Zediva Defends Its Zany Movie Service With Big-Shot Lawyers

By  |  Monday, May 16, 2011 at 7:17 pm

Zediva’s streaming movie service may seem too good to be true, but its legal battle with the movie industry will be no joke.

To defend itself from the Motion Picture Association of America, Zediva has retained a trio of laywers from Durie Tangri, a high-profile intellectual property law firm. The team includes Michael Page, who defended music-sharing service Grokster through to its loss in the Supreme Court; Joe Gratz, who won a case that allowed consumers to sell promotional CDs; and Mark Lemley, a Stanford University professor and IP expert.

The Motion Picture Association of America is bringing its own heavyweights from the law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson. The team played a role in bringing down the music-sharing service Limewire, killing the music search engine Seeqpod and nixing RealNetworks’ RealDVD copying software. As PaidContent’s Joe Mullin puts it, this will be “quite the legal battle.”

Zediva streams new releases for cheaper than iTunes, Amazon and other on-demand movie services because it doesn’t pay any licensing fees to Hollywood studios. The service works like Slingbox, renting a dedicated DVD and movie disc to the user and streaming the content to any Flash-equipped web browser for $2 per movie or $10 for a 10-pack. Because Zediva isn’t duplicating any of the content, it argues that there’s nothing illegal about the service. Movie studios obviously disagree.

But whether Zediva stands a chance in court may not be its biggest concern. Immediately after launching in March, Zediva had to cut off new registrations due to overwhelming demand. The service is physically and financially constrained by the number of DVDs and DVD players it can fit in a server room, and letting too many people in would make the act of renting a movie nearly impossible. It also means that Zediva can never offer a huge movie library, due to the logistics of storing so many DVDs.

I would have loved to see if Zediva could make its quirky approach work without also fending off Hollywood lawyers, but that was never going to happen. Instead, the service will become fodder for copyright case law — not as fun to watch, but not a total waste, either.

 
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3 Comments For This Post

  1. The_Heraclitus Says:
    May 16th, 2011 at 8:41 pm

    They will go down as they can't "broadcast" the content.

  2. circle c geek Says:
    May 17th, 2011 at 4:05 pm

    It's not "broadcasting" because only one person that has the DVD checked out can watch it. In other words, it is not cast broadly. It is much more like renting a DVD from a local video store with a really long extension cord. This fits squarely within Cablevision:

    "[U]nder the transmit clause, we must examine the potential audience of a given transmission by an alleged infringer to determine whether that transmission is “to the public.” And because the RS-DVR system, as designed, only makes transmissions to one subscriber using a copy made by that subscriber, we believe that the universe of people capable of receiving an RS-DVR transmission is the single subscriber whose self-made copy is used to create that transmission."
    http://beckermanlegal.com/Documents/cartoonnetwor… http://www.eff.org/cases/20th-century-fox-v-cable… (summarizing)

  3. The_Heraclitus Says:
    May 18th, 2011 at 3:23 am

    I'm just telling you what the judge is going to pass down. Doesn't do any good to argue with me about it.