Opinion ID: 2599
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Buffer Data

Text: It is undisputed that Cablevision, not any customer or other entity, takes the content from one stream of programming, after the split, and stores it, one small piece at a time, in the BMR buffer and the primary ingest buffer. As a result, the information is buffered before any customer requests a recording, and would be buffered even if no such request were made. The question is whether, by buffering the data that make up a given work, Cablevision reproduce[s] that work in copies, 17 U.S.C. § 106(1), and thereby infringes the copyright holder's reproduction right. Copies, as defined in the Copyright Act, are material objects ... in which a work is fixed by any method ... and from which the work can be ... reproduced. Id. § 101. The Act also provides that a work is `fixed' in a tangible medium of expression when its embodiment ... is sufficiently permanent or stable to permit it to be ... reproduced ... for a period of more than transitory duration.  Id. (emphasis added). We believe that this language plainly imposes two distinct but related requirements: the work must be embodied in a medium, i.e., placed in a medium such that it can be perceived, reproduced, etc., from that medium (the embodiment requirement), and it must remain thus embodied for a period of more than transitory duration (the duration requirement). See 2 Melville B. Nimmer & David Nimmer, Nimmer on Copyright § 8.02[B][3], at 8-32 (2007). Unless both requirements are met, the work is not fixed in the buffer, and, as a result, the buffer data is not a copy of the original work whose data is buffered. The district court mistakenly limited its analysis primarily to the embodiment requirement. As a result of this error, once it determined that the buffer data was [c]learly ... capable of being reproduced, i.e., that the work was embodied in the buffer, the district court concluded that the work was therefore fixed in the buffer, and that a copy had thus been made. Cablevision I, 478 F.Supp.2d at 621-22. In doing so, it relied on a line of cases beginning with MAI Systems Corp. v. Peak Computer Inc., 991 F.2d 511 (9th Cir.1993). It also relied on the United States Copyright Office's 2001 report on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which states, in essence, that an embodiment is fixed [u]nless a reproduction manifests itself so fleetingly that it cannot be copied.  U.S. Copyright Office, DMCA Section 104 Report 111 (Aug.2001) ( DMCA Report ) (emphasis added), available at http://www.copyright.gov/reports/studies/dmca/sec-104-report-vol-1.pdf. The district court's reliance on cases like MAI Systems is misplaced. In general, those cases conclude that an alleged copy is fixed without addressing the duration requirement; it does not follow, however, that those cases assume, much less establish, that such a requirement does not exist. Indeed, the duration requirement, by itself, was not at issue in MAI Systems and its progeny. As a result, they do not speak to the issues squarely before us here: If a work is only embodied in a medium for a period of transitory duration, can it be fixed in that medium, and thus a copy? And what constitutes a period of more than transitory duration? In MAI Systems, defendant Peak Computer, Inc., performed maintenance and repairs on computers made and sold by MAI Systems. In order to service a customer's computer, a Peak employee had to operate the computer and run the computer's copyrighted operating system software. See MAI Sys., 991 F.2d at 513. The issue in MAI Systems was whether, by loading the software into the computer's RAM, [1] the repairman created a copy as defined in § 101. See id. at 517. The resolution of this issue turned on whether the software's embodiment in the computer's RAM was fixed, within the meaning of the same section. The Ninth Circuit concluded that by showing that Peak loads the software into the RAM and is then able to view the system error log and diagnose the problem with the computer, MAI has adequately shown that the representation created in the RAM is sufficiently permanent or stable to permit it to be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated for a period of more than transitory duration. Id. at 518 (quoting 17 U.S.C. § 101). The MAI Systems court referenced the transitory duration language but did not discuss or analyze it. The opinion notes that the defendants vigorously argued that the program's embodiment in the RAM was not a copy, but it does not specify the arguments defendants made. Id. at 517. This omission suggests that the parties did not litigate the significance of the transitory duration language, and the court therefore had no occasion to address it. This is unsurprising, because it seems fair to assume that in these cases the program was embodied in the RAM for at least several minutes. Accordingly, we construe MAI Systems and its progeny as holding that loading a program into a computer's RAM can result in copying that program. We do not read MAI Systems as holding that, as a matter of law, loading a program into a form of RAM always results in copying. Such a holding would read the transitory duration language out of the definition, and we do not believe our sister circuit would dismiss this statutory language without even discussing it. It appears the parties in MAI Systems simply did not dispute that the duration requirement was satisfied; this line of cases simply concludes that when a program is loaded into RAM, the embodiment requirement is satisfiedan important holding in itself, and one we see no reason to quibble with here. [2] At least one court, relying on MAI Systems in a highly similar factual setting, has made this point explicitly. In Advanced Computer Services of Michigan, Inc. v. MAI Systems Corp., the district court expressly noted that the unlicensed user in that case ran copyrighted diagnostic software for minutes or longer, but that the program's embodiment in the computer's RAM might be too ephemeral to be fixed if the computer had been shut down within seconds or fractions of a second after loading the copyrighted program. 