Providers of DVR boxes that record and modify "broadcast"
TV come in two
kinds:
- Independent equipment makers, who (like Sony in the
Betamax trials) provide a tool that consumers may use to
mangle content that
the consumer acquires elsewhere. This
is hard to prosecute. (Unless they go
into the territory of
producing and publishing tables of what to skip in each
show, there was a case a few years back against a religious
group who
published scripts that would skip the "morally
bad" parts of specific movies,
so proselytes could rent/buy
the sinful DVD plus the script to get the
bowdlerized
version; but I don't recall the outcome)
- Wholesale
rebroadcasting companies such as ComCast or
local network affiliate stations
which purchase the
broadcasts in bulk and sell them to consumers, with various
bonus features (such as a DVR) built into their decoder
boxes. These will
generally have lengthy contracts limiting
what they can do to the broadcasts.
For instance, there are
usually clauses prohibiting them from replacing the
commercials that the network got paid to air by other
commercials that the
broadcaster got paid to air.
If Dish networks belongs to the
second category, they may
be in hot contractual water, just as if they had
configured
their boxes to replace the commercials by competing
commercials.
And there is probably plenty of precedent for
stopping the latter behavior by
local "affiliates".
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
|
