Does disallowed DVR service foretell YouTube's fate?

Information Week: Does Disallowed DVR Service Foretell YouTube's Fate? The court accepted the plaintiff's contention that Cablevision, rather than its customers, was directing the copyright infringement. Will the same rules apply to YouTube?

Last week, a U.S. District Court in New York City ruled that Cablevision's digital video recording service, Remote-Storage DVR, was unlawful. RS-DVR was intended to permit Cablevision subscribers without a DVR to record programs on company servers for playback at a later time.

The decision affirmed that while it may be legal for consumers to record television, it's not legal for a cable company to do so on their behalf.

In a blog post, Sherwin Siy, staff attorney at Public Knowledge, an Internet rights advocacy organization, said, "In essence, Cablevision put an extra-long cable on a DVR and housed it on its own property." That, evidently, isn't legal. ...

Internet entrepreneur Mark Cuban, a known defender of copyrights, called the lawsuit a huge strategic mistake in a blog post and urged the aggrieved television networks and film studios to strike deals with Cablevision instead.

"While I think the court accurately applied copyright law as it stands today, it's still anachronistic at best," said law professor Eric Goldman in his blog. "Does it really matter if the hardware is in the users' possession or operated as a service for their benefit? It shouldn't."