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

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

#191

Post by dragonwriter » Wed, Jun 25, 2014, 4:21 PM UTC

jonnathanson wrote: post #45

Grue3 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well, the problem is that Aereo probably could not have prevailed at SCOTUS, because SCOTUS looks to precedent. In this case, their interpretation of the precedent itself (Copyright Act of 1976) was accurate, even if that precedent is out of date in our eyes. If you want SCOTUS justices to innovate, you need to challenge the precedents at their fundamental level, or else point to other precedents that should invalida…

> Well, the problem is that Aereo probably could not have prevailed at SCOTUS, because SCOTUS looks to precedent. In this case, their interpretation of the precedent itself (Copyright Act of 1976) was accurate, even if that precedent is out of date in our eyes.

You are confusing enactments (things like the Constitution and statute law, like the Copyright Act) with precedent (prior rulings of courts applying the same law). These are fundamentally different things, thought the court looks to both

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

#192

Post by ghkbrew » Wed, Jun 25, 2014, 4:22 PM UTC

jervisfm wrote: post #167

Here's a (naive) question: In the US, is a Supreme Court ruling completely final ? What options, if any, are available to the losing party ? Is change through congress the only way to try to appeal rulings? If there are no practical ways to repeal Supreme Court rulings, what happens when the Supreme Court makes a mistaken ruling?

In the US the Supreme Court is the final arbiter of how the law is interpreted. So, off the top of my head, there are at least 2 ways the effects of a judgement can be reversed. 1) The law can be specifically amended by congress and 2) the Supreme Court can make a future ruling which is different than it's original.

Of course, there are intricacies here. Especially in case 2 where the weight giving to legal precedence makes it unlikely.

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

#193

Post by dragonwriter » Wed, Jun 25, 2014, 4:23 PM UTC

marcosdumay wrote: post #154

defen wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you arguing that their current form was invented in America? Because the English crown had patents and copyrights before the USA existed.

In what concerns the rest of the world, it could as well be an all US invention. The UK made nothing to spread it, the US made sure it's more universaly accepted than the Human Rights convention.

> The UK made nothing to spread it

Have you heard of the British Empire? The UK did quite a lot to spread their legal traditions.

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

#194

Post by jessaustin » Wed, Jun 25, 2014, 4:24 PM UTC

Loughla wrote: post #181

toomuchtodo wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aereo should pivot to be a colocation company specifically for this equipment. Sell the device to the end user for $100, charge $8-12/month for "colocation". What next? Illegal for a user to colocate their own antenna equipment?

That feels immoral when I say it out loud. Do we not worry about intent and spirit of the law anymore?

The first person to do so will be a sucker. Seriously, look at how, why, and by whom laws are written. Ignore the marketing, whether it's from politicians or the pundits who parrot them.

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

#195

Post by kayfox » Wed, Jun 25, 2014, 4:25 PM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #163

mlieberman85 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. To be honest Aereo's service was about as reliable as your average antenna is (read: not reliable.) To me it felt like I was renting a really large extension cord for a cable. One that I need because I live in a basement apartment and even with 60 dollar antennas I get spotty reception at best. Aereo was more consistent but the quality was that of what you would expect from an antenna. It didn't feel like…

Broadcast DTV usually looks better on an antenna than on cable. I recently gave a pair of rabbit ears to my mother-in-law and we were amazed at how much better the picture quality was. She's lucky, howver, to live about a mile or two from the sticks. Most people need a better antenna. Cable HDTV is often heavily compressed so they can fit hundreds of junky channels into a limited pipe. Particularly for sports where t…

So, I just spent the last two months working out the details of how to put a digital cable channel on a hotel cable headend. I have some clarification of what may be going on here.

Cable headends tend not to have very much compression equipment, sometimes they have stuff used for feeds local to the headend, but usually the compression happens at the originating facility. For something like CNN, this is at their studio. The signal with that original compression is encrypted, uplinked to the satellite and then received off the satellite by receivers at the headend. It comes out of that receiver as a compressed digital signal called ASI, which is MPEG2 compressed video over SDI. It is then typically fed into a demultiplexer/multiplexer that will combine or separate it into different streams and then it is fed into a QAM modulator. For ATSC the same is fed into a 8vsb modulator (or something like that). For encrypted systems it is fed into a encryption unit before being fed into the QAM modulator. The key here is that each video stream is not recompressed even when it is remultiplexed.

The issue may be that of signal strengths and associated error rates and how that is reflected in encrypted streams. Typically encryption cases degradation to be reflected poorly in the signal compared to unencrypted signals.

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

#196

Post by skottk » Wed, Jun 25, 2014, 4:27 PM UTC

CWuestefeld wrote: post #134

bediger4000 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Exploiting a loophole in the law" - does that phrase really mean anything? Aereo did their system in a way that very carefully conformed to the law. The bizarre system that resulted is a reflection of the contorted, illogical, false-to-fact nature of copyright law, more than "exploiting a loophole". The Supreme Court ruled wrong in this case.

The concept of "loophole" seems to be a loaded way of saying "specification in the law with which I disagree". We hear all the time about people taking advantage of tax loopholes, for example. Yet these very loopholes are generally designed-in, to push people into a particular behavior. For example, I could pay less tax this year if I had solar cells installed on my roof. Would you call this means of avoiding taxes a…

Aereo was banking on partially-relevant case law - not the statute itself - from the Second Circuit which was contradicted elsewhere in the US.

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

#197

Post by IanDrake » Wed, Jun 25, 2014, 4:28 PM UTC

bigtunacan wrote: post #151

IanDrake wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hulu - watch any program any time. Aereo - watch what's over the air right now. Hulu - puts ads in the video Aereo - shows the ads that are over the air. Hulu - is like having everything on DVD Aereo - is like having a 50 mile extension cord on my digital antenna. I think the difference is striking.

The problem is Aereo is charging for this service that circumvents the system and pays nothing back to redistribute the content. Contrast this with the lesser known, but competing service offered from Syncbak. Syncbak does the same thing as Aereo, but rather than circumventing the existing networks and content providers; those are Syncbak's paying customer base. http://www.syncbak.com/

>The problem is Aereo is charging for this service

To me that's like saying Sony who charges $150 for an outdoor digital antenna, RCA who charges $80 for a signal amplifier, and the installer who charges $500 to rig it all properly should all pay the content owners because they enabled me to watch the freely available content.

I could pay Aereo a small monthly charge or I could modify my house at great expense and end up with the exact same outcome. I don't see the difference.

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

#198

Post by zaidf » Wed, Jun 25, 2014, 4:31 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.

What's your definition of innovation?

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

#199

Post by skottk » Wed, Jun 25, 2014, 4:31 PM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #104

I wonder if Aereo would be legal if they dropped the DVR portion of the service. It seems like that is the issue here. If it's really just me renting an antenna it seems like that is still legal.

Nope - it's the unlicensed transmission that this decision covers. The opinion actually states that a cable company (with its licenses) would be able to offer the DVR portion of the service. The DVR thing was covered in the Second Circuit's Cartoon Network/Cablevision decision. It's what gave Aereo the idea to try the many-antennas approach. The biggest difference is that Cablevision has broadcast licenses.

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

#200

Post by ubernostrum » Wed, Jun 25, 2014, 4:31 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 Supreme Court is wrong

The Supreme Court is unfortunately trapped. As the opinion notes, the Court once took a position very like Aereo's, way back in 1968, on the subject of shared "community" antennas (Fortnightly v. United Artists).

The Court's position today is that Congress more or less immediately amended the Copyright Act in response to that decision, and now the law as written no longer supports the Court's former position (and thus no longer supports Aereo's position).