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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.
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.
"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.