Aereo Wins Appeal - Trial Likely for Streaming TV
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Cable companies didn't have to offer à la carte packages because the market, despite tremendous barriers, made that possible. Instead of picking channels, we pick the medium - Aereo (live local), Netflix (vast archived library and hopefully premium new content like House of Cards), Hulu (latest TV shows), and Amazon Instant (relatively new movies). This is very different from deciding if you want Discovery, HGTV, or HBO. Instead of picking genres, we're joining libraries. And I'm perfectly happy with that. In fact, I think this is a much better outcome than relying on cable companies to provide a good selection of TV channels.
My Roku and AppleTV can stream from many different libraries and I can turn the subscriptions on and off easily.
Red flag laws did not stop the automobile; why should copyright stop innovative uses of the Internet?
> Red flag laws did not stop the automobile; why should copyright stop innovative uses of the Internet?
Terrible analogy. With red flag laws, the obsolete industry was just getting between the transactional relationship between car manufacturers and drivers. In this case, the "obsolete" industry is creating the thing that's of real value, the thing that people want: content.[1] There is nothing stopping internet-savvy content creators from allowing their content to be distributed over the internet under liberal terms, other than the fact that people don't want that content, they want the big name content from the big name content producers. And internet companies, like Youtube, etc, who make money off other peoples' content have tremendous incentive to make it seem like a battle of "progress versus outdated industries" when what they want is to be able to make a profit by inserting themselves in the middle of these transactions.
In fact, copyright holders cannot impose restrictions on my right to view their work. The only difference here is that the viewing involves the Internet and the outdated assumptions about copying and media distribution upon which copyright is based. A very long time ago, geographic restrictions made sense, but those days are decades past.
Do not make the mistake of thinking that the law is handed down from the heavens. Laws can be out of date, and laws that were once good at promoting progress can wind up impeding it.
"With red flag laws, the obsolete industry was just getting between the transactional relationship between car manufacturers and drivers"
No, with red flag laws an obsolete industry was trying to impose restrictions on the use of a new technology to the point of making it impractical. It had nothing to do with car manufacturers, it was a law that targeted the users of automobiles. That is exactly what is happening in this case: the broadcasters and media conglomerates are trying to impose enough restrictions on Aereo's technology that it becomes impractical.
The problem with your view of this is that you are connecting the production of entertainment to a specific business model. Broadcast TV killed Vaudeville, and the Internet is killing broadcast TV. We had entertainment before copyright, we have had it with copyright, and we will continue to have it in the hypothetical post-copyright world (if we are lucky enough to see such a day).
"Indeed, it's internet companies like Youtube, etc, trying to profit by getting in-between the content producers and the content consumers..."
You are ignoring the history of those companies. Youtube would never have existed had the RIAA and MPAA not conspired, lobbied, and abused the justice system for the purpose of killing peer to peer filesharing. A promising, decentralized technology that allowed anyone to broadcast entertainment on a global scale was destroyed and companies like Youtube took its place.
What restrictions are they trying to impose exactly, other than "do whatever the hell you want just with your own damn content?" You're completely ignoring that crucial distinction between this situation and red flag laws. Cars were not taking advantage of horse driven carriages in any way. Aero exists only to distribute the content of the big media networks. Nobody would subscribe to their service without that content. Nobody is suing to restrict the technology--they're suing to force Aero to not free-ride on their content.
> A promising, decentralized technology that allowed anyone to broadcast entertainment on a global scale was destroyed and companies like Youtube took its place.
Nobody "killed" P2P. Last I checked, I could still torrent Ubuntu ISO's all day long.
You keep bringing up stuff like "allowed anyone to broadcast entertainment on a global scale" then ignore the fact that nobody has shut down the technology that allows people to do this. You can put together your 18th century murder mystery home movie and distribute it over Bittorrent and it's 100% legal. It's just that nobody wants the random crap filmed by some guy in their basement. They want $100 million Hollywood blockbusters.
What's happening is that content companies are fighting to protect companies like Napster, Youtube, etc, from free-riding on content they didn't create. And I don't think technology changes anything in this regard. Just because technology makes it easier to profit from other peoples' creations doesn't mean that it's "holding back innovation" to keep people from doing so.
No one is stopping content companies from creating their own Napsters and Youtubes and making the money that the "free riders" are now taking. They have shown no willingness to do so even with so many profitable examples out there. If the companies had come out with something like Spotify back when Napster showed what the appetite for music was really like I suspect they'd be in a much better place now in both a PR and Profit sense.
