I'm not intimately familiar with copyright law, but the article's take on this strikes me as wrong:
Fox first argues that merely recording the entire prime time lineup is making "bootleg" copies of the videos. That's a rather stunning claim, and a direct challenge to the Supreme Court's ruling in the Betamax case, which made it clear that time-shifting is legal. The networks are claiming that this is not the same thing, because the "copies" aren't being made by the user, but by DISH itself for use by the user. Beyond being a meaningless distinction, it's also not true. As the Cablevision case concerning a "remote DVR" offered by the service provider showed, if the actions are at the request of the consumer, then it's the consumer making the call.
There's plenty of room to argue that this is legally the same or different from what was upheld in
Betamax. Dish Network will argue that because the ultimate decision to skip or not to skip is left to the viewer, this is a difference only in degree. The networks will argue it's a difference in kind. I think the networks win that argument, and I think the big difference is that the feature to skip commercials, and the equipment viewers are gonna use to skip them, are both
licensed to viewers but owned and controlled by Dish. If Dish changes its features to remove commercial skip, viewers can't do anything about it. Should be fun to see how it all plays out.
