
Aereo loses copyright fight, gets banned in 6 states - r0h1n
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/02/aereo-loses-copyright-fight-to-tv-networks-in-utah/?utm_content=bufferc26cc&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
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wpietri
Fascinating.

Clearly Aereo could sell antennas that people install. And they could also
install those antennas. Presumably they could rent the antenna and the cable
to them instead of selling it. So at what point does it cross the line into a
service that is illegal? When they use a signal booster? When they convert it
to a digital signal? When my neighbor signs up too and they use a common cable
along the way?

I suspect the real problem is that the tech has just changed too much; at some
point original intent stops making sense when the circumstances change enough.
If we had a well-run legislative branch, presumably they would have noticed
this problem a few years back and patched it. Or they would have delegated the
problem to a regulator whose job it was to keep on top of things. But that's
not the world we live in.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Its an interesting theory. And frankly I hope the Supreme Court comes down
solidly in Aereo's favor. The theory goes I can put an antenna on my roof and
watch TV in the living room, I can put an antenna on top of an apartment
building and watch TV down on a lower floor which doesn't have line of sight
visibility. If I were rich I could put an antenna on a nearby mountaintop, run
a line (with signal boosters and conditioners) all the way to my apartment in
the city and watch that. So I should be able to do all of that but using the
network cable between me and my antenna as the coax.

And that runs up against some of the fairly ridiculous rules that content
providers have been throwing up for years to extract money out of consumers.

So far the courts have been somewhat irrational on the topic but as technical
sophistication increases I keep hoping this house of cards will either
collappse or be burned to the ground.

~~~
anigbrowl
_And that runs up against some of the fairly ridiculous rules that content
providers have been throwing up for years to extract money out of consumers._

Broadcast spectrum ain't free. If you're paying hundreds of thousands of
dollars in FCC license fees, and millions on mandatory local production (eg
news operations) and network content licensing costs, you might look askance
at it too. I really think the whole individual aerial thing with Aereo is
bullshit.

~~~
deelowe
This kind of misses the point that I can get broadcast for free by putting up
an antenna at my house right now. I can do that at my neighbor's house or a
piece of land down the road or even two states over. So... Again, at what
point does this become not OK? This has been a real issue with broadcast
spectrum for a while now (it shows up in other areas) and I'm glad Aero is
challenging it to get a decision.

~~~
anigbrowl
Yes, You can do it. But in Aereo's case you didn't, they did. They set up a
small forest of individual antennas in a central location, then invited
members of the public to lease them. It's top down, whereas what you are
describing is bottom up.

If you had negotiated the right to hang a dime-size antenna of the Empire
State building, with a home-brewed DVR accessible over the net, and then your
friends and acquaintances had done the same thing, and eventually you had
clubbed together and hired a janitor to keep an eye on the whole thing, so to
speak, then it would have been a community thing that aggregated around a
single point (a tall building where I imagine TV reception is good). Aereo is
more of an astroturfing operation. It differs from your scenario in the same
way that a housing subdivision built out by a developer differs from a
village.

~~~
deelowe
Most people pay technicians or contractors to install antennas. Hell, some
people pay for remote antennas in the mountains. I fail to see the difference.

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bashcoder
In the second legal battle that Aereo won back in 2012, the lone dissenting
judge in the US Court of Appeals in NY had a scathing critique of Aereo's
scheme. I'm generally pro-Aereo, but I think HN readers might find this
portion of Judge Denny Chin's dissent interesting:

"Aereo’s “technology platform” is, however, a sham. The system employs
thousands of individual dime-sized antennas, but there is no technologically
sound reason to use a multitude of tiny individual antennas rather than one
central antenna; indeed, the system is a Rube Goldberg-like contrivance, over-
engineered in an attempt to avoid the reach of the Copyright Act and to take
advantage of a perceived loophole in the law. After capturing the broadcast
signal, Aereo makes a copy of the selected program for each viewer, whether
the user chooses to “Watch” now or “Record” for later. Under Aereo’s theory,
by using these individual antennas and copies, it may retransmit, for example,
the Super Bowl “live” to 50,000 subscribers and yet, because each subscriber
has an individual antenna and a “unique recorded copy” of the broadcast, these
are “private” performances. Of course, the argument makes no sense. These are
very much public performances." [1]

[1]
[http://www.ca2.uscourts.gov/decisions/isysquery/620ea2ad-c6c...](http://www.ca2.uscourts.gov/decisions/isysquery/620ea2ad-c6c8-4177-84e0-19e5ac2cdb50/1/doc/12-2786_12-2807_complete_opn.pdf#xml=http://www.ca2.uscourts.gov/decisions/isysquery/620ea2ad-c6c8-4177-84e0-19e5ac2cdb50/1/hilite/)

~~~
Natsu
So then what are the rules they are to play by? "We'll make them up whenever
we feel like it!" Certainly, this is a legal problem, but that to me indicates
that it is their problem to fix, not Aereo's. If their judgements rest so
heavily on the minutea of the tech backing this up, perhaps it is time to
rethink these laws on more _principled_ grounds than they have sofar been
imagined....

~~~
ewoodrich
You certainly make a good point, but I disagree with your conclusion.

Ideally, a law is drafted as narrowly as possible. Otherwise, it is open to
extremely broad interpretation and eventually becomes far removed from its
original purpose ( the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and RICO are examples of
laws where this principle has not been followed). If a more "principled law"
were to replace the current OTA rules, it would certainly be far more
expansive to include all immediately foreseeable edge cases (Congress tends
not to get excessively involved in the finer points of modern tech, partially
due to awareness that incorrect jargon could result in a law becoming obsolete
in a few years).

