51–60 of 398 posts
HN/reddit ddos'ed ?
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.
Can someone explain the gist of what's going on to an outside observer not familiar with Aereo?
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.
Describing Roberts as liberal is a great stretch
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.
So how does this ruling not affect the cloud storage providers?
Because it's not about "the cloud" in general. It's about specifically the rebroadcast of television radio signals, concerning which there's a substantial body of law created to govern the activities of cable TV providers. In other words, the SC just defined Aereo as a cable company, when they wanted to be a cloud services company.
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.
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.
Not surprised. The service works by rebroadcasting over the air signals and then charging for them, right?
I've not used Aero and haven't heard their argument but I bet their business model is they rent antennas to customers. I'd be curious to know where that argument failed because surely I could create a business that rented antennas to customers and installed them on houses. Why does it matter the location of the antenna? Either way this is bad for the consumer, bad for technology, and bad for innovation.
I imagine this is a minority opinion here, but I don't see a problem with this decision. 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…
Given that the TV broadcasters are paying for the right to broadcast (often gigantic amounts of money), I don't see a problem with preventing an Aereo from free-riding on that privilege. YMMV.
This is precisely why old people shouldn't be anywhere near tech.