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Aereo To SCOTUS: Shut Us Down and You Shut Down Cloud Storage
jfruh (300774) writes "Aereo is currently fighting for its life before the Supreme Court, and has issued a warning: if you take us down, you could take the entire cloud storage industry down with us. The company argues that they only provide customers with access to shows picked up by an individual antenna that they've rented. If the constitutes a 'public performance,' then so does the act of downloading a copyrighted document stored in a cloud storage service — even if the customer has purchased the right to use that document."
v3rgEz sent in a link to the transcript of the first day of arguments.
What matters is clout. Both mp3.com and Google did a similar thing. mp3.com was destroyed utterly, while Google faced a little bit of RIAA finger waggle.
I doubt this will affect anything cloud-wise.
Just how many industries will we allow the content industry to ruin in its death throes before we finally get wiser?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Yeah, I'm sure cloud service providers will be lined up outside the court rooms to shut themselves down due to precedent. Lots of motivation there.
They're casting this as a decision that will overturn the Cablevision remote DVR decision. They didn't once refer to the fact they need individual antennas to make every transmission a "private performance" under copyright law.
It sounds stupid
So, torrents win again?
From a legal basis Aereo's business model seems sound to me -- all they're doing is helping me receive a broadcast TV transmission which I'm entitled to receive over the airwaves anyway.
On the other hand, a ruling in Aereo's favor would be a boon for the cable companies and could kill the concept of free, broadcast TV altogether. As things stand, the cable companies pay the networks to retransmit feeds of their programming. If Aereo wins, the cable companies would be able to save money by erecting Aereo-style antenna arrays for their cable feeds, bypassing payments to the networks.
As things stand, cable customers are getting screwed because they're paying the broadcasters for the same programming twice -- once in the form of advertisements, and again by paying for the network broadcast feeds. On the other hand, by using my own antenna, I'm receiving dozens of free channels which are being subsidized by the cable customers. If Aereo prevails, broadcasters may terminate over-the-air broadcasts altogether to avoid losing their lucrative royalties from the cable companies, leaving me out in the cold.
(IANAL). I was quite surprised this even reached the high court. The broadcasters have a revenue model of paying by putting ads in front of eyeballs. This service arguably helps them meet that goal. Yes, I'm sure they'd like to double-dip and get paid for the "rebroadcast," but if you are giving your product away for free over the public airwaves, you should not be allowed to complain about where folks choose to locate their antennas. Be happy for the extra eyeballs.
Yes, please!! Please kill the cloud!!
SCOTUS will point out that putting an antenna in one place and sending the TV signal over a wire somewhere else is exactly how Community Antenna TeleVision (aka CATV, or better known as Cable TV) got its start, and the law Aereo is desperately trying to assert doesn't apply is specifically about piping broadcast signals somewhere else.
The court will find that the "just renting an antenna" argument doesn't fix the issue since the original TV services the laws were written against could have been claimed the same way: the users are just renting some share of the big antenna. Having lots of little antennas is technologically cool, but not really different.
It won't have an effect on any other cloud service, unless the cloud service tries to use antennas.
Aereo will lose, nothing will change.
Areo would like for all of us to buy into their fairy tale that their service == the entire cloud, but it was blatantly obvious from the oral arguments (that the submitter likely never listened to or would even comprehend if he had) that the justices were going out of their way to make sure that any ruling would not have an impact on services like Drop Box where the service itself has nothing to do with the content being "cloud" stored.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
As logical as Aereo's argument is, I kind of wish they hadn't made it.
Next week:
Supreme Court Rules all Cloud Technology Illegal
An internal system operation returned the error "The operation completed successfully.".
It was a bad law in the first place, poorly written, which let the networks charge money to cable people when their entire original business was charging advertisers and giving their stuff away for free.
Suddenly you let them charge others for their stuff that they agreed to give away for free originally and this caused the problems.
Aero are not doing anything wrong. The people doing wrong things are the over the air free TV networks that are charging.
The real truth is that the over the air for free model is OUTDATED - just like the buggy whips. I know of nobody actually using the radio waves. They only work in small areas and are only profitable if there is a large population. But in those areas you get so much more from cable TV.
