Bamboom Labs wants to help people cut their cable cords by putting local TV broadcasts online with all the digital trimmings -- that is, the ability to watch live or recorded shows in high definition on any device with a browser, anywhere a broadband connection is available. It's technologically ingenious, but I can't decide whether it's a service the market has been waiting for or a lawsuit waiting to happen. Or maybe it's a solution to a problem not many people are eager to solve.

The New York-based startup is the brainchild of Chaitanya "Chet" Kanojia, former chief executive of Navic Networks, whose technology in set-top boxes enabled cable and broadcast networks to measure audience demographics and match advertisements to them in real time. His time at Navic taught him that at any given moment, about half of pay TV viewers were tuned in to local broadcast channels. That observation led him to believe that if he could get live broadcast signals to people reliably, with the ability to time-shift shows and watch them on any device, and with the social features of the Internet, they'd be more willing to abandon cable and satellite TV.

Other companies have taken on parts of this challenge. For example, Sling Media makes set-top boxes that let people tune in remotely to the TV service they have at home. And Monsoon Multimedia makes set-tops that combine remote viewing with TiVo-like digital video recording. But those devices build off of the programming that pay TV delivers to homes. Kanojia wanted to let people watch local broadcasts  through the Net without the help of pay TV.

Here's where things get complicated.

A federal judge in New York ordered Internet TV service Ivi to shut down Tuesday, finding that it violated the copyrights of a group of broadcasters and Major League Baseball. It was yet another example of a tech company trying in vain to stretch the boundaries of copyright law to avoid paying as much for content as its more conventional competitors.

Ivi TV captured the broadcasts of 55 stations in Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago and New York, then retransmitted them through the Internet to subscribers for a fee of just under $5 a month. For an additional 99 cents a month, viewers could pause, rewind and fast-forward shows, although they could not record them for later viewing.

Copyright law gives cable operators the right to carry broadcast stations if several conditions are met, and provided that they pay a small portion of their revenue in royalties. But the law also requires that cable operators abide by Federal Communications Commissions regulations, which (among other things) give broadcasters the right to demand higher fees for retransmission rights.

Ivi argued that it was a cable system entitled to carry broadcast signals, but also that it was an Internet service and so immune from FCC regulation. As such, it argued that it could retransmit stations online while paying royalties -- about $100 a year, according to U.S. District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald's ruling. Major League Baseball and two dozen broadcasters and studios (including two arms of the Tribune Co., owner of the Los Angeles Times) sued, arguing that Internet-based services aren't cable systems and as such are not entitled to an automatic (or "compulsory") retransmission license.

Buchwald agreed, granting a preliminary injunction against Ivi. She held that Congress created the compulsory license for local cable systems, not national (or global) operators online, and did so within a larger regulatory framework:

Congress legislated with an understanding that the cable systems it was granting a compulsory license to would also be subject to the regulations of the FCC.... [N]o company or technology which refuses to abide by the rules of the FCC has ever been deemed a cable system for purposes of the Copyright Act. Significantly, companies such as AT&T U-Verse, which claim to operate outside of the jurisdiction of the Communications Act, still comply with these rules, most significantly by obtaining retransmission consent.

She also said that if Ivi's interpretation of the law were taken to its logical conclusion, the result would be absurd:

As plaintiffs argue, defendants’ view of Section 111 essentially means that anyone with a computer, Internet connection, and TV antenna can become a “cable system” for purposes of Section 111. It cannot be seriously argued that this is what Congress intended.

Ivi had a number of supporters among pro-technology public-interest groups, which argued that Ivi benefited the public by providing more competition to incumbent cable and satellite TV services. But Buchwald held that the law doesn't hold the door open to online competitors, who cannot enter the market without the permission of the broadcasters whose signals they seek to retransmit.

The company and its allies also tried to persuade the court not to act until the lawsuit could go to trial, arguing that Ivi is too small to divert a meaningful amount of advertising away from broadcast TV in the interim. Buchwald pointedly disagreed:

Defendants cannot seriously argue that the existence of thousands of companies who legitimately  use plaintiffs’ programming and pay full freight means that Ivi’s illegal and uncompensated use does not irreparably harm plaintiffs. Likewise, they cannot contend that since Ivi is small and plaintiffs are large, they should be allowed to continue to steal plaintiffs’ programming for personal gain until a resolution of this case on the merits. Such a result leads to an unacceptable slippery slope.

It's easy to understand why companies like Ivi keep trying to find ways to deliver TV signals despite the limits imposed by time, space and contracts. Live broadcast television remains the most popular video medium in U.S. homes, attracting the biggest audiences and generating the most advertising dollars. Only a few companies have found a way to do so without running afoul of TV industry lawyers -- TiVo and Sling being two good examples. Others, such as ReplayTV and ICraveTV, have not. Buchwald's decision Tuesday was just a preliminary one, but she moved Ivi much closer to the latter category than the former.

