Court: Remote DVRs Don’t Violate Copyright

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals just handed a victory to Cablevision, a provider of remote DVRs. Unlike regular DVRs, which store your recordings on a hard drive in the DVR, remote DVRs store your files at an offsite location. The practice had been challenged under copyright law. The Second Circuit, however, sensibly held that any copyright violations would be the responsibility of the user.

This is a good general principle that overzealous copyright fiends should keep in mind: providers of technologies or hosts of material, like websites, should not be held liable for what users do with them.