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Feds Now Oppose Aereo, Rejecting Cloud Apocalypse Argument
v3rgEz writes "TV streaming service Aereo expected broadcasters would put up a fight. The startup may not have seen the Justice Department as a threat, however. The Justice Department has now weighed in, saying in a filing that it's siding with major broadcasters who accuse Aereo of stealing TV content. In its filing, the Justice Department noted it doesn't believe a win for broadcasters would dismantle the precedent that created the cloud computing industry, as Aereo has previously claimed. The case is expected to go before the Supreme Court in late April."
The same Justice Department officials will soon leave to work for the various broadcast networks.
Thank goodness we've got the Obama administration to bring some common sense back to government and stand up for the little guy.
A Series 3 platform TiVo would let you record digital OTA for $12.95 per month maxium, but that figure is for the entire TiVo service which includes a license to use the software as well as the guide info, and they've always sold the hardware cheap with the idea of making up the loss on selling the service.
In fact, you can probably pick up a used S3 or S3 HD or HD XL with Product Lifetime Service for $300 or less (check area Craigslists), then another $100 for a 2TB WD20EURS to slip into it and $10 -$15 for Low ESR 105 degree rated capacitors to replace the ones in the power supply pro-actively, and the only monthly cost will be the electricity.
Lurk at tivocommunity.com for a while.
You'll also find discussion of Myth and WMC there as well.
When you're paying for Aereo, you're paying as much as anything to have somebody else worry about providing you with an outdoor antenna.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
80 year old WHAT?
what could any 80 year old law possibly have to do with modern nuances of virtual, cloud, broadcast (in modern times), store-and-forward, proxy, repeat, bridge and route?
those didn't exist at all (in any real sense) 80 yrs ago.
besides, you can't have it both ways: copyright was supposed to expire in a 'normal' period of time, but we kept changing things as things were about to expire, so that public property would not be public YET. if the government won't respect its own laws, why should we?
anyway, copyright is not the same thing it once was, and broadcasting over the air is a trade: you get to use airwaves and you get funding from (lots of places). you have been funded and you chose to transmit data in the clear. what happens after that is NOT your business. it stopped being 'yours' once it hit the public non-encrypted airwaves.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Aereo is a public performance of copyrighted material. You cannot do that. You will get slapped.
A public performance?
You have every right to receive, for free, at no additional cost, any broadcast TV signal your antenna can bring in, and to record it on a DVR, and to have the DVR send it to the TV via Ethernet if you want to.
This is just subcontracting the antenna, DVR, and Ethernet part out to someone else.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
.... many networks will stream a good portion of the shows that they air, usually only a day or so after initial broadcast... and typically leave them available for about a week. There's commercials, of course, but it's really not that bad a way to watch television. I'm not sure what need Aero was really trying to fill.
Probably the needs of those for whom those qualifiers are problematic.
my, your, his/her/its, our, your, their
I'm, you're, he's/she's/it's, we're, you're, they're
Area Man Constantly Mentioning He Doesn't Own a TV.
"Public" how, exactly? If I have an antenna on my roof and run that signal into my DVR where I then record a show and store it for private viewing, there's nothing illegal about that, right? If I live in an apartment complex and rent an antenna on the roof instead of owning it, but otherwise do everything the same, that's fine too, right? What if I rent the DVR from a third-party like TiVo? Still cool, right? What if I kept the DVR in a different room, far away from the TV? There's nothing illegal about renting an antenna or hiding equipment away in a closet far away from the TV (in fact, most of us prefer to do that already).
That's all that Aereo is, except that the A/V wire connecting the DVR to the TV stretches over the Internet. Each customer rents their own antenna that picks up broadcast signals that only that person can then watch. Their copy of the signal is kept for them, tied to their account, where only they can view it. And Aereo isn't even going against broadcast blackout regions or the like, since the antennas are local to the users. All they're doing is letting the user move the antenna and DVR to a far away equipment closet that the user then rents from them.
So, again I ask: how exactly is it "public"? Hell, how exactly is it any different than just renting a DVR and antenna that are installed at home? If it's that it's "in the cloud", I'm willing to bet that we'd agree that, while ridiculous, it would be perfectly legal to run the necessary A/V cables from Aereo's HQ to my home, so why would using the Internet magically make it illegal? The fact that I have to access it over the Internet doesn't magically make it public, illegal, or otherwise illicit.
Working at the shop I talk to a LOT of college aged kids, know what I've found? Frankly TV is The Lawrence Welk Show, something old folks liked that the kids honestly don't understand and don't want. They are used to having the net and "shows by appointment" is just something they really "don't get" and if they can't watch a show on THEIR schedule? Then they just don't care, they really don't.
Honestly the only young folks I found with TVs were the really poor, those without net use TV as a form of cheap entertainment. Even my fiance who swore "I'm not gonna be able to stand going without TV" when she moved in has been TV free for almost a year and the USB cap card I gave her for her lappy sits unused. Once I showed her the wealth of instant entertainment? She never went back.
So the broadcasters can bribe the government all they want, like the *.A.A they can't change the fact that their model has gone the way of the 8-track. The future is crowd funding and instant gratification, the days of "tune in, same bat time, same bat channel" as as dated as Adam West's Batman.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I disagree.
what was a public broadcast back then is not even close to what is a 'broadcast' now.
and, add to this the notion of 'store and replay later'. you could not DO that back then unless you were a recording studio. today, everyone is a 'recording studio' in terms of being able to save digital content and play it back later.
the # of people you could reach before was limited. now, the rules are all different and you don't have to have them all tuned in at the same freq, in the same area of the world at the same time.
add to this the fact that 'copyright' does not mean the same thing world wide and so when you send out content to the internet, not everyone is bound by US rules!
the world in tech is so different, its not sensible to apply what we considered 'content distribution' to today's world. too much is not applicable and some things we have today were not even conceived of back then.
laws should never be static. they need to be updated to fit the age. copyright was never updated in peoples' favor, only in corporations' favor. that, in itself, means that it was not maintained in a fair and just manner.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Although Aereo might simply be a remote antenna you pay another party to provide, keep in mind that cable companies are required to pay retransmission fees. How is Aereo's service different than cable? After all, if companies that provide traditional Community Antenna TeleVision service must pay, why shouldn't Aereo?
Whenever you broadcast, each person picking up the signal is effectively receiving a copy of the content. The purpose of retransmission fees is to cover those copies. In contrast, Aereo is not making new copies; it's merely working with the copies that have already been produced and to which each of its users is already entitled. That's why it's so important that they have a 1:1 ratio between antennas, storage of content, and user accounts: it proves that each of those users is legally entitled to the copy that Aereo is receiving, storing, and unicasting to them. Were they doing something like having one antenna and allowing anyone to tune into it over the 'net, this would be an entirely different matter.