In areas with less population, the over the air broadcasters are not profitable.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I suppose you could make Aereo's analogy to cloud storage if their business were primarily to allow you to upload content to them for streaming to your mobile devices wherever you are. That would make certain sense, and the privacy of the user to upload whatever they want should outweigh the rights of the networks to snoop on users to try to catch unauthorized uses of their copyrighted content.
But the service Aereo is selling is a 'cheap DVR in the cloud', which is a very different thing. I suppose the bit about streaming to your mobile devices adds some value, and if dropbox were to add that functionality, they'd probably pass muster. But Aereo's only source of content is broadcast signals - i.e. the broadcasters know without snooping that Aereo users are swiping their content. That ought to tilt the scales in the networks' favor.
Of course this Court isn't so good at striking a balance between two competing values. Given a choice between the Constitutional protection of (money as) speech and the democracy-unfriendly practice of influence buying, I'd have gone with the one that lines up better with the value of one person, one vote. But that's just me...
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
One of the justices asked flat-out if there were technical advantages to having multiple antennas or if it was just a way to get around copyright, and the lawyer dodged the question.
*Of course* the primary reason for having multiple antennas is copyright. It is exactly *because* they have multiple antennas that what they're doing is legal under current copyright law. By ducking and evading the question, the lawyer just looks shady.
From a technical point of view they'd be far better off with a pair of redundant antennas, storing all the shows from all the channels (with deduplication), and then serving them to their subscribers on demand. But that's clearly not allowed under current law.
There is nothing that matches the quality of over-the-air. In large cities there can be quite a few OTA channels and the picture is amazing.
Where I live, on the other hand, we have two channels. Amazing picture, poor selection.
What if the Supremes approve for-profit cloud DVRs but disapprove antennas that are remote from tge customer's residenc? The cloud wins, Areo's business model taks a hit, and it's unlikel the cable companies will "go Areo."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The antenna array is a beautiful piece of marketing by Aereo. Who could object to renting an antenna?
And, in fact, if the output of that antenna -- that is, the radio-frequency signal -- was transmitted to the home (as CableVision was doing back in the day) I think that Aereo would have an slam dunk. But that's not what they are doing.
They are converting the microwatt signal coming out of these antennas a few times. First, they are separating out just the channel that the user wants to watch, then they are digitizing that signal and encoding it onto the internet. That's what I don't think they are allowed to do, and that's why I believe they'll be shut down.
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
No need to innovate when you can legisilate.
Captcha: victors
This surprises me. If the cable companies used to do this, then why do they pay royalties to the networks nowadays? Why is Aereo getting sued if they're doing the same thing the cable companies can do?
Suppose I rent an apartment in New York, and I setup an antenna to pick-up New York broadcasts. Then I stream those broadcasts to my TV at home. Have I illegally retransmitted the signal and I need to pay a licensing fee?
As I see it, both parties are missing incredible opportunities.
Let's Judo-flip this conversation.
Broadcasters earn revenue from advertising. Aero is faithfully streaming content including all advertising to their customers. Clearly what is needed is a partnership for Aero to report viewer demographics back to broadcasters, who can pad onto their numbers when selling ads.
Aero is charging too little for their service. Their model is stupid. They are trying to counter cable carriers charging $50, 60, 100+/mo with a service that's $8 and $12. Aero should charge $29 and kick $15 per customer per month to the cable carrier(s) in the market in which each customer resides. Aero is then in the infrastructure business. The cable companies get build out absolutely free, without having to sink billions of dollars into last mile wiring of neighborhoods, and Aero gets massive revenue stream in a highly symbiotic relationship. For Aero customers, the cable company is is the content licensing and resale business - and the best part - they don't have to service & support those customers, Aero does.
Addtionally, if Aero has such a wonderful idea, there is nothing stopping Comcast from doing exactly the same thing. What is more expensive - the cost of bandwidth, or the cost of pulling copper, telephony or fiber to every house * N tens of millions of customers? Bandwidth is down for a few cents per gigabyte streamed now. How much does a nationwide fiber buildout cost?
This case is really about constipated thinking and reactionary fear in the face of changing climate.
THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.
The system is fundamentally broken. What do you expect a bunch of morons who sign an agreement to limited usage on an unlimited advertised plan. There is so much fear in your consumers that even if you offer them their rights they will not accept it because of a legal agreement, that they have not read.
