Everything is lost… unless you buy a Seagate hard drive. Picture a young mother fretting over losing photos of her adorable brood, or a 30-something man afraid he might lose the countless hours of music he’s stored on his PC. These images will hit the airwaves in December courtesy of Seagate, the disk drive maker. They are part of the company’s first television campaign aimed at consumers.

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In a stunning ruling that has huge implications for the cable industry, the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York has cleared the way for Cablevision (CVC) to offer so-called “network DVRs,” in which consumers would be able to record video programming for future viewing “in the cloud” rather than relying on the hard-drives in their set-top boxes.

The Court of Appeals overturned a lower court ruling which concluded that network DVRs were a violation of content copyrights.

Bernstein Research analyst Craig Moffett notes this morning that the Court concurred with Cablevision’s view that by ceding control of what’s recorded to the customer, Cablevision’s network DVR model avoids direct liability for copyright infringement. “In Cablevision’s view, a network DVR is, in essence, simply a DVR with a very long cord,” he writes.

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More than half of young people copy the songs on their hard drives to friends and even more swap CD copies, according to research that reveals the huge challenge home copying poses to a music industry already battling Internet file-sharing. Three decades after cassette decks first allowed people to make free music tapes for friends, a study by the industry group British Music Rights suggests home copying remains just as ingrained in U.K. culture.

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