For those that may have missed it there is a significant drama playing out in the Australian courts that will impact consumers and rights we already have within the Copyright act.

The current stats are 1-1 in the Federal court with the final appeal to be heard in next few months.

Essentially Optus created a service for its customers called TV now which allowed consumers to individually record their favourite shows on a PVR ( Personal Video Recorder)   This is a well proven right under the existing Copyright Act where consumers had the ability to “time shift” content for their convenience.  The variance in the Optus case is that the PVR is not in the consumers home but further back in the network or Cloud as current marketing speak refers to it.

Now the Optus service went one step further which in the digital age is also accepted the idea of “Place Shifting”, meaning I can watch content I recorded on another device or location based on the above ‘Time Shift” right.  This is where things got complicated,   Sporting bodies argued that this was a breach of their copyright, and that they had just or were about to sell these “mobile” rights for considerable sums and that this service was a grievous breach of their copyright.  The judge in round one found in favour of the consumer and that the optus service was platform agnostic and merely an update of existing rights that existed in the analogue VHS tape world.  The subsequent appeal set aside this judgement and we await round three.

Optus has a strong argument that it was only selling a data storage service and the consumer decided what they recorded and how they accessed and when, which is consistent with the intent of the current Act and the original judges views.

Consumers may have less rights than they did prior if time shift is set aside.  Convergence may have hit a hurdle.