| reply to Tzale
Re: I must side with cablevision here CHECKS AND BALANCES.
"Legislate from the bench" is a bogus misleading term coined by a bunch of whining republicans who were trying to pull the wool over.
The executive, judicial, and legislative branches are supposed to act as a dampening mechanism. Each branch is there to prevent the other 2 branches from doing things that are unconstitutional (favoring the side of not making any new laws - in order for laws to go into place and stay there long term all 3 branches have to continue to agree they are valid).
If the legislature puts some bogus law into place, either the president can veto the bill or the judicial branch can declare it unconstitutional.
So it is the job of the judicial branches of government to interpret the law. It is the police's job to enforce the letter of the law. In this case it is the judge's job to decide the merits of both positions and decide a resolution. There is always the right of appeal on both sides (up to the supreme court).
IMO what Cablevision was trying to do isn't much different from what Comcast already does with VoD... except that each subscriber on Cablevision would select which shows they wanted to "record" beforehand whereas Comcast simply chooses what to archive without the subscriber's choice (and hence there isn't that much selection of VoD content on Comcast).
I believe the future is something like IPTV with every season of every show archived in all-you-can-eat VoD (kindof like what Rhapsody does with music now). Live broadcasts (news, sports, etc.) would probably have a relatively short lifetime unless somebody "saves" one by request in their account storage space.
This would actually be a lot more secure since the content would be on the server side and the customer would need to stream it (should make the studios happier than the current DVR box scenario). |
