THE ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION persuaded a federal judge again yesterday it should be allowed to represent owners of ReplayTV which is taking legal action against 28 movie and TV firms. Five ReplayTV customers are taking almost the entire entertainment business to court over their rights to skip adverts and record TV programmes using digital video recorders.
Hollywood claims that skipping adverts means users are "stealing" content. The EFF claims that the entertainment companies are preventing it and its lawyers from seeing documents that a court has ordered them to produce, with Hollywood making, to us, the absurd claim that the EFF is a competitor because it opposes their ideas about copyright.
Last October, the EFF was given the right to see these documents but the Hollywood lawyers opposed this move in an appeal. Yesterday a district judge repeated that the EFF should see documents in the case.The fair rights case can now go ahead, the EFF said in a statement.