Obama Urges Justices to Avoid ‘Cablevision’ Copyright Case

Submitted by MacRonin on June 1, 2009 - 6:44pm

Obama Urges Justices to Avoid ‘Cablevision’ Copyright Case: Via Threat Level.

The Obama administration is urging the Supreme Court to let stand a copyright case testing whether cable operators may permit customers to store television programming on company servers to be viewed at a later time.

The issue concerns an August ruling by a federal appeals court, which lifted an injunction against Cablevision Systems blocking it from offering customers a recording service that stores programming on the cable company’s own servers instead of on viewers’ in-house playback devices.

Hollywood and television programmers maintain Cablevision’s service directly infringes their exclusive rights to both reproduce and publicly perform their copyrighted works. On appeal, they told the high court that the copyright case was the most important lawsuit following the justices’ 1984 ruling declaring American consumers had a fair use right to use videocassette machines and record copyrighted movies at home.

Ben Sheffner, the attorney behind the Copyrights & Campaigns blog who once worked on the case on behalf of Fox, says the government’s brief (.pdf) points out some procedural problems the Justice Department maintains makes the lawsuit unworthy of the high court’s time.

“The brief also notes that the parties’ agreement to take both indirect liability and fair use off the table ‘distorts the questions that remain and would prevent the court from seeing the whole fundamental controversy in this case,’ making it an ‘unsuitable vehicle for clarifying the applicable legal framework,’” Sheffner writes.

The court is not obligated to follow the Obama administration’s recommendation. The justices asked the administration for its position in January.

Hollywood’s lead attorney on the Cablevision case was Donald B. Verrilli Jr., a former Recording Industry Association of America lawyer and partner in the law firm of Jenner & Block. He is now a high-ranking Justice Department official.

Verrilli’s law firm boss was Tom Perrelli, also a former RIAA attorney who President-elect Barack Obama has tapped to head the Justice Department’s civil division.

There are at least five former RIAA attorneys Obama has named to the Justice Department.

(It should be noted that the Solicitor General, a unit of the Justice Department, submitted Friday’s brief to the high court.)

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