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Zediva Countersues MPAA

23 May, 2011 By: Chris Tribbey



Web DVD streaming service Zediva has countersued the Motion Picture Association of America more than a month after the studios took the company to court over its Flash-based rental streaming service.

Zediva — which rents new-release DVDs over the Internet by streaming the film while it plays in a DVD player — claims in its countersuit that its business model should be declared legal, and that it’s no different than a brick-and-mortar rental store.

“Stores or services that rent out DVDs do not need to obtain a license from copyright holders,” the suit reads. This is because once a video rental store buys a DVD, copyright laws permit it to rent out that copy.

“The only difference between watching a rented DVD on the DVD player in one’s living room and watching a rented DVD using Zediva is that rather than connecting to the DVD with a short cable, Zediva lets users connect to the DFVD player over the Internet. In this way, Zediva simply functions as a very long cable between the user and the DVD player she rented.”

The MPAA contends that Zediva is like any other illegal streaming site, and copyright experts have lined up on the studios’ side.

“The First Sale Doctrine protects the use of the physical good, but it doesn’t allow for public performance,” Robert Rotstein, an adjunct professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, and copyright attorney with Mitchell, Silberberg & Knupp, told Home Media Magazine April 4. “Even if they have a limited number of DVDs, under the law it’s still public performance.”

However, Zediva’s countersuit contends that “[Zediva] is no more a public performance than playing a DVD in one’s own living room. It defies common sense to say, as the studios do, that putting a longer cable between a DVD player and its single viewer transforms a private performance into a public performance.”
 


About the Author: Chris Tribbey


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