Appeals Court Dismisses Time Warner Cable Set-Top Law

The Federal Communications Commission is trying to spur separate competition to cable-leased set-tops in the delivery of video programming, but according to one federal court, the two are inseparable. A panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has upheld a lower court decision dismissing a class action suit against Time Warner Cable for allegedly tying premium cable services to leasing cable boxes, finding that for the purposes of antitrust law, at least, cable boxes and the premium cable service they transmit are not separate products so can't be anticompetitively tied. "A cable box must be cable-provider-specific, like the keys to a padlock," the court found. "Although the plaintiffs frame their claim as a tie-in, the core issue is a cable provider's right to refuse to enable cable boxes it does not control to unscramble its coded signal." The decision was handed down Sept 2.