This reminds me of Aereo. They provided each user with their own individual TV antenna, DVR and streaming server. Their case went to the Supreme Court but they ultimately lost.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aereo
Doing a thing, but with Jesus branding, can get you very far in America beyond all logic. See also: nonprofits participating in politics, nonprofits doing public performances without proper licensing, nonprofits advertising to children in public schools, etc.
To put it in the Supreme Court's exact words: "Given Aereo’s overwhelming likeness to the cable companies targeted by the 1976 amendments, this sole technological difference between Aereo and traditional cable companies does not make a critical difference here."
“We came within one vote of declaring the VCR contraband 30 years ago in Sony [v. Universal]. The dissent in that case was driven in part by the plaintiffs’ prediction that VCR technology would wreak all manner of havoc in the television and movie industries. The Networks make similarly dire predictions about Aereo. We are told that nothing less than ‘the very existence of broadcast television as we know it’ is at stake. Aereo and its amici dispute those forecasts and make a few of their own.… We are in no position to judge the validity of those self-interested claims or to foresee the path of future technological development. Hence, the proper course is not to bend and twist the Act’s terms in an effort to produce a just outcome, but to apply the law as it stands…”
The woman reported her children kidnapped and showed the order to the police and they refused to do anything and said she should just wait and he would probably come back.
The man showed up at the police station a day later with her 3 children, dead.
So now we have the precedent that even in the most extreme and obvious cases, police have absolutely no duty to uphold their oath.
Thanks Scalia.
In general, it's worth keeping in mind that the point of courts is not to decide whether the outcome of the case is ethically or socially desirable. They're there to look at the laws and precedent and figure out how it applies to a given case. If the result is undesirable, it's something for the legislature to fix.
Ah, the old "we're here to talk about laws, not justice" argument.
Programmers seem to think about the law like a program, like a set of rules governing system behaviour and so long as they are not directly violated, this one neat trick judges hate will let them do whatever it is without recourse. But that's not true, firstly because the law is fuzzy and deals with human behaviour, including taking wider views, intent and mitigating circumstances into account, and secondly taking decades or centuries of established case law into account too.
It's why things like "smart contracts" are not the end run around the judicial process that their creators would like...
The ruling also managed to make the law even more inconsistent. If I rent an antenna and install it in a datacenter for TV, that's kosher. If I rent an antenna and pay someone else to install it in a datacenter for TV, that's a copyright violation.
But also I won't deny the copyright owners have done a great job in making the law do exactly what they want it to, nothing more and nothing less.