(Newswire.net — September 12, 2014) — Fox lawyers argued that the service violated copyright law and should be shut down.
In a ruling published yesterday, US District Judge Alvin Hallerstein disagreed, finding that TVEyes’ core services are a transformative fair use.
TVEyes constantly records more than 1,400 television and radio stations, using closed captions and speech-to-text technology to make a comprehensive and searchable database for its subscribers, who generally pay $500 per month for the service.
The company has more than 2,200 subscribers, including the White House, 100 members of Congress, the Department of Defense, as well as big news organizations like Bloomberg, Reuters, ABC, and the Associated Press.
One common use for TVEyes is to let users search for a keyword in order to find out when that term was mentioned in the news, then view a video clip that starts 14 seconds before the keyword was mentioned, and goes on for up to 10 minutes. Most clips however are shorter than two minutes.
Users can also download and save the clips, and share them via social media or email. TVEyes subscribers all agree to only use downloaded clips for “internal purposes” like review, analysis, or research.
In Fox’s view, those products all compete unfairly with its own TV clip licensing, which is done through ITN Source; a company that maintains a library of 80,000 Fox News videos and is searchable using keywords. Through ITN Source, Fox News has made about $2 million in licensing fees.
TVEyes relied on legal precedents allowing for electronic cataloguing of book material, including the Authors Guild v. Google case, in which a district court judge found that Google Books’ copied into a database, then showing text snippets, created a “highly transformative” database that was protected by fair use.
Fox News, meanwhile, looked to precedents in which “defendants were copying the plaintiff’s work and then selling it for the very same purpose as the plaintiff,” wrote Hallerstein. The one exception was Associated Press v. Meltwater, in which a court ruled that a digital news-clipping service wasn’t fair use.
In that case, Hallerstein saw distinctions. Meltwater was dealing with text, which didn’t show “the actual images and sounds depicted on television,” as TVEyes does. Those images can be “as important as the news information itself—the tone of voice, arch of an eyebrow, or upturn of a lip can color the entire story, powerfully modifying the content.”
By indexing and excerpting all TV content, “TVEyes provides a service that no content provider provides.”
Fox News failed to show that the clips could be watched sequentially, or that TVEyes could be used as a substitute for Fox News’ channels.
Hallerstein also disposed of other non-copyright claims brought by Fox News, including a “Hot News misappropriation claim, as well as a state-law misappropriation claim,” finding they were pre-empted by copyright.
But it isn’t quite over yet. While Hallerstein ruled that TVEyes’ core business is protected by fair use, he didn’t rule on a few features – one that allowing subscribers to “save, archive, download, email and share clips,” and use a “date and time search function.”
“The factual record should be further developed before I can decide this issue,” wrote Hallerstein.
An additional hearing is scheduled for October 3.