Free Republic

Jamie Kellner, chairman and CEO of Turner Broadcasting System Inc., argued that if personal video recorders like TiVo Inc.'s and SONICblue Inc.'s ReplayTV are going to allow viewers to zap commercials, consumers should pay for the privilege -- as much as $250 per year. At a dinner with AOL Time Warner executives and the media Sunday in New Orleans -- gathered there for the National Show -- Kellner said he worries that PVRs that will eventually be installed in set-top boxes threaten to destroy commercial TV, which, he argued, is already a fragile business. He cited a new analyst report...

<p>One day after a federal magistrate judge ordered Sonicblue to monitor the TV-watching habits of people who use its ReplayTV 4000 personal video recorder, the company is hard at work on two separate tracks: While its legal team works on a way to stay or perhaps reverse the ruling, its engineers are trying to come up with software to track thousands of ReplayTV customers in the event that the ruling is not changed.</p>

<p>A federal magistrate in Los Angeles has ordered SonicBlue to spy on thousands of digital video recorder users -- monitoring every show they record, every commercial they skip and every program they send electronically to a friend.</p> <p>Central District Court Magistrate Charles F. Eick told SonicBlue to gather ``all available information'' about how consumers use the Santa Clara company's latest generation ReplayTV 4000 video recorders and turn the information over to the film studios and television networks suing it for contributing to copyright infringement.</p>