A case of fear vs fact (engineering).
First, the primary networks are required, by law, to provide OTA service. They were also required to transmit in digital vs the older, analog signal. Supposedly, the digital signals can transmit further and can support error correction (to eliminate ghost images).
As another poster noted, IF you are in range of to receive the OTA broadcast, the HD picture is of higher quality that what you would get via cable. Why? Cable network providers must compress the signal resulting in signal degradation. OTA can send the full, uncompressed digital signal. One of these days, I will have to see if I can receive the signal where I live...probably not.
Because doing it through one big antenna as the cable companies used to has already been ruled illegal. Aereo's innovation is renting out an antenna to each and every customer. This wasn't possible to do practically until relatively recently.
The cable companies used a single antenna and redistributed the signal over their cable network. They actually had to pay a small fee to the TV stations, but in reality the TV stations were happy that their viewers had better reception.
Aereo uses a single antenna per customer, which you "lease" individually. You would think that the TV stations would be happy, but over the past few decades the TV stations (local affiliates and national) have become chummy with the cable providers, and cooperate on advertising, including targeted advertising. Part of the issue now is that the local affiliates are stuck between a rock and a hard place--if the national networks went full digital, they're screwed. If Aereo succeeds, they're screwed again (although not as bad) because they lose a growing source of income. The national stations are fine in the long-term, but short-term they lose control.
It seems to me they should try and argue the merits of their case, not try scare tactics on the court by claiming they'll take down all cloud storage.
This seems like the equivalent of saying, "but everyone else is doing it!"
But the reason there's a fundamental difference between the RS DVR at issue in CableVision and what Aereo provides is, as Justice Alito alluded to, the fact that there's a license in the CableVision context to get the initial performance to the public. And so then I think appropriately the focus in the CableVision context becomes just the playback feature and just the timeshifting that's enabled by that. And in that context, if you focus only on that, then the RS DVR looks a lot like a locker service where you have to come in with the content before you can get content out and you only get back the same content. And here is what really I think Aereo is like. Aereo is like if CableVision, having won in the Second Circuit, decides: Whew, we won, so guess what? Going forward, we're going to dispense with all these licenses, and we are just going to try to tell people we are just an RS DVR, that's all we are, and never mind that we don't have any licensed ability to get the broadcast in the first instance, and we're going to provide it to individual users, and it's all going to be because they push buttons and not because we push buttons. If that were the hypothetical, I don't know how that wouldn't be the clearest violation of the 1976 Act.
This surprises me. If the cable companies used to do this, then why do they pay royalties to the networks nowadays? Why is Aereo getting sued if they're doing the same thing the cable companies can do?
The networks paid to get the law changed in 1992.
If the cable companies used to do this, then why do they pay royalties to the networks nowadays?
Because the television stations sued them and won on the basis that the cable companies were essentially offering a public performance of the television broadcast because they had one antenna and transmitted the input to many users.
Why is Aereo getting sued if they're doing the same thing the cable companies can do?
Cable companies can do it currently because they license the content from the providers (i.e. they pay for the priviledge). Aereo is trying to get around paying the content providers by providing every subscriber with her own personal antenna and saying it's not a public performance. We're just automating what the subscribers could do themselves by erecting their own antenna, attaching it to a tuner and a dvr, and putting the DVR on the internet.
They actually had to pay a small fee to the TV stations, but in reality the TV stations were happy that their viewers had better reception.
They were happy until the cable providers started to allow for centralized DVR services that could cut out the commercials, at which point the TV stations were gaining very little by having the cable companies provide their content to customers. Hence they got unhappy and that was ruled to be illegal.
if the national networks went full digital, they're screwed.
Digital/analog is a different thing from over-the-air/over-a-wire transmission. The national networks went "full digital" a while ago.
Because the providers have "packaged" everything together and send C&Ds about carrying their "free" channel if you didn't pay for their "pay" channels. And none of the cable companies have wanted to fight that lately, because dropping the "free" channel is the best way to get 100,000 pissed off residents to flood the channel with complaints.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
You don't *need* a license to receive the broadcast in the first place. You need a license to take that single received copy, and re-broadcast it to multiple people. That's what CableVision did, but that's *NOT* what Aereo does. Aereo rents each subscriber an individual antenna. Each antenna receives the broadcast independently, and the copy of the broadcast received by that antenna goes *only* to that subscriber.
