U.S. Supreme Court Pulls the Plug on Aereo

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I think we all knew this was coming, but it still sucks. :(

The court ruled against Aereo by a vote of 6-3. The court found that Aereo violates federal copyright law by retransmitting copyrighted programs without paying a copyright fee. Justice Stephen Breyer, writing for the majority, stressed that it was a limited decision that will not “discourage the emergence or use of different kinds of technologies.”
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If you broadcast your signal into my home, I'll do whatever the hell I want with it. If you don't want me to do that, don't broadcast it.

Big media needs to die.
 
Well, this sucks. Sounded like a good idea. Doesn't my HDHomerun do something similar, though? I can take my broadcast signal and rebroadcast it throughout my home (or online....).

So, is this just creating a repeater that is unauthorized? Is that what the deal is?
 
Ur_Mom said:
Well, this sucks. Sounded like a good idea. Doesn't my HDHomerun do something similar, though? I can take my broadcast signal and rebroadcast it throughout my home (or online....).

So, is this just creating a repeater that is unauthorized? Is that what the deal is?
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The deal is that the broadcasters had more money to bribe government officials (including the Prostitute-in-chief's administration) so they won simply because of that.

I find it interesting that liberal democrats always claim to be "for the people" and yet the only people who voted against this crap are the three most conservative justices on the court.
 
Devices like Slingbox and HDHomerun aren't generally used to distribute content beyond personal use. The problem here is that Aero doesn't own or produce any of the content that it was charging to retransmit and it wasn't paying anyone to do so. It's pretty cut and dry.
 
heatlesssun said:
Devices like Slingbox and HDHomerun aren't generally used to distribute content beyond personal use. The problem here is that Aero doesn't own or produce any of the content that it was charging to retransmit and it wasn't paying anyone to do so. It's pretty cut and dry.
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No, you are wrong, they charged for the DVR service.
 
heatlesssun said:
For which they never paid anyone to do. They were taking broadcast material for which they never paid a dime for and then selling it to make money.
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Wouldn't that be like saying Happuage should be sued for allowed the interception and recording of OTA channels for the price of their device? Because they've been doing that for years.
 
NickJames said:
Wouldn't that be like saying Happuage should be sued for allowed the interception and recording of OTA channels for the price of their device? Because they've been doing that for years.
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Huh? Again, Aereo was RESELLING content without paying anyone to do so. Recording a show for personal use is not the same thing as reselling the ability for others to watch it.
 
Man, you really love to troll this place.

Anyway, people, please dont' keep feeding him/her/it.
 
I was waiting for the ruling to get it.. this sucks.. my reception is not the best on my OTA.. I guess I will work on it...
 
heatlesssun said:
For which they never paid anyone to do. They were taking broadcast material for which they never paid a dime for and then selling it to make money.
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The broadcasters were the one sending signals onto Aereo's property. They have the natural right to do with those as they please. If the broadcasters didn't want people doing that, they should not be broadcasting them everywhere and instead they should switch to a Paid TV service with descrambler.
 
Realistically the USA should totally get rid of over the air transmission of TV ... with access to internet sources or hardline sources there is little reason to continue the over the air model and the frequences could be used for other more useful services like wireless data or something ... we need to stop building national systems around rural restrictions ... most people live in cities where we have access to high speed internet sources or cable/satelite providers
 
Does anyone know how the differentiated between this and the early CATV systems?
 
I think the big controversy is where the retransmit device resides. If it's at your residence for personal use, that's one thing. Setting up antenna farms outside of your residence and selling access to broadcast programming under the guise of being a PVR service is something I never sided with. Sure, it gave an option to consumers that wasn't there for content delivery. But it also wasn't private in the common sense, IMHO.

Here's the problem: People enjoy watching/having access to TV content. But a lot of people feel they are entitled to it without fee. Is there a fundamental difference between receiving a tv broadcast to your antenna in your house vs. somewhere else and routing it? For an electronics perspective, no. A signal intercepted is a signal intercepted, it doesn't really matter where, electronically. Are broadcasters probably just hoping that aereo ponies up some extra cash under content-rebroadcasting just to get a larger cut of the pie? Probably. But I see no fundamental difference between what aereo is providing and what cable providers are providing. I actually hate the status quo of content delivery and cable/telecom companies right now, but it's also unfair, to me, to view aereo and other content re-delivery services differently.
 
damicatz said:
The broadcasters were the one sending signals onto Aereo's property. They have the natural right to do with those as they please. If the broadcasters didn't want people doing that, they should not be broadcasting them everywhere and instead they should switch to a Paid TV service with descrambler.
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We should get rid of the free over the air broadcast of TV anyway ... that is 20th century technology ... we should be switching everything to hardline or internet or satelite (more 21st century oriented)
 
grtitan said:
Man, you really love to troll this place.

