Trial Court's Ban on TV Show Retransmissions Affirmed on Appeal

NEW YORK, NY, August 27, 2012 -- Arnold & Porter won an important victory August 27 when the Second Circuit affirmed the Southern District of New York's grant of a preliminary injunction prohibiting the retransmission of broadcast television programming over the Internet by a website called ivi.tv. In the fall of 2010, ivi began streaming broadcast signals of television stations in New York, Seattle, Chicago, and Los Angeles via the Internet to paying subscribers. The firm's legal team filed a copyright infringement action against ivi on behalf of the major broadcast television networks (ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC, PBS, and Univision), motion picture studios (Disney, Universal, and 20th Century Fox), Major League Baseball, and various broadcast station owners (Cox, Fisher, and Tribune). The principal issue in the case involved the proper interpretation of certain arcane provisions of the Copyright Act and their applicability to the Internet.

This case has been widely followed in the media. As the Second Circuit noted in its decision, allowing the ivi service to continue would "substantially diminish the value" of plaintiffs' copyrighted programming and "threaten to destabilize the entire industry." Arnold & Porter is currently representing clients in two other "test" cases addressing related issues in New York and Los Angeles.

Bob Garrett argued the case before the Second Circuit. The Arnold & Porter team also included Harry Katz, Peter Zimroth, Lisa Blatt, Scott Morrow, Reeves Anderson, Steve Marsh, John Ulin, Jerry Falk and Tony Boccanfuso. (The case is WPIX Inc. et al. v. Ivi Inc., case number 1:10-cv-07415, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.)