one on my more times than I can count, and I think that's also what kept shutting the web site down. I really want that girl to go back to the cute ads, where she looked so hot in her pink dresses, that parodied the Apple commercials. Which didn't work for me because I saw the PC guy as cool. Jack in the Box, Zaxby's, Subway, Old Navy ... I don't think anyone is failing to get their message to me.

 

[nomadcowatbk]

Betamax will probably play a big role in this case. One thing that is different than traditional VCR or DVR recording, though, is with most home recording, you initiate it. With the Hopper, the prime time feeds are automatically recorded, without any intervention from you.

Another, mentioned above, is Dish sending down the timing information on commercials. In the early days of DVDs, there was a company that licensed a feature that would "censor" a DVD for bad language, sex, violence, etc. I forget the name but I think RCA had it on some other DVD players. The way I remember it was that the DVD player was loaded with the timing information so that when the standard movie-company issued DVD was played, the player knew which parts to skip over. There were some lawsuits over that feature, but I don't remember how they turned out. The similarity would be that one company is sending out timing cues to affect playback of another company's intellectual property with the featured turned on or off by the end user.

you're probably thinking of the Utah based Clearplay, there was another Utah company that sold edited DVDs along with the original DVD that was sued out of business

 

[arnoldevns]

I understand why "ad-hop" would scare the pants off the commercial TV industry, but somebody please explain to me how skipping commercials can be considered "copyright infringement." Seems like a stretch to me. Does that mean if I get up during a commercial break to get a snack, I'm infringing on somebody's copyright? Granted I'm stretching the premise a little, but the whole thing is ludicrous.

I don't know how ad-hop works, technically speaking, but my DVR and On-Demand from Comcast already has a feature that lets you skip 5 minutes forward or backward. It seems to me that all you would have to do is adjust that skip feature to the length of a commercial break, and you'd essentially have a crude version of ad-hop.

And are people really too lazy to fast-forward thru commercials? It's not a problem for me.

I think Fox's contention is that the automated nature of the hopper changes the overall presentation of their signals to the viewer and hence violates the copyright. It's one thing of the viewer records the show and scans or skips the commercials as they watch. It's another if it's automatically done for them.

I'm not sure Fox has a good legal argument here, but this whole discussion should provide some clear guidance for the way all this new technology is dealt with in the future.

 

[nomadcowatbk]

Clearplay is still in business, there's also another company that sells a device that mutes out words based off the closed captioning

http://www.tvguardian.com/gshell.php

 

[FreddyE1977]

Prediction: This case will go all the way to the Supreme Court, where they will
rule it to be a tax.

 

[vchimpanzee]

I don't need Hopper for anything with Sofia Vergara in it.

 

[Rube Dali the DodoHorse]

Prediction: This case will go all the way to the Supreme Court, where they will
rule it to be a tax.

DishNetworkCare? Sorry, I had to go there.