Live data from Hacker News

Supreme court: Aereo is violating copyright law [pdf]

supremecourt.gov

61–70 of 398 posts

Re: Supreme court: Aereo is violating copyright law [pdf]

#61
post #33
post #10

The Supreme Court is wrong- the reason cable companies are treated as a 'public' performance of a work is that their distribution medium is shared- any subscriber can tune into that broadcasting of that work over a shared common carrier where one copy of the work is transmitted and many subscribers can view it. Aereo is different in that it only transmits the signal captured to a single subscriber at a time, removing…

Aereo's setup is absurd. Placing hundreds if not thousands of identical antennas on a rooftop, capturing identical signals and sending them, individually, to users. That's expensive and inefficient. The only reason they did it was to exploit a potential loophole in the current law - and now the Supreme Court has effectively closed that loophole.

It's called scaling horizontally, and pretty much every company that cares about service availability does it. Is that really your argument?

Re: Supreme court: Aereo is violating copyright law [pdf]

#62
post #4

This doesnt make sense. You are paying for renting the antenna. You're not paying for the content.

How exactly does Aereo work? You rent an antenna from them, they record the show for you, and you can play it back at a later time?

That's one version. The other is that you simply watch the show in near-real-time, just as you would if the camera were sitting in your window.

IANAL, but felt like the DVR functionality really clouded the case and possibly skewed it away from Aereo. Harder to claim you are merely an antenna when you are recording, too.

Re: Supreme court: Aereo is violating copyright law [pdf]

#63
post #25
post #10

The Supreme Court is wrong- the reason cable companies are treated as a 'public' performance of a work is that their distribution medium is shared- any subscriber can tune into that broadcasting of that work over a shared common carrier where one copy of the work is transmitted and many subscribers can view it. Aereo is different in that it only transmits the signal captured to a single subscriber at a time, removing…

The Supreme Court is not able to be wrong on a matter of U.S. law. It gets to decide what that law means, not you. It's not the decision I'd hoped for, nor the one I'd make, but it's nonsense to claim that it's "wrong". All we can do about it now is to get the law changed.

> The Supreme Court is not able to be wrong on a matter of U.S. law. It gets to decide what that law means, not you.

The Supreme Court decides interpretations of law, but the law itself (as written or as interpreted) is quite capable of being wrong. Law does not determine morality.

Re: Supreme court: Aereo is violating copyright law [pdf]

#64
post #37
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Describing Roberts as liberal is a great stretch

Pretty sure he's the one who "saved" Obamacare when it went to Supreme Court.

1. "Obamacare" is an implementation of the Heritage Foundation's[0] health plan from the early 90s. It's "liberal" in the same sense that any Republican can be said to be "liberal."

2. Roberts has a deep and wide judicially conservative record. He cannot be called "liberal" in the context of American politics; it's not even up for debate. The man and his judicial practice is as conservative as they come.

3. I really don't see why it matters. The justices' political leanings have nothing to do with whether or not their decisions are "correct" or not (although it may provide insight into why they decide one way or another).

[0]www.heritage.org

Re: Supreme court: Aereo is violating copyright law [pdf]

#65
post #37
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Describing Roberts as liberal is a great stretch

Pretty sure he's the one who "saved" Obamacare when it went to Supreme Court.

Remember, Obamacare is the health care plan the Republicans proposed after rejecting any kind of single-payer universal plan. That the Republicans subsequently also opposed their own health care proposal speaks more to their basic coherence than their political ideology, per se.

Re: Supreme court: Aereo is violating copyright law [pdf]

#66
post #4

This doesnt make sense. You are paying for renting the antenna. You're not paying for the content.

If that's true, then why is their home page filled with talk about "watch live TV" and not a single word about renting an antenna?

When I look at their offerings, I can immediately see that they're selling a streaming TV service and it just happens to be implemented by receiving radio-frequency broadcasts. Supreme Court justices aren't idiots, and they can probably see that too.

Re: Supreme court: Aereo is violating copyright law [pdf]

#68
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aereo's setup is absurd. Placing hundreds if not thousands of identical antennas on a rooftop, capturing identical signals and sending them, individually, to users. That's expensive and inefficient. The only reason they did it was to exploit a potential loophole in the current law - and now the Supreme Court has effectively closed that loophole.

It's called scaling horizontally, and pretty much every company that cares about service availability does it. Is that really your argument?

It isn't scaling horizontally at all. You scale horizontally to increase your capacity, installing one antenna for every user has zero to do with capacity and everything to do with legality.

Re: Supreme court: Aereo is violating copyright law [pdf]

#69
post #56

Aereo is not violating anything but they should have prepared for something like this. Absurdity is common when you are trying to provide similar service to the consumer in a better way without creating monopoly.

>Aereo is not violating anything but they should have been prepared for something like this. In what other sense could they have been prepared? They fully expected to end up in the courts, likely through the supreme court, and planned appropriately. They lost the case, but it doesn't seem to be for lack of preparation.

I was proposing for them to be prepared before it happened not for the trial.

Re: Supreme court: Aereo is violating copyright law [pdf]

#70
post #44

Seems like, because Aereo isn't just a hardware renter but also an integrated SaaS provider, they were treated as such. The court opinion talks in terms of user interaction with menus on the site to select shows. We're kidding ourselves if this works anything like "hardware rental". If it were, it would feel more like AWS.

This. Aereo wanted to define the activity by drawing a box around the tiny antenna and the user. The Supremes draw the box around Aereo and their customer base.

So if Aereo were just in the antenna rental business, and some other entity were in the cloud DVR business, and consumers paired them together it would be just fine?

Edit: having read the decision, it seems there were companies that provided antenna services back in the 60's, and congress amended the copyright act to forbid them. The ability for Aereo subscribers to choose which material is transmitted is key to Aereo's argument.

Post reply on HN