D&M BELIEVES BANKRUPTCY PURCHASE KILLS REPLAYTV SUIT
ReplayTV’s new owner doesn’t believe it will be a party to the suit filed by major entertainment companies against former ReplayTV owner SonicBlue. D&M Holdings, which announced Wed. it had won a bankruptcy court auction bid to acquire ReplayTV and Rio assets from SonicBlue for $36.2 million, believes it’s “not a party” to the copyright infringement suit, D&M CEO Merle Gilmour told our affiliate Consumer Electronics Daily.
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D&M said the deal to acquire ReplayTV and Rio assets was expected to close in about 10 days. D&M said it planned to keep all ReplayTV customers and would design, produce and distribute lines of ReplayTV and Rio products after the acquisition closed.
An Oct. trial date has been set in the suit in which a group of 28 entertainment companies is seeking an injunction to bar the company from including commercial-skip and Internet retransmission functions on ReplayTV PVRs. “We do not believe that we are a party to the existing lawsuit and that that lawsuit will sort of cease to be in existence postbankruptcy,” pursuant to “the way that bankruptcy works,” Gilmour said. “The plaintiffs in that case would need to refile a lawsuit, and the process would begin over.” Gilmour said “all we did was buy assets here.”
Gilmour said “we haven’t made any decisions” whether to eliminate the commercial-skip or Internet retransmission features that have been the crux of the suits against ReplayTV or whether they would be eliminated as a direct result of any litigation. According to a D&M legal opinion, Gilmour said: “Given that the bankruptcy process did not sell a business, it just sold the assets, that suit stays with the estate,” which is SonicBlue.