Seven's new channel: 72

[Zagloba]

7TWO can not see it in Newcastle so fa:-(((

[Neon Kitten]

Just to reiterate. The new channel will not be fully available for some weeks.

What, if anything, is being done in the wake of the recent court decision in favour of IceTV to ensure that situations like this don't happen in the future?

And not to anyone from Seven who might be reading: if there was something on I might have wanted to see but I miss the first episodes because your program listing is "copyright", then that's just another show added to the torrent list.

[Mitch IceGuide]

Unfortunately if I attempt to answer this question satisfactorily, I will probably do with legal foot-in-mouth. It's best I don't, only to say that we still adhere to strict independant procedure for identifying what programs will appear on any given channel (except abc/sbs).

[Mark]

What, if anything, is being done in the wake of the recent court decision in favour of IceTV to ensure that situations like this don't happen in the future?

And not to anyone from Seven who might be reading: if there was something on I might have wanted to see but I miss the first episodes because your program listing is "copyright", then that's just another show added to the torrent list.

There is no reason why anything should or would be done about this.  The commercial channels are only trying to protect their business model as best they can.  You might want to bear in mind that this is the same business model that provides you and I with free-to-air commercial television in the first place, and you can't expect to have you cake and eat it too.

The High Court has ruled (quite rightly IMHO) that copyright subsists in program schedules.  This is perfectly reasonable: the schedules do not just "exist" for anyone to discover, and do with as they wish, they are created by those people at the various networks whose job it is to select programs, and to decide when and where they will be broadcast.  They are original works, in the sense required by the Copyright Act.  So copying the whole of someone's schedule, or a substantial part of it, is an infringement of copyright.

However, the High Court has also ruled (again quite rightly IMHO, and in favour of IceTV who took the fight all the way to the top) that the "time and title" information of individual programs within a schedule are not a sufficiently substantial part of the whole work to sustain a case for infringement.  Thus if, like IceTV, you have independently constructed a complete program guide without copying the schedule, it is OK to correct a few individual entries by reference to the schedule.

The commercial channels are free to license their schedules to any other party they wish (including IceTV) on whatever terms (including for a fee) that they see fit.  Or they can refuse to do so, and take legal action against any infringers.  As I understand it, the reason they are reluctant to work with third party EPG suppliers such as IceTV is because, in general, PVRs make it too easy for viewers to avoid exposure to commercials, either via "30 second skip" buttons and/or more sophisticated measures.  This obviously kills the major source of revenue to commercial free-to-air networks.

As you may know, the Australian TiVo PVR has access to a licensed EPG, but the trade-off is that it had to hop into bed with Seven, and does not include the most convenient commercial-skipping functionality.

You might think that in the age of broadband internet, the commercial free-to-air networks are dinosaurs in danger of extinction if they cannot come up with new revenue models, and you might be right (time will tell).  But the problem is that the most vocal objectors seem unwilling to pay in other ways for the content.  If you think that your alternative to 7TWO is an (illegal) free download, then I would ask you who is going to pay to create and distribute the content you love so much once there are no networks left that are willing or able to buy it?  The best information available on the internet suggests that many one-hour action series cost well in excess of US$1M per episode to make.  A whole season is thus on a par with a modest Hollywood movie, and someone has to have a good business case before they will bankroll that.

The situation is not even as bad as you make out.  There has been a full schedule on the 7TWO web site for over a week already.  The schedule is also in all of this week's papers.  And the in-band EPG on 7TWO is complete.  So what is stopping you from manually setting your recordings for a couple of weeks while IceTV gets its EPG data up and running?

[prl]

 :o A copyright post I agree with 100%! :o