High court declines to hear DVR case

June 29, 2009 The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear a challenge from television networks and Hollywood studios alleging the remote-storage architecture violates copyright laws. The high court's decision to reject the complaint affirms an earlier ruling by the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which found that Cablevision's network DVR service, which stores captured content on servers at the head-end, is fundamentally identical to what end-users experience while using traditional set-top DVR. Following the lead of Turner Broadcasting's CNN and Cartoon Network, a consortium of television networks and studios -- including ABC, NBC, CBS, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal, Paramount and Disney -- first called for an injunction against the nDVR concept in May 2006, arguing that the service would effectively allow the MSO to rebroadcast network programming at will, a violation of copyright law.

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