My reasoning here is this -- when DVR's broke in the UK, the one major one had the ability to skip advertisements automatically. That promoted legal action, which meant they had to drop the feature.

IIRC, that's exactly what happened here with ReplayTV (which is why Tivos only ever had FF).

Right, over here wasn't it decided to be a violation of the first amendment?

Word on the street is that Drive likely won't get a DVD release.

Word on the street is that Drive likely won't get a DVD release.

Can't say that suprises me, given that we didn't get THE INSIDE, and that at least had all episodes filmed and a final show that could act as a conclusion (at least from what I've heard) like WONDERFALLS did.

wasn't it decided to be a violation of the first amendment?

Nah - it never had anything to do with the first amendment (which would only apply to the goverment, not private parties). Just a run-of-the-mill copyright infringement lawsuit by a bunch of networks against ReplayTV.

The case was dropped after Replay removed the feature in a later release, so nothing was ever decided, but it did give us the hi-larious spectacle of the head of Turner Broadcasting telling us that any time we don't watch commercials, we're stealing - but the networks would allow us to have bathroom breaks "within reason".

Relatedly, what on earth are we going to do in a world without Jack Valenti?

but it did give us the hi-larious spectacle of the head of Turner Broadcasting telling us that any time we don't watch commercials, we're stealing - but the networks would allow us to have bathroom breaks "within reason".

I suppose the Depends people had something to say about that, though.

Pretty soon we're going to go the Max Headroom route of not allowing Off buttons on the TV.

but it did give us the hi-larious spectacle of the head of Turner Broadcasting telling us that any time we don't watch commercials, we're stealing - but the networks would allow us to have bathroom breaks "within reason"

I wish I'd been there to reply (hopefully with live network news cameras taping) "Thanks for giving me the final push I needed to abandon network TV forever. I'll have so much more time to read, exercise, and socialize now that I won't be stealing the commercial TV programming provided by arrogant morons such as yourself anymore!"

I think it was ReplayTV that a friend of my dad's had, which had that button on the remote that would skip ahead a minute or two (a pre-defined amount of time, anyway).

It was probably meant to skip over commercials, but it turns out that this same amount of time is almost exactly the average amount of time between a football being declared dead on the field and the snap of the next play. This is a fantastic way to watch football, by the way. Games that took three hours to play take half an hour to forty five minutes to watch.

Our DirectTV branded DVR, which we just got in January, has a 30-second skip button.