copyright infringement lawsuits

In another defeat for TV broadcasters, an appellate court in Boston has rejected Hearst’s request to expedite its attempt to shut down Aereo.

TV broadcasters officially asked U.S. District Court Judge Rosemary Collyer to hold online video company FilmOn X in contempt for streaming TV programs in Massachusetts earlier this month.

As broadcasters and Aereo wait to see if the Supreme Court will agree to the former’s recent petition to hear the case against the latter, the Barry Diller-backed streaming service has been sued a second time this week in the state of Utah. And today ABC and CW affiliates owner Nexstar Communications filed a motion for a preliminary injunction (read it here) to shut Aereo down during the course of the litigation from the copyright infringement complaint it filed on Thursday.

An attempt by TV broadcasters to shut down Aereo in Utah should meet the same fate as two unsuccessful efforts in New York and Boston, the startup says in court papers filed on Tuesday. “The third time should not be a charm,” Aereo argues. “The facts are the same; the result should be the same as well.”

An appeals court will have the opportunity to address the legality of place-shifting.

Online video company FilmOn TV says it conducted a brief test of its service in New England last week, despite an injunction prohibiting the company from streaming TV programs in that part of the country.

Less than a week after broadcasters petitioned the Supreme Court over Aereo, a New York-based federal judge on Thursday denied the Barry Diller-backed company’s second attempt at winning permission to depose CBS chief Les Moonves.

Are Comcast’s cable business and its NBCUniversal entertainment unit on the same page when it comes to the Aereo legal battle? That’s a question worth asking in the wake of Friday’s petition by major broadcasters seeking a Supreme Court review of the case over the online TV-streaming service.

Aereo’s legal win against TV broadcasters won’t help Alki David’s company … at least for now. And the judge in the case wants to know why “it appears that FilmOn X may be acting in defiance” of her preliminary injunction order. She’s ordered David’s company to show cause, in writing, why it should not be held in contempt. FilmOn X has until Oct. 21 to respond.

Online video startup FilmOn X is asking U.S. District Court Judge Rosemary Collyer in Washington, D.C. to revise her earlier order banning the company from streaming over-the-air TV shows to users. The start-up says a recent decision involving Aereo — which offers a similar service requires Collyer to modify her order.

Cablevision Systems Corp. criticized the arguments made by broadcasters in a Supreme Court filing seeking to shut down Aereo, a start-up company that delivers local television station signals to consumers via the Internet. Cablevision said the case that broadcasters including Fox, CBS, ABC and NBC are attempting to make against Aereo is a “willful attempt to stifle innovation.”

Disney, CBS, NBCUniversal, WNET New York, Fox and Univision today asked the high court to review a ruling by the U.S. Courts of Appeals in New York. That court rejected broadcasters’ plea to shut down Aereo during a trial to determine whether the streaming service infringes on their copyrights.

FilmOn X founder Alki David may have been upset after two courts issued unfavorable rulings in suits brought against him by broadcasters — but he is irate over an erroneous report that he reached a $10 million settlement with CBS in a contempt-of-court case that made it into court files and remained there several days.

With just days to go before broadcasters are likely to take Aereo to the Supreme Court, a federal judge has denied Hearst-owned ABC affiliate WCVB Boston its preliminary injunction motion against the Barry Diller-backed streaming service. “The court finds that Hearst has made a minimal showing of irreparable harm that is an insufficient basis for entering a preliminary injunction in its favor,” said District Judge Nathaniel Gorton.

The possibility is growing that the Supreme Court will eventually be asked to settle broadcasters’ legal battle with Aereo and FilmOn X. As both broadcasters and the companies await a key decision due from a San Francisco appellate court, broadcasters are stepping up the pressure on the two services.

On Monday, Fox Broadcasting Co., Sinclair Broadcast Group and Local TV filed suit in federal court in Utah against Aereo, the start-up company that streams broadcast TV signals to consumers via the Internet. Broadcasters have already challenged Aereo on copyright violation in New York and Boston. This suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Utah, where Aereo recently launched its service, makes similar allegations.

On Monday, a California judge made the latest ruling in the continuing legal saga over Dish’s ad-skipping Hopper. This one pertains to Dish’s Hopper with Sling, also known as “Dish Anywhere,” which was introduced with much fanfare at CES in January. Fox’s latest motion for a preliminary injunction has been denied. The ruling hasn’t been made public, but the parties are talking about what happened.

Aereo, FilmOn, and the major TV broadcasters are in a seesaw legal contest in courtrooms around the country, but in Boston, Aereo appears to have the upper hand. District Judge Nathaniel Gorton, who is overseeing the copyright complaint brought against Aereo by Hearst TV Stations, said yesterday that he’s “inclined at this point” to rule in favor of the Web TV service.

Dish Network’s ad-skipping recording feature survived a court bid by ABC to shut it down almost a year after a Los Angeles judge rejected a similar effort by other broadcasters. ABC’s request for a preliminary injunction against the ad-skipping service was denied yesterday by U.S. District Judge Laura Taylor Swain, who placed her opinion under seal because it contained confidential business information, according to a filing in federal court in Manhattan.

Our technology looks to be different, says the Barry Diller-owned TV digital distributor.

