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Comment by alloyed | Hacker News Reader

From what I gathered, that is what they did try to do, only the Supreme Court wasn't buying it at all. Ars gives a few choicer quotes:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/04/at-oral-arguments...

>"What the local antenna person doesn't do but you apparently could do... is with the same kind of device pick up every television signal in the world and send it... into a person's computer," said Justice Stephen Breyer. "And that sounds so much like what a CATV (Community Antenna TV) system does or what a satellite system does that it looks as if somehow you are escaping a constraint that's imposed upon them. That's what disturbs everyone."

>Justice Elena Kagan noted that "from a user's perspective, it's exactly the same as if I'm watching cable."

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That quote at the end from Kagan is just utterly damning. It sounds like a magistrate ordering the burning of a witch for the seeming similarity, from an observer's perspective, of a telephone and magic.

It always worries me when a case that's even remotely technical makes it to the Supreme Court. Sometimes it feels like trying to teach a dog a card trick.

That analogy is a poor fit, because it is comparing an outcome (speaking over a great distance) with a mechanism (magic). The witch would be burned for using that mechanism, not for achieving that outcome. (The outcome might be used as evidence for the mechanism if people could conceive of no other mechanism for making a telephone).

Kagan is suggesting that the outcome is what the law was trying to regulate, and so the mechanism used to achieve that outcome is not important.

An analogy that would be more fitting would be to say that it sounds like applying an 1890 law against telephone harassment to an harassment that took place over a cell phone.

I see the Kagan quote as utterly rational. Concentrating on the mechanism rather than the result is like saying it is OK to eat the meat of a deer if you capture it in a trap and then kill it by slitting its throat with a blade that has been blessed by a priest, but it is not OK to eat the meat of a deer if you kill it by an arrow shot.

I see the Kagan quote as utterly rational.

If I attached a digital broadcast antennae to my TV, wouldn't it appear to me just as if I were watching cable? I turn on the TV, I select among channels, I watch stuff. Or I attache the local antennae to a local DVR and use that. Same experience as if I had cable going to my DVR.

Yet despite the same end result I'm not watching cable.

Am I missing something? Is the experience not the same?

When you look at it from that point of view, yes, the outcome is the same, and so from that perspective not only should Aereo be OK, but actual cable companies should not have to pay to take over the air signals and put them on their cables.

For better or worse, though, we've already decided we are going to look at more than just what the outcome is inside the home of the viewer, and consider at least some aspects of how the signal gets there. If you stick up an antenna at your location and receive a broadcast signal for viewing there (possibly delayed by a home recorder), that requires no permission. If you want to take those signals and stick them on a cable to distribute to your customers, or rebroadcast them through a satellite, we've decided that does require permission.

I think when Kagan talks about the same outcome, she means Aereo and a cable company are both third parties that deliver content from the broadcasters to you over a wire for pay.

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