Consumer electronics maker SonicBlue has earned the wrath of the media establishment by tinkering with television. Viacom, Disney, and NBC sued last October to stop the maverick company from releasing the ReplayTV 4000, a networkable personal video recorder (PVR) than can automatically skip commercials and transmit recorded shows over a home network or across the Net.

Those two features, says Forrester Research principal analyst Josh Bernoff, "severely threaten the people in the network business, so clearly they're in a position where they feel they need to defend themselves."

The skirmish that claimed the life of Napster has now evolved into a war being staged in your living room. While Napster let you share songs, the ReplayTV 4000 (which shipped despite the suit) lets you share shows with as many as 15 other ReplayTV-equipped friends. Limiting the piracy potential of the device, the sharing process for an hourlong show takes from an hour to one day, according to the company (though that is allegedly overstated).

While sharing recorded shows is certainly questionable under current copyright law, the three companies suing also claim that the ability to skip ads is illegal because it deprives content creators of revenue. Doing so "attacks the fundamental economic underpinnings of free television," the legal complaint asserts. It even implies that ad skipping endangers democracy because political ads "become invisible to viewers."

Illegal Bathroom Breaks

Andrew Wolfe, CTO of SonicBlue, jokes that Walt Disney Company CEO Michael Eisner would probably like to make it a misdemeanor to go to the bathroom during a commercial. "We made the decisions and they didn't," Wolfe says. "These are the same people that sued all the way to the Supreme Court to block the VCR. These are people who have threatened in the past to stop remote controls. This is a very technophobic industry."

Wolfe says his company simply wants to create innovative devices that help people enjoy music and video. "We think that grows the market. If you create a better experience for customers, they buy more content," he says. "And we believe it's legal to create a better experience for customers. The people who are suing us seem to believe that if you restrict what customers can do, that they're still going to be your customers. That's probably very shortsighted."

The other major player in the personal video recorder space, TiVo, has appeased Hollywood by offering consumers less subversive machines. Bernoff sees PVR technology being delivered via set-top cable boxes rather than a consumer electronics device: "Boxes of that kind are much more likely to include some sort of respect for the content, because a cable or satellite company is not going to put a box in the field that does violence to the copyrights of their network partners."