A $795M analogy: Locast, broadcast copyright, and the fall of big antenna

A $795M analogy: Locast, broadcast copyright, and the fall of big antenna
ravik.substack.com

As I mentioned, I am willing to admit that I came into this expecting to find technical illiteracy, and I didn't find much. I agree that the mindset to look for hacks and oversights in laws is a naieve engineer tendency.

> No, the courts aren't saying "if you waste a bunch of money on extra hard drives, you can infringe copyright", either.

I agree no court wants this, and I didn't intend to imply otherwise in the post. Regardless, as a result of these cases, this is the current state the DVR industry is in as I understand. Wasting money on storage does insulate you from infringement, and people do it to be safe.

> a programming language that executes what you intended to write, not what you actually wrote

This is a great analogy. It does clearly get more complex when the court is executing "what you would have intended had you known about the internet" though.

Edit: On,

> The courts do not care how the copy was made

In Cablevision, they did for two reasons:

1. To figure out whether buffering was copying, which is a very technical discussion. See the footnote on MAI Systems

2. To figure out WHO was making the copy, for the volition based infringement test

My point here is that it really does get into the technical weeds. I know your point was mostly to just dismiss the deduplication discussion, which is reasonable. If one of my posed problems made it to court, the court would probably just do the "right thing". However, since they haven't made it to court yet, companies don't necessarily want to be the first to gamble on it.

But the big part of the ruling was that it wasn't just how they requested funding, but the why. The ruling argued that collecting funds to expand more throughout the US was not valid for their non-profit status for some reason that made no sense. And as a result, it appears that a replacement will never exist, because the cost of pulling all of these channels with careful and specific antenna placement in a city, the hardware to pull all of those channels in real time, re-encoding the feed from MPEG2 to HLS/MP4 for the web, potentially making different qualities to account for network conditions (can't remember if the M3U8 playlists from Locast did that or not), and the networking costs of transmitting video are expensive.

And the lawsuit was stupid too. US TV channels are crammed to the max with advertisements, so much so that it feels more like an ad delivery mechanism than an entertainment delivery system. Locast could have been advantageous as they would have actual data of who is watching what when and where. Ad companies love that data, and with traditional OTA feeds, they don't have that. Instead, all of these OTA companies actively refuse offering the ability to watch their streams online for free. Other than local news content, everything else is locked behind a paywall of having an active cable subscription. Why should I, as a consumer, pay $100 a month to watch this same OTA content, just so I can watch it online, especially for a medium so jam packed with ads?

I live in the edge of Columbus, Ohio in an apartment. I'm still within 10 miles of the transmitters for the big 6 stations (the local affiliates of ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, CW, and PBS collectively only use 4 transmitters.). My apartment is luckily facing sort of line of site to most of those transmitters. But even then, I still have bad signal issues with those channels, and in some cases leading to an unwatchable recording. The signal was bad enough that my recording of the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Opening Ceremonies was bared by loss of 2 to 5 seconds of video and audio every 2 minutes. My only alternative was to play $65 to $100 a month to cable or cordcutting subscription to watch that broadcast online. And out of spite for continuing to shutdown any free way to watch their OTA content online, I will _never_ pay. Our laws regarding OTA broadcasts and how people can use and view them need to change ASAP, otherwise what is the point of having them if is not accessible to all.

I think the Supreme Court is going to continue to rule that neat hacks are not really going to get you out of what the law says, but also that the "content producers" are not going to be able to arbitrarily restrict a reasonable service as in the Cablevision case.

What the public really wants is a way to enable the thing they want without either exorbitant costs or heavy annoyances. We're not getting that because the system is not set up for automating micropayments or microdonations and the big operators are writing all the rules. For example, if I pay for a streaming service and listen only to one obscure band, I would expect that my monthly fee would go to them. Instead it goes to the top 100 and a tiny fraction goes to my obscure band, who really don't benefit at all from being on the service. If I had a micropayment platform, my consumption could be going to that band with a fraction going to support the platform.

In other words, record companies are killing music, and it's legal. That's what we need to fix.

The networks can be shitty to their non-owned-and operated stations too. The long-term local ABC affiliate got shafted a few years back. They’d been an affiliate since 1969. ABC demanded a substantially larger amount of money to renew the affiliation than they had in the past. The station initially tried to negotiate the amount down, ABC refused to budge. After careful consideration, the station decided to nonetheless agree to ABC’s demands. After all that, ABC still turned around and basically said “nah, forget it” and went with their direct competitor in the market, who already operated the CBS affiliate. ABC and CBS are now subchannels of the same broadcaster, who happens to be owned by one of the larger station groups. The networks do this because it gives the stations more leverage to demand more from operators, and the station groups have more capital than smaller independently-owned stations. The networks also directly benefit, as the stations in the larger, more flagship markets tends to be network owned and operated (O&O). A station group that says “we own X number of stations and unless you pay us more money, we’ll restrict your carriage of all of them” has a lot more pull than a company that owns one station.

There is actually a choice, but it’s on the broadcaster’s end. A station can elect to choose “must-carry” status, where the operator transmits the signal with no compensation (which generally only applies to a station’s primary subchannel), or a station can demand payment for retransmission.

If cable was invented today, the networks would have it shut down in a hot minute.