• ZDNet, Friday, May 26, 2006 10:30 AM

Hollywood studios and the three major television networks have filed suit against Cablevision Systems in an attempt to keep it from launching an "on-demand" service that competes with digital video recorders, ZDNet reports. The suit claims that Cablevision would violate copyright law with a system where subscribers would store and play back TV programs through computer servers it controls. "Cablevision is actually copying, storing and retransmitting it," says a spokeswoman for the Motion Picture Association of America. "A commercial entity can't establish a for-profit, on-demand service without authorization from copyright owners whose content is used on that service" For its part, Cablevision maintains the suit, "reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of [its system] and ignores the enormous benefit and well-established right of viewers to time-shift television programming."

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