ReplayTV Sharing Site Shut Down
from the unfortunate dept
Yet another article about Hollywood being run by lawyers instead of business people. Apparently, after being pushed around a bit by some Hollywood lawyers the guy who ran a site to let ReplayTV owners share shows they've recorded has been shut down out of a fear of being sued. The Hollywood studios are already suing ReplayTV for including this feature, but they were asking questions about what sort of data this site (which had no relationship with SonicBlue or ReplayTV at all) kept on its users. The fear was that they would subpoena this information and go after users themselves. Of course, it doesn't seem like anything the users were doing went beyond their fair use rights. ReplayTV only lets you share a show with a very small number of people, and considering that it takes about a day just to share a single 30 minute program, it wasn't as if there was rampant trading going on. Even more to the point, though, is that the studios should want people to watch their shows. It gets more people hooked on those shows, and while they may not watch all the commercials all the time, they'll probably still end up seeing a few commercials (or product placements, or sponsorships, or who knows what). Once again, Hollywood is trying to destroy a technology that, if they embraced it, could be much more helpful to them than harmful.
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