[Updated at 2:22 p.m.: Ivi TV Chief Executive Todd Weaver responded to the ruling with a statement. Here's the money quote:

Judge Buchwald's opinion is premised on her statement that ivi is 'not complying with the rules and regulations of the FCC'. This conclusion is simply false, as ivi has met with the all the commisioner's offices of the FCC repeatedly and has received assurances that we are in full and complete compliance. Judge Buchwald makes the legal mistake of misinterpreting the copyright law to instead make communications policy. Communications policy is the province of the FCC and, by basing a judicial copyright decision on communications regulations to be administered by the FCC, the judge is overstepping her constitutional authority.]

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-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.

Students and teachers tired of notes and scribbles ruining their textbooks will probably be interested in a new tablet computer displayed at the Consumer Electronics Show that's designed to replace traditional paper-based learning materials.

The Kno tablet, which has dual or single screens, was designed to accommodate some 97% of traditional textbook formats. Students can write and draw virtually on the 14-inch vertical screens without leaving a trace of their work on the Kno's surface.

The result of a partnership with four leading textbook publishers, the Kno retails at $899 for the dual screen and $599 for the single screen. 

Kno's co-founder and CEO Babur Habib said that, with digital textbooks running 25% to 50% cheaper than traditional textbooks, students could expect to recoup their cash outlay on the Kno in about two years.

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-- Craig Howie

A Ninth Circuit appeals panel sided with consumer advocates today, upholding a lower court's ruling that a record company couldn't block the resale of used CDs just by marking them as "not for sale."

The case pitted Universal Music Group against Troy Augusto, who acquired numerous promotional CDs and then sold them on EBay. Such discs, which the record company mails to reviewers and industry insiders, typically carry labels that declare "Promotional Use Only -- Not for Sale." They may also instruct the recipient that the discs remain the property of the record company and are merely being licensed for personal use.

The "first sale" provision of federal copyright law holds that the owner of a copy of a work may sell or dispose of it without the copyright owner's approval. UMG argued that its promotional CDs weren't covered by the first-sale rule because recipients of the discs didn't own them, they merely were licensees with limited privileges.

The Ninth Circuit had been sympathetic to similar arguments from software developers, ruling that they can bar the resale of their products by licensing them to buyers instead of selling them outright. But appeals court Judge William C. Canby Jr., writing for the three-judge panel, said that the same logic didn't apply to UMG's promotional CDs. That's because the discs were sent unbidden to people on UMG's mailing list, with no indication from the recipients that they agreed to the licensing terms in the packaging.

The recipients were thus free to dispose of the discs as they saw fit, Canby wrote, and Augusto was free to sell them on EBay.

Promotional CDs are a vanishing breed, but lawyers for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Durie Tangri Page Lemley Roberts & Kent, which represented Augusto, said the ruling could apply to other kinds of copyrighted works as well. "The Ninth Circuit recognized an important principle: that you can't eliminate consumers' rights just by claiming there's a 'license agreement,' " Joe Gratz of Durie Tangri said in a statement. "Once a copyrighted work is freely given, the copyright holder isn't in charge anymore."

-- Jon Healey

Healeywrites editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.

While companies such as Righthaven try to protect journalists' copyrights by reflexively suing alleged infringers, online monitoring firm Attributor has pursued a different approach: reflexively trying to strike licensing deals, turning infringing websites into authorized, paying outlets for content. On Monday, Attributor announced the results of a trial run of this approach, finding that a simple request to share revenue or remove unauthorized copies of newspaper articles did the trick 75% of the time.

No doubt some news publishers wouldn't be satisfied just to have infringing material removed. Much of what's churned out in the journalism business has a half-life measured in hours, not days; by the time an unauthorized copy is taken off a site (which could have been more than two weeks after the infringement was spotted), much of the public's interest in it may have evaporated anyway.

Nevertheless, it's encouraging to see copyright holders in the publishing business try to emulate what the music industry has done with YouTube, trying to turn third-party distribution from nuisance into new revenue without resorting to the courts. What Attributor does gets at only a portion of the challenge publishers face online -- significantly, it doesn't address the phenomenon of search engines monetizing the interest in news, or aggregators running ads against headlines and short excerpts. But it could reduce the incidence of third parties lifting articles wholesale and monetizing them in direct competition with the publishers' own sites.

Having been ordered by successive juries to pay the major record labels $222,000, $1.92 million and now $1.5 million for illegally sharing 24 songs, Jammie Thomas-Rasset exemplifies how both extreme and random these damage awards are. That's a consequence of Congress providing statutory damages that range from $200 (for an "innocent infringer") to $150,000 per infringement. As Ars Technica's Nate Anderson observed, jurors have no experience with damage awards, and thus have no clue what's reasonable in the grand scheme of things.

It's true that the three sets of Thomas-Rasset's peers in Minnesota who looked at her actions ordered her to pay well above the legal minimum. That doesn't make the damages they ordered rational. There may be some infringers for whom a $1.5-million penalty is entirely appropriate -- a CD or DVD counterfeiting operation, for instance. But a noncommercial file-sharer?

Attorneys for Thomas-Rasset and Joel Tenenbaum, a file-sharer ordered by jurors to pay the labels $675,000 for 30 songs, want the courts to limit statutory damage awards just as they've limited punitive damages. Neither defendant is particularly sympathetic, yet they persuaded the judges in both cases to make dramatic reductions in the amounts they owed. Tenenbaum's penalty was cut to $67,500 in July and Thomas-Rasset's $1.9-million sanction was lowered to $54,000 in January. But the reductions weren't enough to satisfy either defendant.

