Court Upholds Ruling On Dish Network's 'Hopper' 248
An anonymous reader writes "The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court's ruling in favor of Dish Network, allowing the company to continue forward with it ad-skipping "Hopper" technology. From the article: 'Last year, Fox Broadcasting Company, with the support of other broadcast networks, sued Dish for its "Hopper" DVR and its "Auto Hop" feature, which automatically skips over commercials. According to the Fox, the Hopper automatically records eight days' worth of prime time programming on the four major networks that subscribers can play back on request. Beginning a few hours after the broadcast, viewers can choose to watch a program without ads. As we observed when the it started, this litigation was yet another in a long and ignominious series of efforts by content owners to use copyright law to control the features of personal electronic devices, and to capture for themselves the value of new technologies no matter who invents them.'"
Re:Hey... (Score:4, Informative)
The hopper doesn't analyze meta data or closed captions or anything like that.
The reason the commercial skip feature doesn't work right after broadcast, is because a human being actually watches the program at Dish HQ, marks the start and end time stamps of each commercial break, and the device then skips those times when you tell it to.
It's not an elegant solution, but it's immune to anything the broadcasters can try to do to muck up an automated solution.