Finding that the operation of the RS-DVR would infringe plaintiffs' copyrights, the district court awarded summary judgment to plaintiffs and enjoined Cablevision from copying or publicly performing plaintiffs' copyrighted works "in connection with its proposed RS DVR system," unless it obtained the necessary licenses. Cablevision I, 478 F. Supp. 2d at 624. Cablevision appealed.
DISCUSSION
We review a district court's grant of summary judgment de novo. Bill Graham Archives v. Dorling Kindersley Ltd., 448 F.3d 605, 607 (2d Cir. 2006).
"Section 106 of the Copyright Act grants copyright holders a bundle of exclusive rights.…" Id. at 607–08. This case implicates two of those rights: the right "to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies," and the right "to perform the copyrighted work publicly." 17 U.S.C. § 106(1), (4). As discussed above, the district court found that Cablevision infringed the first right by 1) buffering the data from its programming stream and 2) copying content onto the Arroyo Server hard disks to enable playback of a program requested by an RS-DVR customer. In addition, the district court found that Cablevision would infringe the public performance right by transmitting a program to an RS-DVR customer in response to that customer's playback request. We address each of these three allegedly infringing acts in turn.
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