A U.S. appeals court on Monday ruled that Cablevision’s DVR service does not infringe on the rights of subject matter holders.

“We do not believe that an RS-DVR customer is sufficiently distinguishable from a VCR user to impose liability as a direct infringer on a different party for copies that are made automatically upon that customer’s command,” according to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Cablevision’s RS-DVR Paradigm

Cablevision offers a different type of DVR than the traditional TiVo. The company is pushing what’s called RS-DVR, or remote storage digital video recorder, service. From the customer’s end, the service works just like a TiVo. But the shows aren’t stored on a hard drive within a set-top box. Rather, the shows are stored on Cablevision’s servers and transmitted to customers when they decide to watch them.

Cablevision’s approach to DVR came under fire by some heavy hitters in the entertainment world, who filed a lawsuit against

the company. CNN, Twentieth Century Fox, Cartoon Network, Paramount, Universal, Disney and the major TV networks joined forces, alleging the RS-DVR service worked like a video-on-demand (VOD) offering. The companies wanted Cablevision to get licenses from each of the composition holders before allowing customers to watch the programming. The appellate-court judge did not oblige.

“The composition industry, in suing Cablevision, once again overreached in its goal to limit the personal uses of increasingly popular technology,” said Gigi Sohn, president and CEO of Public Knowledge, a party to an amicus brief supporting Cablevision in the case. “We hope that case will be another signal to Hollywood to scale back its attacks on consumer-friendly technologies.”

Behind the Ruling

Cablevision lost the first round of its legal battle when a judge in the Southern District of New York agreed with the composition holders. In March 2007, a judge ordered Cablevision to stop offering…

Original post by Top Tech News