In a copyright infringement case, the judge ruled against the company Cablevision.  Customers were given a DVR remote to store television shows where “the hard drive itself was stored on Cablevision property.”  The courts decided that this made “Cablevision liable for reproducing and transmitting the programs without permission.” In other words, when Cablevision customers record television shows, no matter if they actually watch them or not (“buffer copies”), Cablevision is responsible for creating this “infringing copy.” Since all the saved programs are stored in Cablevision’s hard drive, the shows are then transmitted to the user after the broadcast, whenever they choose to watch their show.  Thus, officials are claiming that Cablevision “needs to manipulate signals in order to record the shows a user has selected” and, in essence, calling the company a “broadcast pirate.” The Cablevision case “does nothing to curb piracy”; if anything it “discourages innovation.” Also, it seems that Cablevision did nothing to actually infringe any copyright laws, which “center not on the details of the machinery, but on how the rights in a work are affected.” This is a major problem for the officials who deal with copyright laws.  If DVR and other recording techniques become so complicated and so afflicted with copyright laws, consumers may refuse to use them; thus, consumers would not be able to keep up with their favorite shows and probably never be willing to buy the DVD box sets later in life.  These copyright laws could negatively affect the market more so than DVRS (what they see to be the problem in this case) ever would have.

Consumers using Cablevision were not affecting how the works were used, the general market was in no way affected, and there was no copyright infringement.  Therefore, it seems that all this lawsuit did was enrage the public and prove that copyright laws are only “being used as a tool to scrape more money from wherever the studios can get some.”