Ken Potashner, chairman and chief executive officer, told Newsbytes that SonicBlue is seeking a review of the order from Central District Court Magistrate Charles Eick in Los Angeles, who gave the company 60 days to begin logging customer activity in order to gather evidence for lawsuits launched by Hollywood movie studios and television networks.

In what began as four separate copyright-infringement complaints filed last fall, the studios and broadcasters claim in a now- consolidated case that ReplayTV 4000's ability to detect and skip past commercials strikes a blow at a critical source of revenue for the industry, while the device's unique broadband Internet connections could be used as pipelines for unauthorized distribution of popular television programs and movies.

Eick, who is officiating over the pre-trial discovery part of the litigation, ordered that SonicBlue use that broadband link to harvest data revealing "all available information about what works are copied, stored, viewed with commercial omitted, or distributed to third parties (and) when each of those events took place."

Potashner said his company's beef is not about the effort or expense of developing a monitoring system (the entertainment companies are paying 75 percent of the costs), but about spying on its users.

"We have a big moral issue with taking our customers and, in our minds, intruding on their privacy," he said.

Potashner said the company had already offered the results of customer surveys it has conducted - information which he said showed that users of ReplayTV 4000 actually watch more television, but that "they tend to skip the majority of commercials, because thy find them not relevant."

"We also would be less concerned if this was to provide an aggregation of data to the plaintiffs," he said. "But what they want is literally specific data by customer, and for me that's really where the line is getting crossed.

"Why is it individual files, as opposed to an aggregate number? That just lends itself to the point that people's privacy could be compromised."

Turning ReplayTV 4000 into a user-monitoring device won't be an impossible task, since, as SonicBlue's opponents have pointed out, the ReplayTV software was originally developed with some of that capability.

But Potashner said that ReplayTV hasn't be used to compile user data - even in aggregated form - since SonicBlue purchased the former ReplayTV company in early 2001.

"As we stand today, we have never had data flow from the customer to the company," he said.

Squared off against SonicBlue are movie studios such as Paramount, Disney and Twentieth Century Fox, and television networks such as NBC, ABC, CBS and Home Box Office.

SonicBlue, formerly known as video graphics card maker S3, added another controversial device to it stable of gadgets in 1999 with its merger with Diamond Multimedia.

At the time, Diamond had just emerged victorious in a landmark lawsuit launched by the U.S. record industry, with a federal appeals court ruling that devices such as Diamond's Rio MP3 player were legal under the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992.

SonicBlue is at: http://www.sonicblue.com .

Reported by Newsbytes.com, http://www.newsbytes.com .

14:29 CST
Reposted 15:56 CST