So far, personal video recorders have been at the forefront of what has been called a "war" between Hollywood and the tech industry mostly because of the recorders' most well-known feature: ad skipping. Some of the industry's most vocal representatives, not to mention their lawyers, have likened skipping ads to "stealing." The public, it appears, doesn't buy into that idea. The industry has said much less about trading TV shows. The media firms' suit against Sonicblue provides a clue as to what some executives think of swapping TV -- they don't like it -- but can they do anything to convince consumers that there's anything wrong with it? Because of the nature of TV, that too seems like a hard sell.

The war over PVRs hasn't gone well for the media firms, at least in the public arena. The ridicule began last May, when, in a widely circulated interview with CableWorld magazine, Jamie Kellner, the CEO of Turner Broadcasting, called skipping ads "theft." "Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots," he said. "Otherwise you couldn't get the show on an ad-supported basis. Any time you skip a commercial or watch the button you're actually stealing the programming."

Staci Kramer, the reporter, asked: "What if you have to go to the bathroom or get up to get a Coke?"

"I guess there's a certain amount of tolerance for going to the bathroom," Kellner responded. "But if you formalize it and you create a device that skips certain second increments, you've got that only for one reason, unless you go to the bathroom for 30 seconds. They've done that just to make it easy for someone to skip a commercial."

In a subsequent interview with the New York Times, Kellner seemed unmoved by the criticism over his remarks: "The free television that we've all enjoyed for so many years is based on us watching these commercials," he said. "There's no Santa Claus. If you don't watch the commercials, someone's going to have to pay for television and it's going to be you."

Kellner's argument has a rational basis: TV shows are underwritten by ads, and if everyone stops watching ads, networks will have to find another way to finance shows. But his comments seemed to be setting the TV business down the same sorry path the record business has traveled -- accusing its audience of criminal conduct, accusing tech companies of enabling criminal conduct, and protesting any suggestions that media firms move to embrace, rather than resist, technology whose ubiquity is probably inevitable anyway. (When called for comment, an aide said that Kellner preferred not to talk to the media about PVRs anymore.)

Craig Newmark keeps his ReplayTV's Commercial Advance feature turned on, and he doesn't think there's anything wrong with it. "The people in this country gave the networks radio spectrum," he says, "and they were to do something for the public good. Unfortunately, a lot of them have forgotten that." Newmark also doesn't buy the idea that ad skipping will lead to the end of free television. He points out that many experts see ways for the industry to make more money from PVRs by offering additional services: through video-on-demand, for example, which lets people select shows and have them delivered to a PVR, or through pay-TV premium channels in which shows aren't packed into standard 30- and 60-minute time slots. "I'm not an expert," he says, "but even I can see multiple opportunities for media companies to do more with these, to better serve their customers."

But it's hard to see how TV companies could do all of these things in an environment where trading is pervasive. Although some TV shows may seem as if they're on all the time, TV shows make money, especially in syndication, because they're (artificially) scarce resources. There are about 180 episodes of "Seinfeld" in existence, which is about 90 hours of programming. Many Americans have seen most of them, but many wouldn't really mind seeing them one or two more times each. But very few companies have the rights to show these episodes. For media firms, this scarcity -- demand greater than supply -- represents a cash cow: Local affiliates and cable channels can play "Seinfeld" one or two or five times a day and still expect some people to tune in to see the shows, if only because folks can't see them anywhere else.

Banking on this equation, in 1998, Turner Broadcasting purchased the cable rerun rights to "Seinfeld" for $180 million, which, at about a $1 million per episode, was a record syndication deal. The company, which also has rights to "Friends," "Home Improvement" and "The Drew Carey Show," was looking to put together a lineup of 1990s hits that it thought would remain popular well into the next decade.

But what if you'd recorded every episode of "Seinfeld" when it first aired? You could fit the whole series on a $100 hard drive. Or, what if, through your thousands of friends on Kazaa, you had access to every episode of the show? Would you ever need to turn on TBS to watch an episode of "Seinfeld" that someone else had chosen for you?

In their complaint against Sonicblue, several AOL Time Warner companies -- including Turner -- address this issue, saying that the ReplayTV illegally "creates libraries, indexed and stored on the device, containing up to 320 hours" of "unauthorized digital copies" of Turner's works. Presumably, they'd have the same problem with other PVRs, including -- or especially -- the one from Microsoft. (Narayan, of Microsoft, declined to discuss whether media companies had expressed that sentiment in discussions with the company, but he noted several times that the firms are free to protect their content if they want to.)

All through November, while I was trying out Microsoft's Media Center PC, I sent several messages to people who gather to discuss their ReplayTV devices on the message boards at PlanetReplay. Of the half-dozen people who were looking to trade shows with other people whom I contacted, all who responded said they saw nothing wrong with trading or archiving shows. "I don't think I am stealing anything," one person said, in a typical response. "I pay my cable company $35+ per month to watch TV. If it wasn't for Replay I probably wouldn't watch these shows at all."

When asked about the ethics of trading shows, Chad Little, who runs PlanetReplay, wrote, in an e-mail, "Is trading 'Sopranos' to another HBO subscriber unethical? Is trading 'Sopranos' to a nonsubscriber unethical? Is trading 'Friends' to someone who gets NBC unethical?" His answer to these rhetorical questions was vague: "There hasn't been a real 'test' of these ideas," he wrote, though he said that most trading would be ethical, as one could liken it to "trading" VHS tapes.

Cindy Cohn, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who is representing Newmark and others in their suit against the media companies, expressed a similar point of view. It's not automatically illegal to trade shows, she says. "For 'The Sopranos,' sending it to 20 different people who didn't pay for the shows, that would be hard to justify. But for our clients and a lot of the users of the ReplayTV, they send it from the one in the living room to the one in the bedroom." Archiving shows, too, she says, can be a fair use of media. "And frankly we've heard some great stories about that," she says. "One military guy who was called up to fight in the Afghan war, who came back months later and he was so happy: All of his shows were there for him. And gee, isn't that what technology is supposed to do? I can't believe this idea that we would deny people the opportunity to let their media fit their lives."

But even if all of these devices could be used fairly and legally, I asked Cohn, couldn't she see the media companies' argument that PVRs, with their mix of ad skipping, trading and archiving capabilities, could make business very difficult for Hollywood?

"I guess I'd want to see some evidence of that," she said. "They said that about the VCR and they were so brilliantly wrong. The entertainment companies screamed "the sky is falling" -- and it wasn't. They're using these new technologies to grow businesses for them, like movie downloads -- so they should get the benefits of these technologies, but not the downsides? I think history has shown that technology has always benefitted the entertainment companies."

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