There’s fodder in the recent federal court decision giving Capitol...

bar Dish Network’s commercial-skipping AutoHop feature, said lawyers for ABC. The attorneys’ notice of supplemental authority was filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in New York (http://1.usa.gov/YXPZTX). ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC have sued to bar AutoHop on contributory-infringement grounds, while Dish is seeking a declaratory ruling from the court that AutoHop is legal. In the ReDigi case, a federal judge found that the digital music service violated Capitol’s copyrights by allowing users to copy files to company servers and then resell those files to other users. ABC lawyers attached a copy of the 14-page ReDigi decision to their notice, excerpting a brief passage in which the court discussed how ReDigi’s “volitional conduct” supported granting summary judgment to Capitol. The excerpt reads: “ReDigi’s Media Manager scans a user’s computer to build a list of eligible files that consists solely of protected music purchased on iTunes. While that process is itself automated, absolving ReDigi of direct liability on that ground alone would be a distinction without a difference. The fact that ReDigi’s founders programmed their software to choose copyrighted content satisfies the volitional conduct requirement and renders ReDigi’s case indistinguishable from those where human review of content gave rise to direct liability.” In its order, the court went on to argue that ReDigi played a “fundamental and deliberate role” in which it “affirmatively brokered” illegal transactions, making it an “active participant” in the act of copyright infringement. Lawyers for the major networks have argued Dish has played much the same role in marketing and distributing AutoHop as a copyright-infringing feature on its Hopper DVRs. Dish spokesman Bob Toevs declined comment on the ABC lawyers’ filing but said in a statement that the AutoHop case “is grounded in the Supreme Court’s 1984 Sony Betamax decision. That decision, and just plain common sense, say that consumers have the right to record television broadcasts and watch that content at their convenience.”