By
Michael Arrington

Zediva filed a court document in late June opposing Hollywood studios' motion for an injunction against its nascent DVD streaming service, citing a number of cases it feels give it the right to continue to provide customers remote rental access to DVDs playing at its facilities. In it, the company stated that its services are directly analogous to those of Blockbuster and Netflix: it buys a disc and then rents that disc to one person at a time for private enjoyment in their own home. Zediva specifically cited a 2009 Cartoon Network vs. Cablevision case in which the Second Circuit held that Cablevision's provision of remote DVRs to store and play back content did not constitute a violation of the Copyright Act's 'transmit clause' because, "each RS-DVR playback transmission is made to a single subscriber using a single unique copy produced by that subscriber" and which rejected the interpretation from an earlier lawsuit vs. On Command that found that any commercial transmission of protected content is a transmission 'to the public'. 

Tags: