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posted by
NCommander
on Wednesday June 25 2014, @03:55PM
from the why-we-can't-have-nice-things dept.
from the why-we-can't-have-nice-things dept.
The United States Supreme Court has ruled 6-3 against Aereo, saying that Aereo's scheme to lease out thousands of tiny antennas doesn't differentiate it from a cable company, and therefore Aereo violates copyright law. "In a 6-3 opinion (PDF) written by Justice Steven Breyer, Aereo was found to violate copyright law. According to the opinion, the company is the equivalent of a cable company, which must pay licensing fees when broadcasting over-the-air content. "Viewed in terms of Congress; regulatory objectives, these behind-the-scenes technological differences do not distinguish Aereo's system from cable systems, which do perform publicly," reads the opinion."
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Q: How many Martians does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: One and a half.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday June 25 2014, @04:35PM
"saying that Aereo's scheme to lease out thousands of tiny antennas doesn't differentiate it from a cable company"
Interesting thought experiment... Lease out thousands of tiny physical antennas, see what happens. Anytime you add a suffix of "over the internet" to anything, it totally confuses old gray/white hairs so removing it, might help them get it past their senility.
Doesn't have to be thousands, my former bachelor pad a long time ago had "community" satellite dishes we could connect to although I was fuzzy on the fees if any, not being interested in watching TV. So my apartment building could be regulated like a cable TV franchise depending how the accept payment for the community satellite TV dishes (the shared dishes are so there's 1 or 2 or whatever number directTV dishes on the building, not perhaps 20 for each individual subscriber)
Note that the city enforces its monopoly on cable franchises on pain of lawsuit from the cable co, so this might be a weird weapon for cable companies to eliminate satellite as competition in rentals. Or at least make it more of a PITA to use satellite, which is almost as good for them
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Wednesday June 25 2014, @08:25PM
So, after the law was changed in the 1970s, all the cable re-broadcast companies had to do to evade the law was to install a separate TV antenna and tuner for each customer?
In this case, I'm afraid its you who are trying to argue "...but this is new and different because its on the Internet!".
At worst, all SCOTUS did was save Congress the effort of slipping a quick loophole-blocking rider into the next fisheries and peanut farms bill.
The beef here is the 1970s law defining re-transmission of free-to-air signals as copying. That's dumb. That's what needs fixing.