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If you draw a black box around an antenna salesman and the equipment they've installed, you also get something that appears to be a cable company.
Not if you need more than one customer to be "a cable company".
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I think there's a big different between paying money all at once to buy and install hardware that I own vs paying a recurring fee for a service.
What if I paid for the antenna with a credit card, and am slowly making payments month by month? What if I rent the apartment where the antenna resides, and pay a monthly subscription for Internet?
No?
Then you're fine.
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What if I paid for the antenna with a credit card, and am slowly making payments month by month? What if I rent the apartment where the antenna resides, and pay a monthly subscription for Internet?
Are either one of those you paying a recurring fee to a company for a service that streams TV to you? No? Then you're fine.
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> an ongoing service relationship with a company that both owns and operates equipment that has everything to do with content? does this mean i can pay a third party to install an anetenna in new york, but i can't pay them maintain it for me?
I reckon you wouldn't be able to have your own antenna in your New York apartment, unless you actually own the apartment. Renters are out of luck.
If the owner amortizes the cost of this antenna as a general building expense, and sets all the rents accordingly, there's still no problem. However, if the owner attempts to charge a separate fee for that connection (or tries to raise the rent for people who opt out of paying that fee) then he has not only inserted himself in the middle of the content transmission stream, he has done so on an individualized commercial basis. In effect, he's made himself a micro-distributer by establishing a cash for content deal with his tenants and the law has a major problem with that.
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Are either one of those you paying a recurring fee to a company for a service that streams TV to you? No? Then you're fine.
The mechanism is exactly the same.
They looked at Aereo and said: It looks like a cable company and quacks like a cable company so it's gotta act like a cable company. The precise configuration of equipment they have in their datacenter doesn't matter.
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The mechanism is exactly the same.
Doesn't matter. I know you don't like that but that's the way it is. Common law isn't source code running on a machine with perfectly defined rules, it's a set of values adjudicated by judges. They looked at Aereo and said: It looks like a cable company and quacks like a cable company so it's gotta act like a cable company. The precise configuration of equipment they have in their datacenter doesn't matter.
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If the person you're paying is doing the work, then it's obviously not for their personal use. It's for yours. So they're doing it for money on someone else's behalf, which throws the "personal, non-commercial use" argument straight out the window. Moving on to Dropbox. Dropbox has no involvement in the selection of the file in question, or even the type of file, and moreover, they're not the ones to place it on thei…
Your argument doesn't work for the analogy, because the viewer is simply paying someone to do the physical work required for the viewer to remotely watch his own stream from his own antenna. It's like the difference between setting up a cable card and Internet stream server yourself, and hiring a tech guy to come to your house and set it up for you.
That's miles away from "just hiring a tech guy to come over and set up your cable card".
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Doesn't matter. I know you don't like that but that's the way it is. Common law isn't source code running on a machine with perfectly defined rules, it's a set of values adjudicated by judges. They looked at Aereo and said: It looks like a cable company and quacks like a cable company so it's gotta act like a cable company. The precise configuration of equipment they have in their datacenter doesn't matter.
I'm not arguing that the law is the way I think it should be. I'm just arguing that the law is really dumb, and that it's pretty clear the legal system just makes decisions that serve the interests of powerful lobbies, rather than some intelligent or even discernible set of rules or principles.
It costs a lot of money to make American Idol and CSI and to license the rights to the Super Bowl. The people that own that content should have a right to license it out in whatever manner they choose.