I don't think there's such a thing as a "right" to view someone's work, unless it's granted by the copyright holder. (Where else would you get such a right?)
>A very long time ago, geographic restrictions made sense...
It doesn't matter if they make sense or not; I don't think there's anything in copyright law that says the terms of a license have to make sense to any particular person (and who would get to decide that, if there were?)
Also, it doesn't seem like geographic restrictions have anything (yet) to do with this; from what I've read, Aereo only works inside the normal broadcasting range of the channels it re-transmits.
>...an obsolete industry was trying to impose restrictions on the use of a new technology...
That would be a good explanation for the lawsuit, if it had been started by manufacturers of portable TVs who wanted it to be impractical for people to use their non-TV devices as though they were TVs. In this case, it's about a group of companies who hold public performance rights to certain works, trying to assert those rights. As it happens, a court has ruled that Aereo is not infringing those rights.
So there's nothing in this whole story to justify stripping content creators and copyright holders of any of their rights.
You do not think you have the right to use your eyes without first asking someone's permission? You have that right, and you are also free to listen to almost any radio transmission your equipment receives (the exceptions to this are not copyright related; it is more like restrictions on RADAR detectors).
"It doesn't matter if they make sense or not; I don't think there's anything in copyright law that says the terms of a license have to make sense to any particular person"
There are limits to what we allow licenses to cover. There is no reason we should still allow licenses to cover geographic regions in this day and age (but there is also no reason to continue clinging to copyright either).
"Also, it doesn't seem like geographic restrictions have anything (yet) to do with this; from what I've read, Aereo only works inside the normal broadcasting range of the channels it re-transmits."
They do that because of the law, because the law is so dangerously out of date. It is not as though someone sat down and said, "The Internet allows us to send streams to anyone in the world. Let's limit our service to New York City, and not take advantage of the technology available to us!" This was a decision that was motivated by a backwards, anachronistic legal framework.
"if it had been started by manufacturers of portable TVs who wanted it to be impractical for people to use their non-TV devices"
You seem to have missed the point: Broadcasting is the obsolete industry. We do not need centralized broadcasters with technology that cannot send video more than a couple hundred miles, because we have a decentralized system that can send video anywhere in the world.
"So there's nothing in this whole story to justify stripping content creators and copyright holders of any of their rights."
You don't think there is something wrong with having to build an individual antenna for every user of Aereo's service? You don't think there is something wrong with telling someone in rural Texas that they are not allowed to use Aereo's service because they live in the wrong place? Aereo's technology solves an artificial problem, one that results from a legal framework that now serves only to keep powerful corporations in power.
You speak of copyright as though it was handed down by God. Perhaps you should take a look at its history, before assuming that there is some moral imperative for it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensing_of_the_Press_Act_166...
If one can legally bridge a "free" over the air broadcast over TCPIP one mile (or whatever the size of a broadcast area is), why not one hundred miles or even across the country?
I feel it's the beginning of the slow demise to the cable TV business model.
Aereo could easily add third tier cable stations or up and coming stations looking for an audience, i.e. Al Jazeera, Current TV and others. To fill in the void of no CNN, Fox News and others. ESPN though is a different story.
The case made a big deal about the fact that Cablevision was streaming separate streams to each user, and therefore it wasn't a public performance. The correct answer would've been: IP unicast is never a public performance.
It's not copyright law that gives NBC, Viacom, etc, their power. It's the fact that people really want their products and aren't willing to settle for alternatives. All copyright does is keep the Youtubes of the world from cashing in on that demand by inserting themselves in the middle and trying to profit from the popularity of the big media products.
The limitation on transmitting copyrighted works essentially creates a geographical monopoly with respect to television. Even if you could fly to another city and watch TV for free there, it is a copyright violation for a company to send you the signal from an antenna there. That's also why the Zediva rent-a-DVD-remotely was struck down: even if you own or rent the equipment, it seems illegal for the company to transmit the copyrighted work to you.
The ruling in the Aereo case gets around this because they limit their transmission to people who get the exact same free-to-air signal. There is still a transmission (which is what the dissenting judge based his argument upon), but the practical effect of getting the same content you would get otherwise seems to have prevailed, fortunately.
IANAL so I don't know how accurate that all is, but it's the understanding I've gotten from reading around.