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Court Upholds Ruling On Dish Network's 'Hopper'
An anonymous reader writes "The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court's ruling in favor of Dish Network, allowing the company to continue forward with it ad-skipping "Hopper" technology. From the article: 'Last year, Fox Broadcasting Company, with the support of other broadcast networks, sued Dish for its "Hopper" DVR and its "Auto Hop" feature, which automatically skips over commercials. According to the Fox, the Hopper automatically records eight days' worth of prime time programming on the four major networks that subscribers can play back on request. Beginning a few hours after the broadcast, viewers can choose to watch a program without ads. As we observed when the it started, this litigation was yet another in a long and ignominious series of efforts by content owners to use copyright law to control the features of personal electronic devices, and to capture for themselves the value of new technologies no matter who invents them.'"
This is about "broadcast" networks. They can't have their cake, and eat it, too. In exchange for getting use of public airwaves to make a profit, the public has a right to use what's broadcast.
Next step - in what way is putting content on the public airwaves not placing it in the public domain?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
The tacit agreement has been broken for a long time as the networks have continued to lower the value of the content and raise the "price" (number of ad minutes per minute of programming) to ridiculous levels. Watching June Cleaver talk about how Palm Olive made her hands soft while doing dishes at the end of the show vs. 3 minutes of ads for tampons, antidepressants, beer, Chrysler, personal injury attorneys, car insurance, pizza snacks, and GEICO before watching another 5 minutes of the newest SyFy shark/bear/icthysaurus hybrid (ick on all levels) are really worlds apart. Oh yeah, and that on top of paying $70/month to Comcast (remember when cable was advertising-free?) for that in the first place!