In the latter case, the Recording Industry Assn. of America offered to accept even less -- $25,000 -- if Thomas-Rasset agreed to have the judge vacate the ruling that slashed her damages to $54,000. She insisted instead on having a third jury consider just the issue of what she should pay the RIAA, which is how $54,000 became $1.5 million. (Thomas-Rasset plans to appeal again.)

Tenenbaum, meanwhile, has appealed his reduced amount, arguing that it's still unconstitutionally high. The RIAA contends that there's no authority for judges to reduce awards that are within the range provided by federal law, and if it prevails Tenenbaum's debt will skyrocket again. But such a ruling would also put the onus on Congress to set more reasonable guidelines for damage awards against noncommercial infringers.

If lawmakers need more reason to scale back the damages for infringers who aren't in the piracy business, they should consider the emergence of companies like Righthaven. Founded by a Las Vegas lawyer, Righthaven has sued more than 160 websites and their operators for what appear to be minor infringements -- essentially, running all or part of individual stories found on the Las Vegas Review-Journal's website. You can read more (much, much more) about Righthaven in a piece I wrote Thursday for the Opinion L.A. blog.

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.

The U.S. Copyright Office on Monday gave documentarians, amateur video remixers and smart phone application developers wider latitude to circumvent electronic locks on DVDs and mobile phones, as long as they're not infringing any copyrighted material protected by the locks. The long-delayed ruling -- the librarian of Congress was supposed to issue it last October -- was quite a leap in comparison to the narrow exemptions granted in previous years, which were limited mainly to security researchers and film schools.

The biggest beneficiaries may be documentary filmmakers and iPhone software developers. The former gained permission to circumvent the Content Scramble System software on DVDs to copy short portions of copyrighted motion pictures for non-infringing uses. In an interesting twist, the copyright office extended the exemption to anyone making a documentary, not just members of a recognized group of filmmaking professionals. 

The ruling on DVDs was a defeat for the Motion Picture Assn. of America, ...

The moniker chosen by the inter-industry Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem doesn't reveal much about its purpose -- to deliver movies and music to consumers through the Internet in a way that's resistant to piracy yet compatible with a wide variety of devices. So it's not surprising that the brand name the group is announcing today, UltraViolet, doesn't tell consumers much about the products bearing that logo, either. Not like, say, "HDTV" or "Super Audio CD."

But then, it's hard to convey what DECE is about in just a few words. The group, which now boasts 58 members from the entertainment, consumer-electronics and tech industries, grew out of an effort by Sony's Mitch Singer to overcome the incompatibility problems caused by the various anti-piracy technologies being used by online retailers. The result is a system built around an online locker that will store the rights people obtain to movies, music and other types of entertainment. Participating retailers and service providers will send information about each customer's purchases and rentals to his or her rights locker. The locker, in turn, will enable compatible devices to download or stream the content from the retailers' or service providers' sites in accordance to the rights they've obtained.

Such complexity is needed because content owners insist on using digital rights management software and other security techniques to limit copying. The goal of DECE is to hide that complexity, enabling people to manage or play items from their collections by navigating through simple Web pages.

Neither Apple nor Disney is participating at this point, among other notable holdouts in the entertainment and device arena. The technical specifications aren't final just yet, Singer said in a recent interview, but DECE members expect to begin testing the system this year.

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.

Bloggers rip, reuse and rehash text and media from the entrails of the Internet all the time, but the legality of doing so remain contentious.

Legal questions aside, the major blogging platforms have come to facilitate the reproduction of content from other websites.

Last week, WordPress, the top host of blogs, added a "reblog" feature. Clicking that button composes a new post housed on your blog suffixed with the headline, description, thumbnail and link to the source material -- a process nearly identical to adding a link to your Facebook profile.

"Borrowing" content has been a common practice among bloggers practically from the beginning. You can take whatever you want as long as you give credit, right?

Not necessarily.

Excerpts of text generally fall within the "fair-use" doctrine of U.S. copyright law. Bloggers can freely use parts of someone else's writing to help make a point. Wholesale reproduction of an article is never a good idea. Still, courts may be more lenient with noncommercial blogs -- so there's solid reason to think twice about slapping up Google ads. Or packaging and selling a newspaper's content in an iPad app.

A federal judge ruled this week that the company behind the LimeWire file-sharing network was liable for infringing the major record companies' copyrights, exposing the company and its former CEO, Mark Gorton, to potentially enormous financial penalties.

The ruling didn't come as a huge surprise; LimeWire is similar to other second-generation file-sharing networks (Kazaa, Morpheus, Grokster) that the courts had previously held secondarily liable for infringement. Its distributor, LimeWire LLC, has long known it was in the music industry's cross hairs, but it didn't try to protect copyrighted works to the degree that, say, BitTorrent Inc. has done.

What's most interesting about the ruling is the route that U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood took to find LimeWire and Gorton liable...