TVEyes Pushes for Lifting of Injunction on Fair Use Grounds
The injunction against TVEyes' blocking subscribers from emailing, downloading or running date-time searches on TV clips should be vacated, it said. Those functions are equally fair use as the functions that are permitted -- namely searching, viewing and archiving --…
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the media monitoring service said in a brief filed Thursday in the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The U.S. District Court in Manhattan was wrong when, in crafting its injunction, it asked which TVEyes research functions were an integral part of its service, because that test has no basis in the Copyright Act or court precedent, the company said. TVEyes also can't be held liable for its subscribers' emailing, downloading and date/time searches, and the court's injunction improperly failed to apply the four-factor test for issuing an injunction set up in the Supreme Court's 2006 eBay v. MercExchange decision, the company said. Fox News Network sued TVEyes in 2013, alleging copyright infringement. The Manhattan court issued an order in 2015 that the company's archiving function is fair use but that emailing, downloading and date/time searches are not, and subsequently issued an injunction. Those functions are in fact fair use since they're transformative uses, letting subscribers "fulfill purposes that differ from the original news and entertainment purposes of the broadcasts," and there's no evidence those functions harm the market for those works, TVEyes said. Even if an injunction could properly be issued in the case, the company said, the Manhattan court's injunction is overly broad because "it extends to any and all conceivable future Fox programming" and injunctions should be strictly for the specific legal violations.