After an almost 12 month wait for a decision, Justice Bennett declared the schedule information is not the copyright of the Nine Network. The reasons for the judgement are yet to be released, with the parties in discussions as to which elements are confidential. The judge will hear from the parties before making orders as to costs and has ruled IceTV is not precluded from bringing a claim for unjustified threats of copyright infringement.

IceTV's service lets users call up the TV guide on their television screen, browse through the next week's schedule and select programs they want to record. IceTV-compatible devices, such as digital video recorders, often allow users to skip advertisements, but this feature is not linked to the IceTV program guide.

IceTV's electronic program guide, for which subscribers pay $100 per year, must be downloaded from the internet - meaning few recorders are compatible with it. While most digital video recorders have the ability to extract a seven day Electronic Program Guide from the broadcast signal, it's of little use in Australia because the networks only broadcast details of what's on now and next.

In July, Australia's free to air television networks agreed to share their programming schedules electronically for free, via the broadcast signal, but the new service is expected to utilise a form of copyright protection requiring people to buy a new recorder or set top box.

Excluded from the deal was pay television provider Foxtel, also owned by the Packet family's Publishing and Broadcasting Limited. Early this week Foxtel finally struck a deal with the Ten Network to access Ten's program schedule and rebroadcast Ten's digital television signal on the Foxtel service. The Seven Network continued to deny Foxtel rights to its digital broadcasts and its program schedule, but the IceTV ruling may open the way for Foxtel to use Seven's scheduling information without Seven's approval.

Meanwhile the Seven Network has teamed with US digital video recorder TiVo to introduce the iconic device to Australia next year, although with the ad-skipping features disabled. An Electronic Program Guide is a fundamental feature of the TiVo - creating speculation of a deal between Seven and PBL to exchange scheduling data for TiVo in return for scheduling data for Foxtel's TiVo-like Foxtel iQ recoder.

Keep reading for the judge's Summary of Findings