Fox News Scores Big Court Win Against TVEyes

On Aug 26, Federal Judge Alvin Hellerstein in New York gave Fox News a partial win in an important copyright dispute that could influence the future of the news business. Fox News has been taking on a media monitoring service called TVEyes, which is probably unfamiliar to most but has been a resource for many well-known journalists, politicians and corporations who wish to track what cable news is saying about a given topic. The cable news network has argued that a company that records some 1,400 television and radio stations and charges customers $500 a month for access to a near real time index of clips -- with the ability to share such videos -- threatens its revenues and violates its copyrights.

Last September, TVEyes convinced Judge Hellerstein that the core part of its service relating to indexing and excerpting was protected as a fair use. The judge noted that TVEyes was the only company offering such a comprehensive service and held up its transformative value. However, the judge wanted more discussion on some of TVEyes' other features. In particular, those relating to letting subscribers download, archive, e-mail and search for clips. And on the verge of the decision, the controversy led outsiders to file friend-of-the-court briefs including from CNN, NBC and CBS taking Fox News' side despite some evidence they or their reporters were customers for TVEyes. Judge Hellerstein has now decided that the archiving functions also fall under fair use but expresses concern about its sharing function and rules that features related to downloading and searching by date and time are not covered as fair use.