TV Listings Copyright :: ICE TV Decision

A week ago the Federal Court of Australia found against Nine Networks in a copyright case it brought against ICE TV. Nine asserted that ICE TV had infringed the copyright of their TV Schedule in the production and communication of their ICE Guide.

The case is important as it has determined, within the Australian jurisdiction, that copyright for a compilation - such as a weekly TV schedule must be considered as a whole and that there is no separate copyright for components, such as the time and title information within that schedule.

“Nine cannot claim copyright in the time and title information for a single day or week as if that information were itself a separate compilation.” - Bennett J

It also provides an interesting window into the world of Australian TV scheduling and listings production. For the details you’ll have to read the full decision.

BTW: Talking of TV schedules I see that Fiona Rae is providing a ‘wheat from chaft’ look ahead for the week on NZ screens. Who would have known that C4 was screening Skins otherwise?

Here’s my 5 minute summary of the case

Facts

ICE TV provides an digital EPG service for consumers in Australia.
ICE have created their own system, comprising of a database and prediction process.
The basis of their system is data that was collected by watching television and compiled into the initial channel templates.
Part of ICE TV’s process is checking their predictions of the TV schedules against the guides published by third parties.
These aggregated listings are created by a small number of companies, including Pagemasters.
(BTW: Pagemasters is used by NZ publishers both for TV listings and more recently for subcontracted sub-editing).
The aggregators are provided with the weekly schedules by the TV Networks, including Nine.

Bennett J identified the following issues for determination.

What is the identity of the Nine work(s) in which copyright subsists?

“Nine can claim copyright in the Weekly Schedule. It cannot claim copyright in the components of the Weekly Schedule as if they are separate compilations. They are not.”

What is the effect of aggregation on the copyright subsisting in the Nine work(s)?

“The process of aggregation does not “destroy” Nine’s copyright in the Weekly Schedule. The Weekly Schedule remains a copyright work but it is separate and distinct from the Aggregated Guides, which are themselves original literary works and copyright protected compilations.”

Did Ice copy the Nine work(s) when it created the first templates for the IceGuide?

“It is at law open to a person to ascertain the facts recorded in a compilation by independent inquiry and to compile his or her own compilation containing the results of that inquiry. So long as the second compiler does not copy the first compilation, there would be no infringement of any copyright in that compilation ‘any more than the existence of copyright in a photograph of a scene signifies that there is copyright in the scene itself, which, therefore, a later photographer is not at liberty to photograph from the same viewpoint’”

Do Ice’s present activities infringe Nine’s copyright?

“Different content and modes of expression and arrangement may be utilised for a television schedule. The Weekly Schedule, the Aggregated Guides and the IceGuide each differ in their manner of selection, expression and arrangement. It follows that form and content are each relevant to the question of infringement.

Ice does not engage in broadcasting. It does not take the skill and labour of placing programs in an order that appeals to viewers in that Ice plays no part in the placement of programs. It does not take the format of the Weekly Schedule. It does not take synopses from the Weekly Schedule. It conducts its own research and drafts its own synopses.

Ice does take slivers of time and title information each day from the Aggregated Guides. For the reasons I have set out in detail, Ice does not reproduce a substantial part of the Weekly Schedule in so doing.

It follows that Ice has not infringed Nine’s copyright in the course of making and updating the IceGuide.”

For other takes:
William Patry provides comment.
ICE TV’s reaction
Sydney Morning Herald Report

“they’re applauding because i’m a pissant”

Freeview

Freeview has been around for a month on my non-Freeview tuner. I don’t get to use the MHEG-5 based EPG but contrary to some press reports I still have an EPG. Given that’s how I select what to record on the Topfield PVR I would not be terribly happy if it disappeared.
I am happy to have TV3 and C4 available to record. The Daily Show now gets selected in my weekly time-shifting trawl through the EPG, where I select the programmes that week that will get recorded and which we will watch…whenever and without commercials. After a hard days work a bit of Jon Stewart with dinner is nice way to start the evening. The quote above is from last night’s show, or rather the episode that I watched last night, but was probably recorded the night before.

Final Cut Pro & MXF

Talking of work I never really concluded the discussion of my investigation into mixing FCP and MXF within a workflow. FCP 6.0 does not provide any MXF capabilities period. Compressor 3, bundled as part of FCP Studio, can use an optional Episode Pro plugin from Telestream that provides the ability to rewrap QuickTime <=> MXF. I believe that Omneon’s ProExchange also provides this functionality.
In the scenario that I was looking into we’ll probably stick with QuickTime from ingest through production and play-out but will rewrap into MXF for archiving.

Python and the Nokia E65

Don’t have much time for happy hacking the Nokia E65. I am a bit disappointed that the 3rd edition S60 security model is so restrictive that I couldn’t get some of the API to produce any results in my initial peeking. location.gsm_location() produces nada without ReadDeviceData, ReadUserData, and Location privileges. It seems that in order to get these privileges on the phone you own you need to acquire a developer certificate. Hmmmmmm.
I’m not a big user/fan of Twitter but I was planning to do a proof of concept script that would update Twitter as one moved between cell locations.

Lastly

Jim Barksdale argues for the need to more effectively archive our bits.
And given Microsoft’s recent patent threats this video of Columbia Law Professor, Eben Moglen, is worth five minutes of your time.

BT Vision

British Telecom have just gone live with their Vision product/service in the UK. It provides Freeview channels, on demand IPTV content and a PVR.

• DVB-T receiver
  
• IPTV ‘receiver’
  
• PVR (80Gig)
  

It connects to BT supplied broadband (ADSL) to allow access to the on-demand IPTV content. Freeview channels, received via terrestrial digital signal, can be recorded on the PVR. The IPTV content does not appear to be recordable.

There is a one off install charge for the box (90 pounds sterling)

Films from £1.99
Music videos from only 29p
TV shows from only 79
Kids’ shows from only 49p

Monthly subscriptions to on demand content 6-9 pounds per channel. Costs aren’t provided for their Sports package, which includes Premier League football. The access to football from start of season 2007 is crucial, it will allow viewers to watch the majority (288 of 380) of Premier league matches ‘near-live’.

Interesting things to do with a Topfield - watch AFC Wimbledon

So what is interesting about the Topfield (TP) apart from the basic PVR functionality, which cannot be under estimated if you haven’t tried using one for a week.

Connectivity: Using the USB 2 interface you can download recorded content from the TF onto a computer. Likewise you can upload files from a computer to the TF. There are a couple of Mac pieces of software that provide the ‘altair’ like file transfer functionality.

I tried out MPEG Streamclip and MacTF and both could not see the file names of recorded material. Uploaded content appeared fine. It was only after I renamed recorded material to very short filenames that I could see them and download them.

Experiments in downloading content worked fine. Radio content and TV was transfered and converted without a hitch.

Straight up and down MPEG-1 transcoded to MPEG-2 transport stream worked well and therefore let me view the latest win of mighty AFC Wimbledon, courtesy of Woking Jon and his ongoing amcam coverage of their matches in Ryman’s Division 1.

I also tried to upload content from a DVD, one I had created, but apart from the transcoding and uploading process taking an eon I could not succeed in getting audio, vision was fine. MPEG Streamclip has transcoding capabilitiies and I also used ffmpegX.

I was tempted to see if the Speccy emulator, written for the TF4000, would work on the 5000 but as it doesn’t support sound and I couldn’t see a kosher copy of Atik Atac to test it with my interest waned.

I hope to experiment more with the TAPs available for the TF5000 when we acquire a permanent one.