Anyway, people, please dont' keep feeding him/her/it.
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I just want someone to explain how it makes any sense that someone can record TVs show, put them online and then sell access to those show without paying the providers anything to do so.
 
US Supreme Court: the best court money can buy :mad:

The supreme court is now just a rubber stamp for the government and corporations. Actually the government and corporations are the same thing now :(
 
My real question is: would it be infringement if I put my networked DVR in a colo with decent signal and watched it from home. If so, why is it infringement for someone else to run the DVR for me? It's hard to go to the colo and adjust the antenna, and update the software etc, I want the cloud to do it.
 
panhead said:
US Supreme Court: the best court money can buy :mad:

The supreme court is now just a rubber stamp for the government and corporations. Actually the government and corporations are the same thing now :(
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A vast oversimplification. The networks pay billions for content, the contracts with the NFL and NCAA alone are worth billions. So if Aereo business model is ok, then they can take that very same content, never having to do a deal with the content provider, and just sell it.
 
teh_chem said:
I think the big controversy is where the retransmit device resides. If it's at your residence for personal use, that's one thing. Setting up antenna farms outside of your residence and selling access to broadcast programming under the guise of being a PVR service is something I never sided with. Sure, it gave an option to consumers that wasn't there for content delivery. But it also wasn't private in the common sense, IMHO.

Here's the problem: People enjoy watching/having access to TV content. But a lot of people feel they are entitled to it without fee. Is there a fundamental difference between receiving a tv broadcast to your antenna in your house vs. somewhere else and routing it? For an electronics perspective, no. A signal intercepted is a signal intercepted, it doesn't really matter where, electronically. Are broadcasters probably just hoping that aereo ponies up some extra cash under content-rebroadcasting just to get a larger cut of the pie? Probably. But I see no fundamental difference between what aereo is providing and what cable providers are providing. I actually hate the status quo of content delivery and cable/telecom companies right now, but it's also unfair, to me, to view aereo and other content re-delivery services differently.
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I guess it depends on how you interpret the use of technology in relation to our laws. From the sounds of this decision, the majority believed that Aereo was rebroadcasting, which would make them subject to the laws governing rebroadcasting. I do not think they understand what is going on and are therefore forced to interpret the law in accordance with their perception of what is going on. From a technologically enlightened standpoint, it would appear that what they were doing was providing you with a service that mimicked having a tuner card in your PC that allowed you to stream to your other devices.

Until our laws catch up with the technology at hand, we will continue to see rulings like this, which make no sense to the tech-literate, but make perfect sense to the tech-illiterate (which sadly appears to be most of our elected representation as well as the regulators that those elected representatives appoint). The same kind of thing is happening with Netflix right now, at least with regard to the technology being interpreted through a legal lens that has not kept pace with the changes in technology.
 
How much money do i have to pay to retransmit the signal that my antenna picks up down to my tv?
 
heatlesssun said:
Devices like Slingbox and HDHomerun aren't generally used to distribute content beyond personal use. The problem here is that Aero doesn't own or produce any of the content that it was charging to retransmit and it wasn't paying anyone to do so. It's pretty cut and dry.
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How is it different? With Slingbox you pay a subscription charge for the Slingbox service to re-broadcast content to you. With AERO you pay a subscription charge to re-broadcast content to you.

Skripka said:
With sling box you already as a consumer need to be paying for the content.
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Broadcast TV is free, there is no subscription charge.
 
bigdogchris said:
How is it different? With Slingbox you pay a subscription charge for the Slingbox service to re-broadcast content to you. With AERO you pay a subscription charge to re-broadcast content to you.

Broadcast TV is free, there is no subscription charge.
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I would imagine that for it to work from a legal standpoint, you would have to be in the broadcast area for the TV station you are re-broadcasting (though as previously stated, I think that re-broadcasting is not the appropriate term, at least not in the sens of how our laws currently define re-broadcasting).
 
heatlesssun said:
A vast oversimplification. The networks pay billions for content, the contracts with the NFL and NCAA alone are worth billions. So if Aereo business model is ok, then they can take that very same content, never having to do a deal with the content provider, and just sell it.
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The networks pay billions, they then charge advertisers billions and send those transmissions out over the air for free. Aereo sold space at their antenna farm and room on their servers for individuals to access those OTA broadcasts, Aereo did not remove the commercials so there was no loss to the networks and they didn't allow anyone but the individual consumer access to their individual stream.

The only legal grey area should have been that aereo did not have an antenna dedicated to every subscriber, they should have, but to say that the networks were harmed or copyrights were infringed was ridiculous and shows the justices don't understand the technology.
 