The cited opinion does not rely on the minutea of the tech at all, the judge
is using the technical description to illustrate how a complex technical
scheme can be used to circumvent the intent of a law. And generally, judges do
not look favorably on what they percieve to be "legal tricks", in this case,
applying the unarguably legal example of private OTA viewing to a far more
expansive scheme to act as a secondary provider of OTA streams without
properly licensing them for redistribution.

I'm sure that the law _could_ be rewritten in a more "principled" way, but
there's a very good chance we could end up with something like the CFAA, which
would be far worse than relatively narrow judicial interpretations of the
current law.

~~~
Natsu
The laws effectively codify commercial agreements between the public (who gets
very little representation, IMHO) and various moneyed interests. As they had
the better bargaining spot, I'm not really inclined to give them anything we
did not specifically agree to.

It's sad that their response to imaginative new technology is "we didn't think
to outlaw that, so we're changing the rules." Might as well be a "right to
profit" in my view.

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cinskiy
I'm not American and I heard of this company for the first time, but it's
obvious for me that 'over the air' is the progress, and 'over the physical
cable' is not, and it seems to me that physical cable owners want to block
progress, and an unreasonable toll solely for owning the cable, because they
know they will never own the air.

Same thing with Tesla and car dealerships. Why would I need a dealership, if I
can order a car to my door online straight from the manufacturer these days?

~~~
bgilroy26
It is more economically efficient for the manufacturer to deliver ~300 cars to
one location every couple of months and have the 300 customers drive the "last
mile" to their homes when they want to buy a car.

The alternative is to have the manufacturer drive all the way to each
customer's house at a time the customer chooses individually.

The current system of car delivery is a better use of energy/people's time
than autos on demand.

~~~
icebraining
Cars on demand don't prevent the manufacturer from having local warehouses to
where they deliver ~300 cars every couple of months, so the energy expended
doesn't really change, only who does the last-mile driving (new owner versus
some employee). If anything, a warehouse will waste much less than a
dealership holding the same number of cars.

As for it being a better use of people's time, if people are choosing the buy
from the websites vis-a-vis going to dealerships, I'd say they have shown
otherwise.

~~~
bgilroy26
If you're suggesting that removing the sales staff, mechanic shop, and loud
promotions from car dealerships would cut costs, I agree.

Perhaps we agree on all counts. I do not understand how a dealership and a
local warehouse differ in a conversation about how to distribute auto
inventory for sale.

~~~
icebraining
Well, I guess the issue is that I didn't think that was the conversation we
were having. cinskiy asked why would one need a dealership, when one can
_order_ directly from the manufacturer - this doesn't imply anything about the
distribution of inventory, just how the sales process works.

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mal-2
The content companies would put Aereo out of business real quick by offering a
free, constant, live stream on their websites with local ads and programming
based on the location of the viewer.

Owning OTA spectrum comes with a responsibility to provide the signal to the
public for free. It was an absurd idea to begin with for content providers to
charge cable companies to distribute something which has the sole purpose of
being distributed and is broadcast for free to everyone with an antenna.

------
NIL8
This is actually bigger news than most people realize. The powers that be are
trying to establish a precedent to preemptively control content transmission
by still-to-come technologies in the future.

Aside from that, I love it when a simple, old-school hack (TV antenna) is used
to solve a big problem and provide better service than the big corporations.

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paul_f
I think Techdirt nailed it 6 years ago: "Felony interference of a business
model"

[http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20071004/163314.shtml](http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20071004/163314.shtml)

------
acd
I think it just requires one country to have favorable laws for it to be big
punch hole in the cable televisions monopoly.

The first company to figure out Internet HD TV streaming both live and Netflix
style browsing per tv program shows 100-400 TV channels

Selling this around $10 per month will win a lot of subscribers.

Examples of companies that have Internet TV streaming solutions Aereo Zattoo
Magine

Internet bandwith are dropping for every year that goes by as routers gets
more powerful, we only need around 10 megabit to stream HD tv, someone will
figure it out.

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paul9290
This judge is old and out of touch
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dale_A._Kimball](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dale_A._Kimball)

I use Aereo everyday and the game needs to change even for the better of
copyright. They just don't see it yet, as they didn't see the win that befell
them when they lost the war against the VCR.

~~~
meepmorp
Is he out of touch because he is improperly interpreting the law, or because
he reached a conclusion you don't like?

~~~
paul9290
Indeed do you like and enjoy dealing with your cable company? Do you like
paying for tons of channels that hold no value to you? Do you not want to see
awesome and innovative content services created? Do you know the history of
copyright and how they always fight technology, but it in the end it works out
for the better of them?

~~~
meepmorp
This has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not a judge has properly
applied law and legal precedent in a ruling. Calling the judge old and out of
touch due to his ruling suggests you don't actually understand what judges do
in their jobs.

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nailer
Same technical measure was used by an online PVR company in Australia four
years ago. Alas I can't remember the name. It didn't work out well for them.

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cookiecaper
ArsTechnica is lame to act like this is a Utah-specific thing. This is a
federal case brought in a federal court that happens to be based in Utah.

~~~
fpgeek
If you'd read the article, you'd know that a federal case brought in a federal
court in New York came out the other way, so the impact of this decision is
geographically-limited until the Supreme Court weighs in (oral arguments
coming in April).

~~~
cookiecaper
I did read the article and I understand that the decision affects all of the
10th circuit and that other courts ruled differently. It still has nothing to
do with Utah specifically. It's a federal district court that is operates
within Utah, but is otherwise wholly separate from Utah's interests or
government. The articles says things like "Utah is hoping to slow their
progess". This is blatantly misleading.

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pbreit
Do the lawyers here feel like Aereo's losing is reasonable?

~~~
gcb0
depends on which side they are being paid by.

