One day after a federal magistrate judge ordered Sonicblue to monitor the TV-watching habits of people who use its ReplayTV 4000 personal video recorder, the company is hard at work on two separate tracks: While its legal team works on a way to stay or perhaps reverse the ruling, its engineers are trying to come up with software to track thousands of ReplayTV customers in the event that the ruling is not changed.
One day after a federal magistrate judge ordered Sonicblue to monitor the TV-watching habits of people who use its ReplayTV 4000 personal video recorder, the company is hard at work on two separate tracks: While its legal team works on a way to stay or perhaps reverse the ruling, its engineers are trying to come up with software to track thousands of ReplayTV customers in the event that the ruling is not changed.
On Thursday, Magistrate Judge Charles Eick told Sonicblue to gather “all available information” about what TV shows are copied, stored, viewed without commercials or traded using the ReplayTV 4000.
The judge ordered that the information be turned over to the television networks and movie studios that are suing Sonicblue for releasing the ReplayTV 4000, a recorder that allows people to “AutoSkip” over commercials and trade pay-TV shows with people who might not have paid for the content.
The media companies — including Paramount and Disney — allege that the ReplayTV 4000 allows people to steal copyrighted TV shows.
Eick’s order does not compel Sonicblue to identify each user by name; he agreed with the media companies that the data be anonymous, and that the viewing habits of each user be described with a unique code.
Andrew Wolfe, Sonicblue‘s chief technology officer, said that the company is asking the trial judge in the case to review Eick’s ruling, or to at least give the company more than the 60 days to comply.
Wolfe said that it would take the company some time to put in place the technology to monitor its users.
“We have to write new software for the ReplayTV 4000 that gathers what people are watching,” he said. “We will have to write software to ‘anonymize’ that data. My guess is we have to write software to put it into some kind of readable form, too.”
Asked if the company had the technical means to comply with the judge’s order, Wolfe said: “Yeah, it’s possible. We just don’t know if we can do it in 60 days.”
The judge ordered the media firms to pay 75 percent of the costs associated with gathering the data, so Wolfe said that the company was considering hiring more engineers to do some of the work.
The judge’s order does not violate the company’s privacy policy, which allows Sonicblue to collect information if it is legally required to do so. But privacy experts said that the ruling nevertheless set a bad precedent, as it seems to put copyright law above consumers’ privacy.
“It’s essentially the judiciary inserting themselves into the marketplace and requiring private companies to act as big brother or agents of big brother to monitor people,” said Megan Gray, an attorney at Electronic Privacy Information Center.
Gray said that her group is filing a friend-of-the-court brief to alert the court to the privacy implications of this ruling.
In an e-mail message, a Disney spokeswoman denied the allegation that her company was trying to violate anyone’s privacy.
“Replay’s statement that its users’ privacy rights are being violated is a deliberate and completely misleading characterization of the court’s order,” wrote Michelle Bergman, the spokeswoman.
“Replay must provide only anonymous data about how the plaintiffs’ copyrighted works are being copied and used. In fact, Sonicblue’s current privacy policy states ‘Once your ReplayTV digital video recorder is set up and registered, it collects certain anonymous viewing data, such as which programs you record, which features you use and other similar data about your use of the ReplayTV Service.’ Consistent with Sonicblue’s own privacy policy, none of the data the plaintiffs are seeking identifies any individuals.
“We respect viewer privacy and the order we obtained respects that important right. We are simply protecting our copyrighted content and all whose livelihoods are dependent on it.”
But Laurence Pulgram, Sonicblue’s attorney, said that if the studios wanted only to find out who was trading HBO shows or skipping commercials, they would have asked only for that information.
“The purported defense against ‘stealing’ is just an attempt to camouflage the invasion of privacy,” he said. “The information collected is all the information about how you watch TV. Do you watch Friends every week? Do you watch the Playboy Channel? And watching the Playboy Channel wouldn’t show you’re stealing anything. Just watching a show with (the RealPlay 4000) isn’t even alleged to be a crime.”
Author: Farhad Manjoo
News Service: Wired News
URL: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,52302,00.html
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