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This doesnt make sense. You are paying for renting the antenna. You're not paying for the content.
The opinion compares Aereo's use of tiny antennas to cable companies' use of one big one. They argue that since Congress passed a law back in the '70s to define the cable companies' practices as rebroadcast, that law should be read as also defining what Aereo does as rebroadcast.
Tech people like to treat laws as rigid rules that would be written in a formally specified language if only legislators were capable of such a thing. But they're not, and by design.
It doesn't make sense for a law to be written such that receiving on one antenna and sending the result to your users is illegal, but receiving one an antenna farm all located in the same spot and sending the result to your users is legal.
Do we really want to live in a country where the obvious solution is illegal but an insane workaround is legal? I don't want a precedent set where it becomes standard for laws to be bypassed with expensive and technically pointless workarounds. If we want to allow companies to receive TV broadcasts and stream them over the internet, we should do so. If we don't, we shouldn't. A situation where they're only allowed to do it if they have 10,000 separate and unnecessary antennas is absurd.
Personally, I think it's ridiculous that a TV station can broadcast their signal free of charge to anyone capable of receiving it, but if a company wants to receive it and then pass it along to somebody, they have to pay a fee. But the problem is with the ridiculous law, not with a completely reasonable interpretation of it.
What this seems to leave open is the question of whether a company that was e.g. a generic cloud service with various features and functions, among them the ability to rent a mini-antenna and stream recorded data from it to your computer, would still be infringing. It suggests the infringement is largely due to the way Aereo positioned and marketed itself to customers - the common sense reality of the service overrode the technological loophole they attempted to exploit.
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.
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.
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.
Bear in mind that the function of the Supreme Court isn't to propose new laws (legislate); it's to rule on existing laws. By its own mandate, the Supreme Court does not serve an innovative function in government. It serves an examination and arbitration function. If we want to change anything here, we'll have to start in the other branches of government, or else bring a case that sufficiently challenges the Copyright Act.
So how does this ruling not affect the cloud storage providers?
Down. Any mirrors?
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.
So how does this ruling not affect the cloud storage providers?
In other words, the SC just defined Aereo as a cable company, when they wanted to be a cloud services company.