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Broadcasters Petition US Supreme Court In Fight Against Aereo
First time accepted submitter wasteoid writes "Aereo provides live-streaming and cloud-based DVR capability for Over-The-Air (OTA) broadcasts to their paying customers. Broadcasters object to this functionality, with Fox claiming about Aereo, 'Make no mistake, Aereo is stealing our broadcast signal.' The focus appears to be the ability of Aereo to provide streaming and DVR capabilities that traditional broadcasters have not delivered. The litigious broadcasters are fighting against "Aereo's illegal disruption of their business model.""
The real reason the broadcasters are doing this is because right now if you dont have an antenna (and many people dont, people in apartments and other shared dwellings, people with no light of sign to the transmission tower etc) the only way to get the OTA channels is to buy pay TV. And the pay TV operators pay a fair chunk of money to the OTA networks for rebroadcast rights.
So what Aereo is doing is allowing a lot more people to get the OTA channels without going through the cable companies (which means the cable companies wont be willing to pay as much for the rebroadcast rights to the OTA networks)
with Fox claiming about Aereo, 'Make no mistake, Aereo is stealing our broadcast signal.'
It's clearly not theft. Why is it not illegal for Fox to make this fraudulent claim in a public forum?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Since the Americans hold their Constitution so dear, almost to the level of Scripture itself, maybe a proper way to deal with corporate parasitism, is to make it unconstitutional to make any law which props up a failing business model or restricts competition in a free market.
Aereo has no right to profit from the significant money spent and effort made to deliver the broadcast signals in the first place. Not without compensation.