Pro-ReplayTV Goes Forward

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) suit against the folks suing SonicBlue/ReplayTV over capabilities in the 4000 series digital video recorder is moving forward. The judge dismissed the objections raised in the churlish brief filed by the plaintiffs which tried to further a legal fiction that you can sue a maker of a product over uses that can only infringe on rights when carried out by an end user not exercising fair use rights.

To summarize what I think Lawrence Lessig and others have said: devices that may potentially be used for infringing purposes cannot per se be banned or regulated when they have many, non-infringing uses. All of Hollywood's machinery for digital control appears to be focused on removing all fair-use rights (non-infringing) which are constitutionally protected, I'd argue.