Good article in today’s Wall Street Journal about illogical new IP laws. Basically, Cablevisions proposed offering — allowing customers to save programs on a remote DVR — violates copyright law.

It seems that someone may record a program on their own DVR (say a Tivo) for their own personal use, but could not record the same program on a remote server located at another premisis, even if their “part” of the server was in a separate location.

From the article:

Cablevision argued that since the consumer was controlling recording and playback, remote DVRs are fine under copyright law — a decision that reaches back to the Supreme Court’s 1984 ruling that videocassette recorders are legal. (Mindful of the law, Cablevision even said it would dedicate separate storage space for each subscriber, instead of, say, keeping one recording of an episode of “The Sopranos” for use by anyone to record it.) But the studios and cable networks argued that the remote DVR was more like a video-on-demand service, and Cablevision needed permission to “rebroadcast” the programs. Judge Chin agreed, saying that with a network DVR, Cablevision “would be engaging in unauthorized reproductions and transmissions” of copyrighted programs.

So let’s break this down. If the bits that make up your recording of “The Sopranos” go to a hard drive in your living room, everything is (presumably) legal. But if the bits that make up your recording of “The Sopranos” go to a hard drive in a Cablevision data center somewhere, that’s illegal. Got that?

This is, of course, nonsense: In a sensible world, a DVR would be a DVR, regardless of where the hard drive happens to be located, and those who argued otherwise would be sent on their way with the old saw about the forest for the trees. (What if Cablevision took the hard drives out of its iO DVRs, stacked them in its data centers and ran cables from the drives to customers’ homes? Would that be illegal?)

But we don’t live in a sensible world.