

U.S. judge says Internet streaming service should be treated like cable - Animats
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/07/17/us-filmon-copyright-ruling-idUSKCN0PR02620150717

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exarch
What salient factors distinguish a cable company from a "mere" streaming video
service? Demand programming? Nope. Time shifting? Nope. Advertisement? Nope.
Other than the literal media the data flows over, what is the legally
meaningful difference?

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jimrandomh
A cable company is a natural monopoly; servicing an area requires a large
infrastructure investment, there is usually only one cable company willing to
service a given household, and cable companies negotiate with municipalities.
A video streaming service doesn't have these properties. This is a legally
meaningful difference because much of the regulation imposed on cable
companies is intended to compensate for lack of competition.

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spathi_fwiffo
I would disagree with you somewhat:

Cable isn't a natural monopoly, they are sanctioned monopolies due to their
negotiations with municipalities; Previously their only competition was over-
the-air broadcast. We have this model in place of a company being given sole
propriety over the physical 'cable' infrastructure.

But, just look at what has happened now that Verizon can compete by using a
different set of wires (FIOS). They want to compete because it is a huge
business and the monopoly has been broken.

The difference with a video streaming service is that they don't own the
infrastructure over which their service is delivered.

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acjohnson55
Wowwww. Too little too late for Aereo, which was a vastly superior service.

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Dylan16807
What happened to Aereo was ridiculous. They tried to avoid cable regulation,
the supreme court used a somewhat-shaky argument to say they looked too much
like a cable company to avoid that, then another court said they don't get to
use cable rules either??

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DiabloD3
Yeah, that never made sense to me. How do you claim they're too much like a
cable company (thus declaring them one), but not allowing them their rights as
one?

The Judges who ruled in favor of that should have been investigated for
corruption. It made zero sense, and in my opinion, failed the "follow the
money" test.

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ubernostrum
The Supreme Court case involving Aereo was not a wrong or bad or corrupt
ruling.

The historical roots here are the community-access television (CATV) systems
of the 1970s. CATV systems were legal at that time, and the Court acknowledged
similarities between what Aereo did and what CATV did. But the Court was stuck
with the fact that Congress had explicitly amended the Copyright Act to say
that a CATV-style system was considered to "perform" the copyrighted programs
it passed on to viewers. Which in turn left the Court without much choice as
to whether Aereo was "performing" the programs viewed by its customers.

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Karunamon
But then they should have been allowed the benefits of that classification,
which they were _explicitly denied_.

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xasos
This reminds of Chicago's recent "cloud tax" [0]. It places a tax on anything
related to the cloud, include AWS or Netflix. Most of the premises don't make
any sense, and it just seems like another revenue stream for the Chicago
government.

> Each one takes an existing tax law and extends it to levy an extra 9 percent
> tax on certain types of online services. The first ruling presumably covers
> streaming media services like Netflix and Spotify, while the second would
> cover remote database or computing platforms like Amazon Web Services or
> Lexis Nexis. Under the new law, what passes as $100 of server time in
> Springfield would cost $109 if you're conducting it from an office in
> Chicago.

[0] [http://www.theverge.com/2015/7/1/8876817/chicago-cloud-
tax-o...](http://www.theverge.com/2015/7/1/8876817/chicago-cloud-tax-online-
streaming-sales-netflix-spotify)

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chias
I'm just waiting for a judge to rule that cable should be treated like a
streaming service ;)

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deathhand
" _Broadcasters have been aggressively litigating_ " \- This sentence should
never be written about American democracy.

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madaxe_again
"Have been aggressively litigating" is pretty much all American history
1776-present. Most western history since thenabouts, in fact.

Better than "the media barons slaughtered 222,000 more in today's fighting
over broadcast rights, thus starting the 27th copyright war".

