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.”

In a recent case, television studios realized that a certain individual had gotten a copy of a number of episodes of the popular Fox television show 24. These episodes had yet to be aired, but were soon uploaded to the Internet. The individual was charged with “uploading copyrighted material…knowing the work was intended for commercial distribution.” The episodes were first uploaded to the website LiveDigital, but quickly reached YouTube, therefore both “were served subpoenas under the DMCA demanding they disclose the identities of the users who uploaded the episodes.” In this landmark case, the individual could receive a rather severe punishment. Not only were the uploaded episodes considered valuable because of the popularity of 24 and the fact they hadn’t been aired yet, but copyright officials are trying to use this case as an example for future pirates. Normally, Internet copyright infringement cases are taken up against “user share sites.” The fact that an individual did the same gives copyright officials more incentive to protect “‘the rights of the content owners who invest millions of dollars in a television series must be protected.’”

Twentieth Century Fox, who produces 24 and is a major studio in the television industry “hopes it [this case] will serve as a powerful warning that uploading copyrighted TV shows and movies to the Internet can be a crime with significant penalties and will be prosecuted as such. ”It seems fair to say that this particular studio is not alone in their beliefs. It also seems that the individual prosecuted in the 24 case is being so harshly is so that others will be deterred from attempting the same. Television copyright officials “have no choice but to take it seriously, because if they don’t catch it early, they won’t be able to stop it at all ’” Without enforcing harsh punishments, illegal downloading and uploading of copyrighted material will continue to the point that there will be no laws to prevent it or punish for it. Officials are implementing harsh penalties, but more importantly they are putting into effect laws that are current with the technology.