Fox News Wins Injunction Restricting Clip-Sharing

Cable giant scores victory in its legal battle with media monitoring service TVEyes

"The O'Reilly Factor"

Enjoy catching snippets of Fox News on your computer when you’re not near your television to watch Bill O’Reilly and his fair-and-balanced cohorts?

That might be a little more difficult to do come next month.

Fox News scored a victory in its legal battle against media monitoring service TVEyes on Friday, when a judge handed down an injunction limiting TVEyes’ ability to distribute clips from Fox News and Fox Business.

U.S. district judge Alvin K. Hellerstein ordered a permanent injunction against TVEyes, prohibiting the service from allowing its users to download video clips from Fox News Channel and Fox Business Network to their computers.

The injunction also prevents users from viewing content from the cable outlets using TVEyes’ date, time and channel search, and from sharing clips on social media services including Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.

On the plus side for TVEyes, the judge found that it was OK for the service’s users to archive clips to their Media Center. Users will also still be allowed to share clips by emailing them to others, providing that TVEyes “develops and implements adequate protection measures.”

Friday’s order also put in place a number of policies. For instance, when someone outside of a TVEyes’ subscriber’s organization receives a link to a Fox News or Fox Business clip, that person will be required to enter their own email address into a box onscreen before the clip will play. A prominent notification will also appear on the screen indicating that the content isn’t protected by copyright law and can only be used for research and analysis within the bounds of fair use.

The injunction goes into effect Dec. 14.

Fox News sued subscription service TVEyes  in 2013, claiming copyright infringement.

TV Eyes countered that its offering of video clips and transcript snippets “are transformative and thus constitute fair use protecting it from claims of copyright infringement.”

Pamela Chelin contributed to this report.

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