Slashdot Mirror
Fox Sues Dish Over "Auto Hop" Ad-Skipping Feature
therealobsideus writes "Dish recently announced Auto Hop, giving its customers with the Hopper DVR the ability to 'hop' past commercial break on recordings. In response, Fox has filed suit against Dish in U.S. District Court, seeking to block the technology." The L.A. Times has coverage, too. Fox claims that giving viewers the ability to skip commercials on recorded television shows demonstrates the "clear goal of violating copyrights and destroying the fundamental underpinnings of the broadcast television ecosystem."
Whoever didn't see this coming.... can I have your job?
That said... "clear goal of violating copyrights and destroying the fundamental underpinnings of the broadcast television ecosystem." *facepalm* The Internet is SUPPOSED to destroy ecosystems built on artificial scarcity. Free markets and black swans are a bitch, aren't they?
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Good! Let's tear down that century-old ecosystem, including the business models of those leeches. They're dying anyway. Let's start over from scratch and figure out how we can do it again, this time in ways that don't require stunting technological innovation.
Not watching commercials is NOT violation of copyright.
If this is illegal, what the fuck is a DVR? What the fuck is a VCR? Both can be used to circumvent commercials.
Man, I hope they get their ass smacked down for this, just as those other idiots did in the past in the other lawsuits.
Just ask ReplayTV how well this works out in the end.
Oh, I wouldn't be surprised at all. Next thing will be NoScript getting declared the tool of terrorists and child pornographers and banned.
Actually, Fox isn't milking the consumers, they're milking their ad customers (companies, not you. You're the product they're selling). I'm pretty sure Fox knows that nobody watches their ads anymore, but this would make it blatantly obvious.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
What really makes me wonder what these idiots are smoking is if average Joe gets up and looks for snacks , grabs his wife's boobs, accidentally sharts and has to hit the bathroom, is he violating the contract that makes TV possible?
Why aren't people who pay for cable TV being taxed (so to speak) twice? Once for the subscription and once again for the fucking ads? One of cable TVs big "draws" in the early days was "no commercials..." That didn't last.
Basically we have a bunch of suits who have no idea how stupid they sound... I don't know what's more sad, the idea itself or the actual spreading of the idea... I have this sneaking suspicion no one at Fox (Hey Rupert, suck my crank!) has a voice in their head that tells them "that's a bad idea... keep it to yourself." I imagine they learned about electricity by sticking a fork in a light socket too.
Explains a great many things, I think.. Suffice to say, is there anyone sane left in the entertainment industry? My decision to skip the theater and rental counter is becoming a better and better idea.
I think Joe Sixpack slapped with a lawsuit for getting beer might wake the sheeple up enough to say "what the fuck?" instead of "ooooh. I gotta drop mad bank on a 3D tv so I can experience movies how they were MEANT to be seen! To the Best Buy!"
It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
I was actually quite surprised recently when I re-order cable television to watch the Canucks lose in the first round of the playoffs.. I was surprised at all the products, movies, and television that I had no idea about until I saw commercials on tv for the first time in two years. Maybe I'm unique, but I doubt that. I think commericals and advertisements have more effect on us than most people are willing to admit. I'll go out on a limb and say that advertising via commericals on television still works for companies (especially clever and memorable ones such as Coke or Apple)
Honestly, I don't really care about the TV issue one way or the other; but the potential precedent is ugly.
If Dish's plan were to tape the broadcasts, chop out the chaff, and send you the final cut, that'd be a clear-cut case of a copyright infringing unauthorized derivative work.
However, their actual implementation, as best I've been able to tell, doesn't modify the copyrighted source material at all, it just adds specific automated behavior to the playback device. If that is 'copyright infringement' then virtually anything a playback device might choose to get fancy about is subject to the veto of team content. Automatic volume reduction on your music when you get a phone call? Sure. Replaygain volume normalization? Sure. Stretching or letterboxing to put 4:3 on 16:9 or vice-versa? Why certainly. Applying a custom CSS stylesheet to a website against the operator's wishes? You bet.
Yes, it may well happen to be true that OTA broadcasts aren't going to be helped by easy commercial skipping; but something isn't 'copyright infringement' merely because it happens to be bad for the checkbooks of people who hold copyrights. It also has to, y'know, infringe. In this case, if the definition of 'infringement' is stretched far enough to save our poor, beleaguered, broadcasters it is stretched far enough to allow near-total control over any device that handles rendering of copyrighted material, which is virtually anything.
Compared to that, letting all of broadcast TV burn looks like a fantastic idea, even if you are otherwise sympathetic to it...
I wonder if these folks would be shocked to hear that even VCR's had a feature known as 'Fast Forward'. It was a ground breaking function that allowed one to skip content they did not want to see on a recording.
Fox has a point, oh my god I will go to hell for that, TV broadcasting gets it money by giving YOU TV and advertisters eyeballs to watch the commercials.
If Fox can't generate sufficient revenue to continue broadcasting, because people are skipping ads, then Fox should stop broadcasting.
They shouldn't sue people that aren't watching the ads.
That expectation that the law must protect their outmoded (and exploitative) business models is what fucks me off so much about the media industries. Find a new business model. Find a new business. Engage and embrace your customers, because clearly they want to watch Fox, they just don't want fucking adverts.
There is a big problem with online TV, from the perspective of companies like Fox: it is very easy for the studios to go directly to their customers. Fox is essentially a publisher. They buy or commission TV shows and then broadcast them with adverts to recoup their original costs and make a profit. If they don't want a show, the studio has few alternatives for distribution, because the airwaves only provide a limited amount of space. On the Internet, this is not the case, as long as someone is willing to pay for it then the studios can keep producing their shows and can keep distributing them. Why would they need the likes of Fox? And, if every show that Fox cancels ends up being directly funded by fans and continuing, who would care about Fox?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News