English Entertainment
RDF Media sues Fox over reality series ripoff
MUMBAI: British independent television production company RDF Media has filed a lawsuit against US broadcaster Fox.
The lawsuit has accused Fox Broadcasting and Rocket Science Laboratories of ripping off RDF’s original Wife Swap reality television series to create their own competing show, Trading Spouses: Meet Your New Mommy.
The suit accuses Fox and Rocket Science, which jointly produce Trading Spouses with both copyright and trade dress infringement, as well as unfair competition. It claims that they attempted to capitalise on the success of RDF’s Wife Swap by willfully and illegally developing Trading Spouses– that incorporated all of the expressive elements and trade dress of Wife Swap.
Versions of Wife Swap have aired on British television since January 2003 and in the US on ABC since September 2004.
RDF programmes director Stephen Lambert who created and served as executive producer on Wife Swap had the following cutting remarks to make. “In our view, this is the most clear-cut case of copyright theft in the history of the reality genre. It has been widely reported that Fox has long pursued a strategy of ripping off other people’s intellectual property. RDF intends to take full advantage of the law to put a stop to it.”
The lawsuit states that Fox’s parent News Corp COO Peter Chernin told Fox executives last year that he had seen the British version of Wife Swap during a visit to London and that “it was the show everyone was talking about in the United Kingdom.”
After discovering that ABC had acquired the US rights to the show, the suit alleges that Fox and Rocket Science executives decided to copy its format and trade dress in order to to confuse viewers and mislead them into watching Trading Spouses rather than Wife Swap US.
In both Wife Swap and Trading Spouses two wives with contrasting values and lifestyles exchange spouses and families for a period of seven and ten days. During the first half of the trade, each wife must abide by the rules of the departing wife covering all aspects of household management, from chore delegation to budgeting, from food preparation to child discipline.
During the second half of the trade, each wife imposes her own rules on her new household. At the end of the swap, the two wives meet for the first time and share what they have learned about themselves, their spouses, and each other during the swap.
This is not the first time this year that Fox has been sued over a reality show. Earlier this year Dreamworks and Mark Burnett had sued the Rupert Murdoch owned broadcaster for stealing an idea for a boxing show. DreamWorks and Mark Burnett Productions had claimed ideas from their show, The Contender were stolen by Fox who produced The Next Great Champ. While Burnett lost the suit it didn’t matter. Next Great Champ’s low ratings and early exit made the suit a non-issue.
Coming back to the RDF suit at the annual meeting of the Television Critics Association in Los Angeles last July, Fox entertainment president Gail Berman acknowledged that Fox had specifically decided to develop a show similar to Wife Swap.
Meanwhile Daily Variety says that RDF is looking for at least $18 million in damages. The Hollywood Reporter has put the figure at $54 million. Unlike most reality show legal battles, both these shows faired well in the ratings. The burden will be on RDF Media to show there were stolen ideas that resulted in financial damage.
There could be further litigation in the near future. In January Fox and ABC will come out with shows involving nannies who discipline children. ABC rolls out Supernanny, a British-inspired reality show about a UK nanny who straightens out-of-control American children. Fox’s Nanny 911, will be a British-produced reality show about a team of UK nannies who straighten out etc etc.
UK: The aerial is losing its grip. As broadband becomes the default way Britons watch television, the UK is edging towards a decisive, and divisive, question: should Freeview be switched off by 2034? The issue, highlighted in reporting by The Guardian, has exposed deep fault lines over access, affordability and the future of public service broadcasting.
For nearly 25 years, Freeview has delivered free-to-air television from the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 to almost every corner of the country. Even now, it remains the UK’s largest TV platform, used in more than 16m homes and on around 10m main household sets. Yet the same broadcasters that built it are now pressing for its closure within eight years.
Their case rests on a structural shift in viewing. Smart TVs, superfast broadband and the Netflix-led streaming boom have pulled audiences online. Advertising economics have followed. By 2034, the number of homes using Freeview as their main TV set is forecast to fall from a peak of almost 12m in 2012 to fewer than 2m, making digital terrestrial television, or DTT, increasingly costly to sustain.