MrCaffeineX said:
I would imagine that for it to work from a legal standpoint, you would have to be in the broadcast area for the TV station you are re-broadcasting (though as previously stated, I think that re-broadcasting is not the appropriate term, at least not in the sens of how our laws currently define re-broadcasting).
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That is exactly how aereo worked, you couldn't access the stream from outside of the city where the broadcast originated (if your billing address was outside of the area you were out of luck) and eventually they even blocked IPs from outside the broadcast area from accessing the stream.
 
Did we give the Television networks their transmission frequencies when they switched to HD or did we make them license them for a fee ... if we gave them to them then we should begin the transition to eliminate free over the air transmission and take the frequencies back to be resold ... if we sold them the frequencies then we can work to add better encryption and eliminate free over the air transmission that way ... there is really no need for over the air as most people get their TV from Satelite, Cable, or internet now (I haven't used over the air in more than a decade)
 
bigdogchris said:
How is it different? With Slingbox you pay a subscription charge for the Slingbox service to re-broadcast content to you. With AERO you pay a subscription charge to re-broadcast content to you.
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Slingbox isn't a subscription service. Aereo is. Rebroadcasting one's own content for personal use isn't the issue here. It's rebroadcasting that content without consent or compensation to the content provider for profit that's at the heart of the matter.
 
heatlesssun said:
Slingbox isn't a subscription service. Aereo is. Rebroadcasting one's own content for personal use isn't the issue here. It's rebroadcasting that content without consent or compensation to the content provider for profit that's at the heart of the matter.
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I do not disagree with your analysis; however, I do disagree with the definition of the term re-broadcasting as it has been used in the decision of this case. I think that the term is dated and is used because the law has not been amended to take changes in technology into account. The piece of evidence I submit is that Aereo required that its subscribers be physically in the broadcast area of the content they streamed and implemented measures to ensure this was the case.
 
kbrickley said:
Did we give the Television networks their transmission frequencies when they switched to HD or did we make them license them for a fee ... if we gave them to them then we should begin the transition to eliminate free over the air transmission and take the frequencies back to be resold ... if we sold them the frequencies then we can work to add better encryption and eliminate free over the air transmission that way ... there is really no need for over the air as most people get their TV from Satelite, Cable, or internet now (I haven't used over the air in more than a decade)
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How it is that no one has asked if you're trolling....

Is it that obvious/known to everyone and thus ignored?
 
Honestly, I would have loved Aereo to win and I would have signed up if they moved to the west coast immediately.

But from a legal standpoint, I always felt that 10,000 mini-antennae instead of 1 big one (clearly illegal) was a facetious technical workaround against the spirit of the law. Again, not that I necessarily agree with the law, but until that's changed...
 
kbrickley said:
We should get rid of the free over the air broadcast of TV anyway ... that is 20th century technology ... we should be switching everything to hardline or internet or satelite (more 21st century oriented)
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Great plan. Remove the free less infrastructure required option for the consumer for costly monthly fees and new infrastructure to give more control to the corporations. If anything, we should be expanding it and removing all hardline options.

This is not just a rural customer argument. It's also how you're willing to pay for TV and the resulting ads. I for one will never pay a dime for TV as long as commercials are involved. Might as well remove free over the air radio while you're at it and all CB/Walkie wavelengths.

Any startup can buy a radio tower and broadcast their services. Only the giants can sway politicians and governments to lay their infrastructure and have the capital to deploy satellites and wide coverage wired grids.
 
kbrickley said:
Did we give the Television networks their transmission frequencies when they switched to HD or did we make them license them for a fee ... if we gave them to them then we should begin the transition to eliminate free over the air transmission and take the frequencies back to be resold ... if we sold them the frequencies then we can work to add better encryption and eliminate free over the air transmission that way ... there is really no need for over the air as most people get their TV from Satelite, Cable, or internet now (I haven't used over the air in more than a decade)
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OTA HD is in a subset of the spectrum OTA analog was using (channels 52-69 were reallocated; and channels under 7 are now disfavored). My understanding is that broadcasters got to switch or keep their channel under roughly the same terms (during transition, they got a temporary second channel to run digital on).

Why should I pay for cable/satellite when the broadcasters are willing to spend their own money to send content they paid for to my house at no cost to me, beyond a small investment in an antenna.
 
I'm curious to see how this affects the rapidly growing cloud market, I understand this can open the door to some major legal headaches.
 
heatlesssun said:
Huh? Again, Aereo was RESELLING content without paying anyone to do so. Recording a show for personal use is not the same thing as reselling the ability for others to watch it.
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no they where renting antennas
 
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