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Aereo Suffers Loss and Hopes for Supreme Court Win

posted by Dopefish on Friday February 21 2014, @12:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the what-doesn't-kill-you-makes-you-stronger dept.

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."

 
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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by dmc on Friday February 21 2014, @07:56PM

    by dmc (188) on Friday February 21 2014, @07:56PM (#4503)

    The part that makes this fuzzy for me is that Aereo is a commercial entity profiting off the rebroadcasting of someone else's content.

    This sentence would be a nice foundation, but I don't by the *re*broad*casting* word. "broad"casting seems to imply making something "broadly" available to others. From my (non-RTFA) gathering, this is only making it available to the same person who could have watched it at home instead. I'd call that "narrowcasting" myself.

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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by jonh on Friday February 21 2014, @09:28PM

    by jonh (733) on Friday February 21 2014, @09:28PM (#4558) Homepage
    It seems to me anyway, that if it's legal to run a business which rents VCR's or DVD players, then there shouldn't be any objections to running a business which rents what's essentially a tiny antenna plus a digital VCR. Aereo have clearly gone to some rather absurd lengths to stay within the confines of the law, such as it currently is.

    The fact that they seem to be profitable would indicate that there's a clear demand for the service they're providingthe TV comapanies could get rid of Aereo simply by competing with them and offering their OTA programming to viewers over the internet.