But critics say the rush to switch off risks abandoning those least able, or least willing, to move online.
“I don’t want to be choosing apps and making new accounts,” says Lynette, 80, from Kent. “It is time-consuming and irritating trying to work out where I want to be, to remember the sequence of clicks, with hieroglyphics instead of words. If I make a mistake I have to start again.”
Lynette is among nearly 100,000 people who have signed a “save Freeview” petition launched by campaign group Silver Voices. She fears the government is about to “take [Freeview] away from me and others who either don’t like, can’t afford, or can’t use online versions”.
Official figures underline the fault lines. A report commissioned by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport estimates that by 2035, 1.8m homes will still depend on Freeview. Ofcom’s analysis shows those households are more likely to be disabled, older, living alone, female, and based in the north of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Freeview is owned by the public service broadcasters through Everyone TV, which also operates Freesat and the newer streaming platform Freely. After two years of review, DCMS is expected to set out its position soon, drawing on three options proposed by Ofcom: a costly upgrade of Freeview’s ageing technology; maintaining a bare-bones service with only core PSB channels; or a full switch-off during the 2030s.
The broadcasters have rallied behind the third option. They argue that 2034 is the logical cut-off, when transmission contracts with network operator Arqiva expire. By then, they say, the cost of broadcasting to a dwindling audience will far outweigh the returns from TV advertising.
Ofcom agrees a crunch point is approaching. In July, the regulator warned of a “tipping point” within the next few years, after which it will no longer be commercially viable for broadcasters to carry the costs of DTT.
Others see risks beyond economics. Questions remain over whether internet TV can reliably deliver emergency broadcasts, such as the daily Covid updates, in the way that universally available DTT can. The UK radio industry has also warned that an internet-only future for TV could push up distribution costs and force some radio stations off air if PSBs no longer share Arqiva’s mast network.
“It is a political hot potato,” says Dennis Reed, founder of Silver Voices, who says he has “dissociated” his organisation from the government’s stakeholder forum, which he believes is “heavily biased” towards streaming.
The Future TV Taskforce, representing the PSBs, counters that moving online could “close the digital divide once and for all”. “We want to be able to plan to ensure that no one is left behind,” a spokesperson says, adding that rising DTT costs could otherwise mean cuts to programme budgets.
The numbers show the scale of the challenge. Of the 1.8m Freeview-dependent homes projected for 2035, around 1.1m are expected to have broadband but not use it for TV. The remaining 700,000 are forecast to lack a broadband connection altogether.
Veterans of the analogue switch-off, completed in 2012 after 76 years, recall similar fears of “TV blackout chaos”. Around 6 per cent of households were labelled “digital refuseniks”, yet a targeted help scheme and a national campaign, fronted by a robot called Digit Al voiced by Matt Lucas, delivered a largely smooth transition.
This time, the BBC is less keen to foot the bill. Tim Davie, the outgoing director general, has said the corporation should not fund a comparable support programme for a Freeview switch-off.
Research for Sky by Oliver & Ohlbaum suggests that with early awareness campaigns and digital inclusion measures, only about 330,000 households would ultimately need hands-on help ahead of a 2034 shutdown.
Meanwhile, viewing habits continue to fragment. Audience body Barb says 7 per cent of UK households no longer own a TV set, choosing to watch on other devices. In December, YouTube overtook the BBC’s combined channels in total UK viewing across TVs, smartphones and tablets, albeit measured at a minimum of three minutes.
That shift may accelerate. YouTube has recently blocked Barb and its partner Kantar from accessing viewing session data, limiting transparency just as online platforms consolidate power.
“When the government chose British Satellite Broadcasting as the ‘winner’ in satellite TV it was Rupert Murdoch’s Sky instead that came out on top,” says a senior TV executive quoted by The Guardian. “There already is such an outsider ready to be the winner in the transition to internet TV; it is YouTube.”
Freeview’s future now hangs on a familiar British dilemma: modernise fast and risk exclusion, or protect universality and pay the price. Either way, the aerial’s days as king of the living room look numbered.
