"A federal magistrate in Los Angeles has ordered SonicBlue to spy on thousands of digital video recorder users -- monitoring every show they record, every commercial they skip and every program they send electronically to a friend.

Central District Court Magistrate Charles F. Eick told SonicBlue to gather 'all available information' about how consumers use the Santa Clara company's latest generation ReplayTV 4000 video recorders, and turn the information over to the film studios and television networks suing it for contributing to copyright infringement.

'We've been ordered to invade the privacy of our customers,'' said Ken Potashner, SonicBlue's chairman and chief executive. 'This is something that we find personally very troubling.''

Privacy advocates condemned the ruling which came during the pre-trial discovery process of a series of lawsuits against SonicBlue....

The plaintiffs asked SonicBlue to turn over information on how individuals use the recording devices. SonicBlue said it does not track that information. The magistrate, who is supervising discovery, ordered the company to write software in the next 60 days that would record every 'click' from every customer's remote control.

Four separate lawsuits focus on a pair of features on the ReplayTV 4000: an 'AutoSkip' function that allows the device to bypass commercials while recording a program and a high-speed Internet port that allows users to download programs from the Internet or send them to other ReplayTV 4000 users....

Attorneys for the studios say they need this information to determine the extent to which the ReplayTV 4000 allows consumers to steal copyrighted movies and television shows....

The court ruling also requires SonicBlue to track individual users -- not by name, but through 'unique identification numbers....'

Privacy advocates said the ruling is a more egregious invasion of privacy than TiVo committed. In that case, TiVo collected aggregated data that was purposefully separated from personal details about the viewer. And consumers could opt-out, keeping their viewing habits from being collected.

ReplayTV users won't have that choice.

'It's an incredible invasion of privacy,' said Fred von Lohmann, an intellectual property expert for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. 'But second -- and equally important -- is what the Electronic Frontier Foundation and others have been saying was going to happen now for some time. Basically, under the guise of copyright laws, courts are going to be put in a position of telling technology companies how to build their products.'' " [Mercury News, via Slashdot]

I'm glad SonicBlue is going to fight this order. This is unbelievable, and the last paragraph above really brings home the old adage "if you them an inch, they take a mile." This is why you can't believe Congress when they say the DMCA couldn't be used for inappropriate purposes, and it illustrates perfectly why we need to fight the CBDTPA.

And when you get down to the technical level, how are they gonig to count all of these missed commercials and sent shows? How will they distinguish between someone sending a TV show to a different room in order to watch it and someone sending it to a friend? Are they going to count if someone watches a commercial twice (after all, Replays have a button that lets you back up seven seconds). I catch the end of commercials all the time, so do those count?

And what about the fact that someone is storing more shows than they ever could before in order to actually watch them. If you put PVRs out of business and people start watching less television overall (as the whole Napster fiasco indicates could easily happen), can the production companies then sue the networks for destroying their industry? Where does it end? At what point do we equate SonicBlue's livelihood with NBC's? After all, if I'm paying extra for cable and the majority of programs I tape are on cable, why am I obligated to watch commercials on those stations? I've already paid my premium, three times if you count what I shelled out for the ReplayTV because its price included a lifetime subscription fee for their channel guide. Nobody's complaining that consumers aren't watching commercials during HBO's Six Feet Under, so how is this different?

Can you tell I'm upset about this? Something is really wrong when a company can be forced to spy on its customers for the sake of saving an industry that refuses to provide the very services the customers turn to the company for in the first place.