FilmOn X LLC, founded by Alki David, told judges at a hearing Tuesday that it isn’t infringing copyrights by capturing broadcasters’ over-the-air signals with its small remotely located antennas and retransmitting the programming to its customers. “The rulings of the district court in these cases should be reversed,” Ryan Baker, a lawyer for FilmOn X, told the judges.

Broadcasters including Fox, NBC and ABC have offered additional justifications for a nationwide injunction to stop Aereo-like FilmOnX. In a filing late Friday in Federal District Court, the broadcasters charged that FilmOnX — which has changed its name from Aereokiller — is “a broadcast retransmission service, not a technology provider.”

Online video company FilmOn X is arguing that it should be allowed to continue operating while a lawsuit against the company is pending in federal court in Washington. The startup is asking U.S. District Court Judge Rosemary Collyer to reject a request by TV broadcasters to prohibit the service from operating.

The launch on Tuesday marks the free-TV-via-Web provider’s 12th in the U.S. and fourth in the region covered by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which issued a preliminary injunction against FilmOn in December.

Nearly a month after WCVB Boston filed a copyright infringement suit and sought an injunction against the Barry Diller-backed streaming video service, the much litigated Aereo says the Hearst-owned station has its facts wrong.

An appeals court is primed to review the long-running dispute a second time.

Another month, another salvo in the ongoing multi-pronged legal trench warfare between the broadcasters and FilmOn founder Alki David. This time, it’s CBS who is back in court against the billionaire digital media entrepreneur. On Monday the network asked U.S. District Court in New York to enter an order to ensure that David holds up his part of a $1.6 million copyright infringement settlement reached last year.

A federal appeals court says a lower court was correct in deciding against Fox’s request that Dish be blocked from offering its set-top box features that automatically record all primetime programming on the Big Four broadcast networks and then automatically skip all the commercials on playback.

Online video company Aereo says the new copyright lawsuit filed against it by Hearst in Boston should be transferred to New York, where the startup has been battling the major TV broadcasters since last year.

U.S. Circuit Judge Denny Chin issued a blistering dissent after the full 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan refused to make the Aereo Inc. case one of the rare instances when it assembles all of its judges to decide an issue. Chin dissented from that decision as well, though he went farther Tuesday, describing how the April 1 decision had damaged the financial landscape of free television. He said it “eviscerates the Copyright Act” and “upends settled industry expectations and established law.”

In a decision that disappointed but didn’t entirely surprise broadcasters, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit on Tuesday declined to rehear in banc its earlier decision rejecting a request by broadcasters to terminate with extreme prejudice Aereo’s broadcast subscription service in New York. As interesting as the legal dispute itself is (at least to lawyers), the end result may well be governed more by technology than by law. If you have spent much time in the communications world, you have heard the old saw that “the law struggles to keep up with technology.” In the case of Aereo, however, it has been quite the opposite, with technology struggling to keep up with the law.

The broadcaster’s desire to shut Aereo down could end up at the Supreme Court. After its bid for rehearing of its copyright infringement case at an appeals court was turned down today, Fox said: “The Second Circuit’s denial of our request for an ‘en banc’ hearing, while disappointing was not unexpected.  We will now review our options and determine the appropriate course of action, which include seeking a hearing in the U.S. Supreme Court and proceeding to a full trial on the merits of the case.”

A group of 18 CBS affiliates argue in new court papers that Aereo’s lawsuit against them should be thrown out on the grounds that it raises questions that are already pending in litigation between CBS and Aereo.

FilmOn, one of Alki David’s digital TV companies, has reacted to a lawsuit that was filed in March with an answer and counterclaim. David is seeking a declaratory judgment that providing technology that allows consumers to receive free over-the-air broadcast signals via the Internet is not a violation of TV broadcasters’ copyrights.

In the ongoing legal battle over Aereo, the upstart digital TV distributor won’t be able to ask CBS CEO Leslie Moonves questions under oath about how Aereo’s presence in the marketplace has affected the network’s negotiations with cable and satellite companies.

Fox Broadcasting Co. is asking a federal appeals court to overrule a district judge and halt Dish Network Corp.’s AutoHop ad-skipping service that it says threatens television’s advertising system. Lawyers for Fox are scheduled to present their case today at a hearing in Pasadena, Calif. They claim Dish’s PrimeTime Anytime and Auto Hop services, which allow subscribers to record all four networks’ entire primetime schedule and watch the shows commercial-free the next day, infringe Fox’s copyrights and breach Dish’s license agreement with Fox.

In litigation over Aereo’s expansion, lawyers for CBS say the words “we will sue” doesn’t amount to a “concrete promise” to do just that around the nation.

Broadcast networks filed suit on Thursday to halt a company from offering streams of their signals in the Washington, D.C. market, in the latest effort to challenge the legality of a bevy of services seeking to provide over-the-air TV on the Internet. Fox, NBC, ABC and Allbritton Communications filed a claim in U.S. District Court in Washington against Aereokiller, the provocatively named company founded by FilmOn’s Alki David.

The Barry Diller-backed digital disruptor drew instant lawsuits from all four TV networks until two litigators figured out a way to fight back.

In its  fight with broadcasters, the Barry Diller-backed streaming company files for summary judgment in the case that examines the legality of its service of providing consumers with the ability to access over-the-air TV programming on digital devices.