Judge offs ivi.tv Seattle Internet-TV rebroadcaster ivi.tv has had most of its channels pulled by a US District Court judge. Judge Naomi Buchwald granted an injunction against the company, blocking it from providing its TV feeds to its customers. The company charges $4.99 per month and provided customers with a custom player to watch the …
"cable system", then?
Not all Cable TV data/video is carried solely on cables, and I'd be surprised if they owned the relay satellites that provided the long-range links- so it's not based on the distribution medium or ownership of the whole distribution network...
It's not creation of brand new content- and if it was, they could just create a "public spaces: LIVE!" videofeed and claim that was it.
Could be a tricky one, this...
...that it has something to do with actually getting permission from the original broadcaster to redistribute their signal for profit, which is what ivi neglected to do, and which was the reason that the networks and others asked for the injunction until the copyright infringement case could be tried.
Cable/satellite carriers may pay a fee in exchange for permission to carry, or make some other arrangement, but networks/channels (except for local "must-carries", perhaps) pretty much ALWAYS have the right to decide whether to let an aggregator/carrier rebroadcast their programming, AFAIK.
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