Who stored the copyrighted document on the cloud storage device? If it was the user who had already purchased the rights to said storage from the provider of the copyrighted content then there's no problem at all. If it was the cloud service itself or somebody else that stored it there, ready for any end user who pays for the service to access it, then I can see there could be problems
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I suppose you'll think I'm like that Amish guy that still uses a horse (this buggy whip term has to go. A buggy whip doesn't get you anywhere, the horse does), but I view the OTA broadcast. I can get quite a few channels, they have great picture quality, and most importantly it is free. I could get a lot more channels with cable, but I'm willing to try and find other ways to watch the few shows worth a damn and avoid paying huge amounts of money for reality TV and other garbage.
We are really just arguing about a non-interactive medium for entertainment and, to a lesser extent, for information. This is by no means a requirement of life.
I pulled the plug on broadcast and cable television back in 2000. Nothing worthwhile to watch and too many ads. My brother brought DVDs of newer shows and I've no interest in them either. I've lost any desire to waste time watching television, and these legal battles do more to drive me away from it all. The content owners don't want to play nice and I refuse to patronize such villiany.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
I just want to point out to any Aereo users that should they get shut down, you can still go back to the Pirate bay and start real piracy again. It's a lot easier than this nonsense, all the commercials are edited out for you already AND if you thought you were sticking it to the broadcasting industry before, you'd really be sticking it to them now.
Originally, cable TV was a coax cable that merely carried over the air tv signals, with a higher quality signal. however, a single coax cable could carry lots of tv channels. all sorts of low budget cable tv channels emerged, including an espn. but cable became more popular, the extra channels got more viewers, and money. the programming became higher quality.... cable channels could start charging money for their distribution. cable prices went up, and so did cable bills. Today, cable produces shows like Game of Thrones, and Breaking Bad. Two thirds of households now subscribe to cable.
Does cable now have the viewership to tell free over the air TV to put its antenna where the sun don't shine? We will soon find out.
Digital signals do not transmit further than Analog signals! In fact, the range of a watchable signal is severely reduced. The clarity of the digital signal is significantly better and remains nearly perfect until the edge of the transmission range, but beyond that it completely degrades, whereas the analog signal is of poor quality, but still viable for many more miles.
OTA can send the full, uncompressed digital signal
I think your a little confused. The OTA (ATSC) standard is still sending compressed video (mostly MPEG2) , just that the bit rate tends to be higher than what most (some?) cable companies provide for their digital content.
See also netflix, which tends to have even lower "HD" quality than the cable companies. With the advent of lossy compression the quality of a show just as much to do with bitrate and compression algorithm than resolution/color depth/framerate/etc.
For a limited period of time and only because it benefits the common good. Is limiting the market in a capitalist society in the public good? The original intent of copyright was as a limited benefit to the creator for major benefit to the consumer in access to more, with less confusion. The current idiotic anti-American view of copyright flies in the face of the intent of the original meaning.
Just because you and I do not use the "radio waves", and just because the people in your social circle don't use the "radio waves" does not make this in any way true. There are one heck of a lot of low income folks out there that don't have $100 bucks or whatever it is for cable TV, and they 100%, absolutely get their signals over the air, just like you'd be surprised the number of CRT televisions in those homes. Don't be so quick to assume everyone lives a high tech life with disposable income.
We do use over the air still at our house for a few shows. As my sibling stated, the quality of the HD stream is superior to most other HD streams because there is much less compression than the cable companies/dish companies provide. So it has better quality and it is free, so we can't complain.
We do internet stream/download/netflix cd most of our consumed content though, since each of those methods have their obvious benefits as well.
Such a shrewd strategy may backfire. Given how up-to-date the supreme justices are, they'll probably think cloud storage is related to global warming and nuke it.
Big Media owns the right, which owns 5 of the judges. Not sure why they are even wasting time listening to arguments before voting to take even more rights away from individuals.
