I rarely get a chance to watch the new Doctor Who episodes on Fridays when they are broadcast on the SciFi channel. Instead, I have my mother record them on her DVR and I come by later in the week and watch them. (I skip the commercials when I do.) It is my understanding that the courts have ruled this behavior to be legal.
Say I forget to set her DVR one week, or my stepfather deletes the show by mistake before I get a chance to watch it. I go on line and download a copy of the show using Bittorrent, or a similar P2P system. Under current US law, is this legal? If (as I suspect) the courts have not ruled decisively on this, how do you believe they should rule, based on existing law. Why?
Episodes of Doctor Who are broadcast in the UK and Canada before being shown in the US. Suppose I want to “time-shift” an episode from the future, and download this Friday’s episode from a recording made available on the Internet by a UK watcher who recorded it last year. Same questions as above. Finally (and facetiously), didn’t the Doctor himself implicitly approve of this sort of thing with his use of “jiggery-pokery”?
GROUND RULES: This is not the place to debate intellectual property rights in toto, only how such rights as they currently exist apply to these cases. I am not asking about saving a copy of the episodes for repeated viewing, nor about downloading movies or other content not normally subject to time-shifting. Some (but not all) P2P networks require that the copy you make be available for others to copy for at least a short time; this may be discussed if it has legal implications of it’s own, but I don’t want the two issues to be confused. Some people believe that that recent legislation (specifically the DMCA) conflicts legally with the letter or intent of earlier copyright law. This can be discussed, but only as it pertains to these senarios.