IceTV slays Nine in High Court EPG victory: update

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 22 April 2009 11:47

Business IT - Technology

The title originates with the program maker, not the broadcaster, and there are few practical ways of expressing the time at which a program is to be broadcast. Hence they reasoned that this information was not held to be sufficiently original to constitute a substantial part of the schedule.

It is, however, the information that is of greatest value to an ordinary person planning to watch or record programs.

And this is where the High Court judges came to a different conclusion to their colleagues at the Federal Court. The Full Court concluded that the time and title information was the centrepiece of Nine's schedules, but the  High Court ruled it was not substantial enough.

The judges also considered the "skill and labour" test often applied in copyright matters. While they accepted that Nine's employees did indeed apply skill and labour to programming decisions, there was no significant skill and labour applied to the expression of time and title information.

So how does IceTV operate?

It receives program schedules directly from ABC and SBS, so there's no problem with those channels.

For commercial stations, IceTV uses a list of what was broadcast the previous week as a starting point. It then updates that list using information from at least three published (print and online) program guides.

Details of the process continue on page 3.