Optus
loses TV Now appeal
This is a case I've tried to follow here in Aus.
Optus is a telecommunications provider, and TV Now is an online service they
provide which lets you record free to air television and play it back on your
phone.
AFL is the Australian Football League, and they recently sold the
broadcast rights to a free to air channel, a pay TV network and Telstra (a rival
telecommunications provider) for ~$5b. Of this $5b, Telstra paid
$153m for the exclusive rights to broadcast over the Internet to their
customers (and hence, to mobile phones).
The argument from Telstra and
the AFL are that Telstra paid for the exclusive rights to broadcast over the
Internet, but Optus is stealing the broadcast from the free to air provider and
selling it to its customers.
Optus is arguing that there are existing
provisions in the copyright act which allow people to record television for
their own personal use, and they are just facilitating it.
This result
really irks me, because it gets to the crux of abusing copyright law to entrench
themselves in the 20th century model of selling content. The appeal was won by
Telstra and the AFL because of (what I refer to as) a technicality: Even though
it is the user who makes their recording (presumably by pressing the record
button on their phone), Optus is the one actually conducting the recording
exercise.
My main concern is: we can currently use a Home Theater PC
(HTPC) to stream TV to laptops throughout a house. You can watch TV live on
different devices in the house. It is only a matter of time before somebody
writes a plugin for MythTV which compresses live TV on the fly, to the point
where I will be able to watch live TV (received from my own personal PC and its
TV tuner) on (my own personal) mobile phone via 3G. Will they say that is
illegal because I'm watching free to air TV over the Internet, but Telstra has
exclusive rights to this?
Once this type of technology is available, it
would be relatively easy for someone with a bit of technical knowhow to set up a
HTPC which broadcasts live free to air TV to their phone over the internet. But
good luck getting the average sports fan to set this up in their own home. So
what about if a company goes and does it for them, but instead of in their home,
they do it via some online service? It is extremely easy to deploy new servers
on demand in the "cloud". They are saying that the online service is illegal. My
fear is that this implies that my HTPC is illegal too.
It also means
that when we get to the stage that we can implement what was previously only
done on hardware, via software and online services, we are not allowed
to.
Please excuse my rant, you may be able to tell that this frustrates
me greatly!!!
Cheers,
pete. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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