The Australian Federal Court today handed down their appeal decision in the latest twist in the Optus TV Now copyright case where the National Rugby League claimed the telco’s online recording service breaches the sporting body’s copyright.
Reversing their colleagues earlier decision, the judges found the TV Now service does breach the League’s copyright.
The Court’s reasoning is because the service plays a part in creating a recording the copies cannot be considered an individual’s personal copy to be watched at a later time – therefore they aren’t protected under the personal use provisions of the Copyright Act.
It’s going to be interesting to see where the line is drawn that a computer program or cloud service is infringing copyright.
Could be that copying a video of a football game to Dropbox, Google Drive or Evernote is a copyright breach by those services?
Perhaps online back up services like Carbonite or iCloud could infringe copyright as they automate the copying process?
Even if Optus doesn’t appeal the case to the Australian High Court, the decision will almost eventually tested there by someone else.
Many of the spokespeople – along with and their apologists in the sports and business media – have argued this is about the law falling behind technology.
The court covered this in paragraphs 18 to 25 of the judgement linked above and the judges are quite clear the law was written to be technology neutral.
Calls now to “reform” copyright law in light of the TV Now and AFACT – iiNet cases to “bring the law up to technology” are disingenuous.
While there’s no doubt legislation could be tweaked, there’s the real threat any “reforms” driven by the pleading of the copyright industries and their tame journalist friends will result in more restrictions and damage the take up of modern technologies.
One can’t blame the rights holders for trying to maximise their income, they have to feed the remorseless hungry beast that is modern professional sport – although one wishes they didn’t keep bleating “think of the children” to justify their actions.
We’ve previously seen how sports organisations have felt threatened by every new technology and the profits these new tools have delivered them.
The latest wave of change is no different, although the glory days of sports rights may be another symptom of a changing economy and 1980s thinking.
Hopefully the sports organisations and rights holders won’t be allowed to kill the potential of the these technologies before new business models are allowed to evolve.