845 F.Supp. 356, 363 (E.D.Va.1994). We have no quarrel with this reasoning; it merely makes explicit the reasoning that is implicit in the other MAI Systems cases. Accordingly, those cases provide no support for the conclusion that the definition of fixed does not include a duration requirement. See Webster v. Fall, 266 U.S. 507, 511, 45 S.Ct. 148, 69 L.Ed. 411 (1924) (Questions which merely lurk in the record, neither brought to the attention of the court nor ruled upon, are not to be considered as having been so decided as to constitute precedents.). Nor does the Copyright Office's 2001 DMCA Report, also relied on by the district court in this case, explicitly suggest that the definition of fixed does not contain a duration requirement. However, as noted above, it does suggest that an embodiment is fixed [u]nless a reproduction manifests itself so fleetingly that it cannot be copied, perceived or communicated. DMCA Report, supra, at 111. As we have stated, to determine whether a work is fixed in a given medium, the statutory language directs us to ask not only 1) whether a work is embodied in that medium, but also 2) whether it is embodied in the medium for a period of more than transitory duration. According to the Copyright Office, if the work is capable of being copied from that medium for any amount of time, the answer to both questions is yes. The problem with this interpretation is that it reads the transitory duration language out of the statute. We assume, as the parties do, that the Copyright Office's pronouncement deserves only Skidmore deference, deference based on its power to persuade. Skidmore v. Swift & Co., 323 U.S. 134, 140, 65 S.Ct. 161, 89 L.Ed. 124 (1944). And because the Office's interpretation does not explain why Congress would include language in a definition if it intended courts to ignore that language, we are not persuaded. In sum, no case law or other authority dissuades us from concluding that the definition of fixed imposes both an embodiment requirement and a duration requirement. Accord CoStar Group Inc. v. LoopNet, Inc., 373 F.3d 544, 551 (4th Cir. 2004) (while temporary reproductions may be made in this transmission process, they would appear not to be `fixed' in the sense that they are `of more than transitory duration'). We now turn to whether, in this case, those requirements are met by the buffer data. Cablevision does not seriously dispute that copyrighted works are embodied in the buffer. Data in the BMR buffer can be reformatted and transmitted to the other components of the RS-DVR system. Data in the primary ingest buffer can be copied onto the Arroyo hard disks if a user has requested a recording of that data. Thus, a work's embodiment in either buffer is sufficiently permanent or stable to permit it to be perceived, reproduced, (as in the case of the ingest buffer) or otherwise communicated (as in the BMR buffer). 17 U.S.C. § 101. The result might be different if only a single second of a much longer work was placed in the buffer in isolation. In such a situation, it might be reasonable to conclude that only a minuscule portion of a work, rather than a work was embodied in the buffer. Here, however, where every second of an entire work is placed, one second at a time, in the buffer, we conclude that the work is embodied in the buffer. Does any such embodiment last for a period of more than transitory duration? Id. No bit of data remains in any buffer for more than a fleeting 1.2 seconds. And unlike the data in cases like MAI Systems, which remained embodied in the computer's RAM memory until the user turned the computer off, each bit of data here is rapidly and automatically overwritten as soon as it is processed. While our inquiry is necessarily fact-specific, and other factors not present here may alter the duration analysis significantly, these facts strongly suggest that the works in this case are embodied in the buffer for only a transitory period, thus failing the duration requirement. Against this evidence, plaintiffs argue only that the duration is not transitory because the data persist long enough for Cablevision to make reproductions from them. Br. of Pls.-Appellees the Cartoon Network et al. at 51. As we have explained above, however, this reasoning impermissibly reads the duration language out of the statute, and we reject it. Given that the data reside in no buffer for more than 1.2 seconds before being automatically overwritten, and in the absence of compelling arguments to the contrary, we believe that the copyrighted works here are not embodied in the buffers for a period of more than transitory duration, and are therefore not fixed in the buffers. Accordingly, the acts of buffering in the operation of the RS-DVR do not create copies, as the Copyright Act defines that term. Our resolution of this issue renders it unnecessary for us to determine whether any copies produced by buffering data would be de minimis, and we express no opinion on that question.