Fluffeh writes:
"Although there are arguments scheduled for 22 April in the Supreme Court, US District Judge Dale Kimball of Utah ruled against Aereo which effectively bans it in Utah along with the rest of the 10th Circuit, which includes Wyoming, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Colorado.
Kimball ruled that Aereo's retransmission of Plaintiffs' copyrighted programs "is indistinguishable from a cable company and falls squarely within the language of the Transmit Clause." He didn't buy Aereo's argument that its system of renting a tiny antenna to each customer allows it to avoid the "Transmit Clause" of the 1976 Copyright Act, which determines what kind of "transmissions" of copyrighted material must pay licensing fees."
(Score: 4, Informative) by tynin on Friday February 21 2014, @07:23PM
Since you have to be in the area of the transmission for Aereo to resell it to you, who exactly do you think is there target audience? After all, the same people should be able to get these OTA for free.
What this service is for, is for people who should have access to these TV transmissions already, but are for one reason or another, unable to get reception. There are many legitimate reasons that make it almost impossible to get reception depending on your geographic location, or if you are living in a building where putting up an antenna is illegal, or maybe you just get poor reception.
These broadcasters are going to doing nothing to solve this TV equivalent of the ISP "last mile" problem, but they should. To me, this was nothing but fair competition coming in and filling in the gaps of other companies failure.
(Score: 1) by jonh on Friday February 21 2014, @09:17PM
The TV companies would much rather pretend that it's still 1950, and they sure as hell aren't going to spend any time or money looking into this fancy "computers" stuff to increase their viewership to include people who can't get a decent OTA signal, or want to watch their TV shows on their phone or laptop.
But they're also damn sure that even though they're not interested in improving value to their customers, nobody else should be able to either. Why should they have to adapt their business to changing realities? There simply must be some kind of law against this kind of thing!
</snarkasm>