Supreme court: Aereo is violating copyright law [pdf] • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by warfangle » Wed, Jun 25, 2014, 2:56 PM UTC

unreal37 wrote: post #13

rglover wrote: post #3

Not surprised. The service works by rebroadcasting over the air signals and then charging for them, right?

Not really. They rented you exclusively an antenna at their location, and you can use it to watch over the air TV. There was no rebroadcasting technically, which is how they hoped to get around the law.

That's the only difference between Aereo and the original CATV companies. Original CATV was one giant antenna on a hill piping the broadcast to homes that couldn't get the signal; this is thousands of antennas intelligently provisioned on a hill piping the broadcast and providing DVR functionality to homes that don't necessarily want to deal with using the crappy tv antenna -> computer hardware available.

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

#92

Post by brucehart » Wed, Jun 25, 2014, 2:56 PM UTC

selmnoo wrote: post #71

I've mentioned this before on HN, I'll say it again: Aereo should now do a pivot, becoming a hardware reseller of TV-signal-receiver/streamer devices like this one: http://www.hauppauge.com/site/products/data_broadway.html - it can stream either over your local Wi-fi, or across the interwebs so you can watch remotely when you're out of the house. Broadband speeds are a bit slow, but they're getting there (slowly) - u…

Slingbox seems to have a strong position in this market. It's tougher to stream video from a person's home than from a data center. Most homes with broadband have limited upload speed that makes it difficult to stream good quality video. I'm hoping newer compression algorithms such as HEVC will make it possible to get decent quality even on connections with less than 1 Mbps upload bandwidth.

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

#93

Post by rtpg » Wed, Jun 25, 2014, 2:57 PM UTC

cheez0r wrote: 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 definition of "public" in public performance is not about who the broadcast goes out to, but about the relationship between the broadcaster and the broadcastee.

If I invite 100 people to my house to see a movie, it's not a public performance (supposedly) because they are coming as members of my social circle. If I instead showed at a movie theatre and charged for it, and the same 100 people showed up, then it would be a public performance because those 100 people came as members of the public.

Here Aereo broadcast to customers as members of the public. Because Aereo owned the equipment, they were the ones doing the broadcasting (in the oral arguments one of the judges commented on how if instead they sold the equipment and just provided hosting, the position would be much more defensible).

But, like what many others have said, the intent of the law is really what matters, and the definitions of public performance are much more about intent than about technical implementations.

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

#94

Post by harryh » Wed, Jun 25, 2014, 2:58 PM UTC

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #31

pgrote wrote: post #9

Justices Breyer, Roberts, Kennedy, Ginsburg, Sotomayor and Kagan were the majority. It isn't over since the case now goes back to the lower court, but Aereo can no longer argue they are the same as a person putting an antenna on their roof.

Its amazing that the left and the right can't agree on anything, not even it being illegal to lie on gun applications, but once IP is tossed in the game they all fall on some pretty strong protectionist postions. I'm not making some big statement here, but it just goes to show that guys like Lawrence Lessig and the EFF keep losing because they have so few allies in government and have the most powerful enemies, the v…

Actually "they all" didn't agree. The right flank of the court (Scalia, Thomas & Alito) dissented.

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

#95

Post by ganeumann » Wed, Jun 25, 2014, 2:58 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #89

themgt wrote: post #43

The really interesting question is the implications for future precedent/innovations. The ruling says "But this difference [Aero's technological setup] means nothing to the subscriber. It means nothing to the broadcaster. We do not see how this single difference, invisible to subscriber and broadcaster alike, could transform a system that is for all practical purposes a traditional cable system into “a copy shop that…

I find the use of "innovation" here irritating. There's nothing "innovative" in 2014 about a service that streams TV over the internet. The only thing "innovative" about Aereo is its legal strategy of exploiting a loophole in the law.

"innovative" !== "technologically innovative"

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

#96

Post by dminor » Wed, Jun 25, 2014, 2:58 PM UTC

Grue3 wrote: post #27

pgrote wrote: post #9

Justices Breyer, Roberts, Kennedy, Ginsburg, Sotomayor and Kagan were the majority. It isn't over since the case now goes back to the lower court, but Aereo can no longer argue they are the same as a person putting an antenna on their roof.

So, all the "liberal" judges? Sucks that the ones who usually defend human rights are also the same people who stifle innovation.

All the judges were against it. The three who dissented just didn't agree on the reason.

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

#97

Post by exo762 » Wed, Jun 25, 2014, 2:58 PM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #72

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its amazing that the left and the right can't agree on anything, not even it being illegal to lie on gun applications, but once IP is tossed in the game they all fall on some pretty strong protectionist postions. I'm not making some big statement here, but it just goes to show that guys like Lawrence Lessig and the EFF keep losing because they have so few allies in government and have the most powerful enemies, the v…

Intellectual property law is the pride and joy of our legal system. Really. Patents, Copyright and Trademarks are all American inventions that have spread everywhere in the world. Many Americans think it goes too far, but in the fraternity of lawyers and judges, IP rules.

Romans gave world Civil law, Americans gave world IP law. Sad.

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

#98

Post by djb_hackernews » Wed, Jun 25, 2014, 2:58 PM UTC

untog wrote: post #68

djb_hackernews wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I maintain that having a multiple of identical components in a system that perform the same duty is horizontal scaling. There are many reasons to scale horizontally, and I'd say increasing capacity is exactly what Aero would be interested in, not to mention fault tolerance. My career is based on building distributed fault tolerant systems, which is potentially why I think I understand their approach differently than you do.

But yes, horizontally scaling systems comes at a cost, sometimes they are more inefficient, sometimes they cost more, but in the long run if it helps you meet the goals of the business it shouldn't be illegal.

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

#99

Post by untog » Wed, Jun 25, 2014, 2:58 PM UTC

cheez0r wrote: post #81

untog wrote: 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.

Yes- they are renting me an antenna in the locale the performance is being broadcast, and providing connectivity to that antenna. That is not a loophole- that is the letter of the law- that an individual can receive a broadcast performance of a work, but that it cannot be duplicated. It meets the letter of the law- unlike a system that received the broadcast signal, captured it, and provided the same copy to many use…

It's the letter of a law written in the 1970s, when streaming technology like this didn't exist. No-one had even conceived of the idea that you would group hundreds of antennas together and stream them across a wide area network to users.

The spirit of the law as passed was to stop cable companies capturing and rebroadcasting over-the-air TV signals without compensation. So it shouldn't be too surprising that the Supreme Court made the judgement they did.

It's quite simple: when this law was created, was Aereo's use case considered? If the answer is 'no', then you can expect the law to be refined to cover it at a later date. Odd legal loopholes don't get to stand just because they've been around for a while.

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

#100

Post by hyperpape » Wed, Jun 25, 2014, 2:59 PM UTC

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #31

pgrote wrote: post #9

Justices Breyer, Roberts, Kennedy, Ginsburg, Sotomayor and Kagan were the majority. It isn't over since the case now goes back to the lower court, but Aereo can no longer argue they are the same as a person putting an antenna on their roof.

Its amazing that the left and the right can't agree on anything, not even it being illegal to lie on gun applications, but once IP is tossed in the game they all fall on some pretty strong protectionist postions. I'm not making some big statement here, but it just goes to show that guys like Lawrence Lessig and the EFF keep losing because they have so few allies in government and have the most powerful enemies, the v…

I think you are confusing "left and right" with "mainstream Democratic and Republican politicians". These categories don't really overlap all that much.