After Cutting 70 Percent of its Staff, ivi TV Appeals TV Streaming Injunction
As online video streamer ivi TV continues to press its copyright arguments against media companies in federal court, the company has cut staff and refocused its resources on its legal and policy goals, CEO Todd Weaver said in an interview Thursday. After a federal judge ordered ivi to stop streaming TV stations’ signals to its subscribers, the company cut 70 percent of its staff and completely shut down its headend facilities, Weaver said in court documents associated with its appeal of that injunction filed last week. The company is “surviving on subscriber donations and savings” after seeing 95 percent of its sales wiped out, he said in the declaration. The company had claimed it was entitled to carry TV station signals under the Copyright Act’s compulsory license, but the major networks and other media companies sued last year to block the service.
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"It’s been a large blow but we're managing through it,” Weaver told us. “We're conserving all our efforts to pour into legal.” That starts with ivi’s appeal to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, but Weaver said ivi will also be active in proceedings before the FCC and Copyright Office. Next, the company plans to respond to the commission’s 14th video competition inquiry (CD April 22 p5) and it has already submitted comments to the Copyright Office in its review of the statutory license rules, Weaver said. Ivi’s appeal follows a ruling last week by U.S. District Court, Manhattan, Judge Naomi Buchwald, denying ivi’s motion to stay an injunction she issued, court records show. “That was about as much of a no-brainer as you could assume,” Weaver said. Now a three-judge panel of the 2nd Circuit is expect to rule on ivi’s new stay request within months, Weaver said. “That would tell us whether we can operate for the duration of the appeal,” which he expects could take 18-24 months, he said.
The appeal may draw support from the public interest community. Public Knowledge, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Media Access Project and the Open Technology Institute filed a joint brief before Buchwald’s court. They may again, a Public Knowledge spokesman said. “The odds are in favor,” he said. Meanwhile, Buchwald on Wednesday set an Aug. 15 deadline for discovery in a separate but related case involving another Internet streaming provider FilmOn.com and the major broadcast networks, court documents said.
In its appeal, ivi argued Buchwald erred in granting the injunction because ivi’s operations meet “every aspect of the definition of ‘cable system'” in Section 111 of the Copyright Act. “The only way to exclude ivi is by imposing additional restrictions not found in the text of the statute itself,” it argued, saying it has “at least a substantial possibility of being reversed on appeal.” There are no requirements in the statute that the system own or control the wires over which it transmits video programming, and there are no geographic limitations in the statute either, it said. “The Media Companies oppose nationwide transmissions, but the statute has no such limitation,” it said. And even if it did, the district court’s injunction was too broad, restricting all retransmissions, not just national ones, it said.