JACOBS, Circuit Judge:
In this copyright infringement suit, defendant TVEyes, Inc. (“TVEyes”) offers a service that enables its clients to easily locate and view segments of televised video programming that are responsive to the clients’ interests. It does so by continuously recording vast quantities of television programming, compiling the recorded broadcasts into a database that is text‐searchable (based primarily on the closed‐captioned text copied from the broadcasts), and allowing its clients to search for and watch (up to) ten‐minute video clips that mention terms of interest to the clients.[1] Plaintiff Fox News Network, LLC (“Fox”), which has sued TVEyes in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, does not challenge the creation of the text‐searchable database but alleges that TVEyes infringed Fox’s copyrights by re‐distributing Fox’s copied audiovisual content, thereby enabling TVEyes’s clients to access that content without Fox’s permission. The principal question on appeal is whether TVEyes’s enabling of its clients to watch Fox’s programming is protected by the doctrine of fair use. See 17 U.S.C. § 107.
The district court held that fewer than all of the functions of TVEyes’s service constitute a fair use. Specifically, the district court deemed a fair use the functions enabling clients of TVEyes to search for videos by term, to watch the resulting videos, and to archive the videos on the TVEyes servers; but the court held that certain other functions were not a fair use, such as those enabling TVEyes’s clients to download videos to their computers, to freely e‐mail videos to others, or to watch videos after searching for them by date, time, and channel (rather than by keyword). The district court therefore dismissed Fox’s challenge to important functions of TVEyes’s service, but also held that TVEyes was liable to
- ↑ TVEyes also captures radio content. For simplicity, this opinion will focus on only television broadcasts.
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