Defendant TVEyes, Inc. (“TVEyes”) is a media company that continuously records the audiovisual content of more than 1,400 television and radio channels, imports that content into a database, and enables its clients, for $500 per month, to view, archive, download, and email to others ten‐minute clips. TVEyes also copies the closed‐captioned text of the content it imports, allowing its clients to search for the clips that they want by keyword, as well as by date and time.
Plaintiff Fox News Network, LLC (“Fox”) sued TVEyes for copyright infringement in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. The principal question on appeal is whether TVEyes’s enabling of its clients to watch Fox’s programming is protected by the fair use doctrine.
TVEyes’s re‐distribution of Fox’s content serves a transformative purpose insofar as it enables TVEyes’s clients to isolate from the vast corpus of Fox’s content the material that is responsive to their interests, and to access that material in a convenient manner. But because that re‐distribution makes available to TVEyes’s clients virtually all of Fox’s copyrighted content that the clients wish to see and hear, and because it deprives Fox of revenue that properly belongs to the copyright holder, TVEyes has failed to show that the product it offers to its clients can be justified as a fair use.
Accordingly, we reverse the order of the district court to the extent that it found fair use. Our holding does not encompass the copying of Fox’s closed‐captioned text into a text‐searchable database, which Fox does not challenge on appeal. We affirm the district court’s order to the extent that it denied TVEyes’s request for additional relief. We also remand for entry of a revised injunction.
Judge Kaplan concurs in a separate opinion.
