TV not now - Optus' TV Now service held to infringe copyright

Focus: Optus' TV Now service held to infringe copyright Services: Commercial, Intellectual Property & Technology

April has been a busy month for important, technology-related judgments.

On 3 April, the ACCC won its appeal against Google in relation to Google's

adwords scheme, and Google was found to have engaged in misleading and deceptive conduct 1.

On 20 April, iiNet triumphed over "Hollywood" in the High Court because its conduct was held not to constitute authorisation of the infringements of copyright carried out by its customers 2.

Then, on 27 April, Optus was judged to have infringed the NRL, AFL and Telstra's copyright in broadcasts of NRL and AFL football games through its TV Now subscription service 3.

The issue

Optus introduced a new TV subscription service called "TV Now". This service allowed customers to have free to air programmes recorded so that they could play them back at a more convenient time on their compatible Optus mobile device or computer.

The customer could log in to the TV Now service, select the programmes to be recorded, and then have those programmes streamed to their mobile device or computer when they wished to watch them.

The TV Now service recorded the programmes chosen by the customer and made four different copies of those programmes to ensure that there was a copy compatible with each type of device the customer may...