Because the FCC changed the rules. The rule used to be that cable companies were required to carry any OTA station in the market. The current rule is that the OTA station may choose one of two options:
1) force the cable company to carry the station (and receive no compensation); OR
2) negotiate a fee with the cable company to carry the station (and risk the possibility that no agreement is reached => no compensation and no carriage).
I watch over the air HD. I have a mythtv box and a HDHomerun that I use as an OTA DVR. Anything that's not coming over air or available on netflix or HBO Go, I just get from bittorrent. Cable providers can go to hell.
>> if you take us down, you could take the entire cloud storage industry down with us.
For me that alone is a good enough reason to shut them down right there.
If Aereo prevails, broadcasters may terminate over-the-air broadcasts altogether to avoid losing their lucrative royalties from the cable companies, leaving me out in the cold.
Freeing up tons of bandwidth for the FCC to re-allocate to cell phone companies. Wireless broadband Internet access would dominate the airwaves, as more and more people ignore the local media. Wireless broadband would infiltrate the countryside, pushing prices low and demolishing the business models of Dish Network and Direct TV.
Live sporting events would have to find another way to reach an audience which is more committed to saving dough than Sunday's game. Resonable subscription prices will be offered for Internet access to these events.
This turn of events kills Disney's cash cow, ESPN, and forces content creators to offer all of their content online through Hulu, Miro, Netflix, Redbox, etc.
Broadcasters lose and either change their business model, or join the ranks of unemployed newspaper journalists.
Of course, none of this has any effect on listener / viewer sponsored NPR / PBS which already offers everything online for free. The above post is the outline for a future Frontline! http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/view/
I have a windows media center PC with a dual tuner card built in and we record OTA broadcasts.
People *do* still want over the air broadcasts. What I think people didn't want was the increased difficulty level of receiving a constant, watchable signal. That's the unfortunate side-effect of the OTA broadcasts going digital. With analog signals, sure -- you might lack some clarity. But poor reception that only caused the picture to get a little fuzzy (or occasionally lose vertical sync) becomes a total interruption of both audio and video.
A lot of people would like the option to receive those broadcast stations without the hassle of getting an antenna rigged up that pulls them in reliably. But others still prefer the OTA broadcast, because it frees them from reliance on a 3rd. party delivering it to them. ISP's are starting to talk about bandwidth caps and throttling, increasingly, as people generate more and more traffic streaming video content. OTA frees you from having to chew up bandwidth on any of that content, at least. And you don't get stuck with fees like you do with cable or satellite.
Honestly, I think what's rather ridiculous is that our legal landscape encourages companies like Aereo to exist in the first place! Their whole business model is technically insane.... (Really? Maintain whole fields of micro antennas all doing the exact same thing, just to try to find a way around legislation we've got in place preventing them from offering the same service in a far more sensible manner?) If the OTA broadcasters had any sense, they'd offer free Internet streaming as an alternate method of reception, and do all of that themselves! Then they could substitute advertising that made sense for the wider audience listening via the Internet, on the streaming version.
so, if i rent a tv from rent a center. am i allowed to watch tv on it? ,, yeah like if they let us watch hbo for free was a similar thing.. NO ! that is a private transmission .. We are talking about FREE over the air channels
if i go to the electronics store and get an over the air antenna and put it on a credit card. i havent paid my credit card bill yet, can i watch tv on ot?
all the argument is about, it is a free over the air radio waves, free is the main word here. it is free to watch these 4 or 5 channels . most people can not even receive good reception in their homes if they arent near a big city.
am i breaking the law if my antenna picks up a signal from a town i dont live in? just because that signal is closer?
this has nothing to do with Aereo. they have a legal business model. but once politics gets involved and big money companies throw their money around.... ugg
this has to do with the networks losing money contracts with the established cable companies starting their own rental business.
in the arguments i read, they talked about HBO , and the judge was like
The collect a monthly fee. Advertisements are from the OTA broadcast.
I am 21 years old, live in a major city, and I use OTA to watch live TV. I would never pay $100/mo for cable, and this lets me watch live news as a supplement to Netflix and Amazon Prime.
$100/mo cable bills are outdated.
Analog is better in where I live because I can still watch TV even if it is not clear. With digital, I just get drop outs. Basically, you get it or none. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
is to get money from sports bars that put broadcast sporting events on all of their televisions in order to attract customers.
People don't really want CDs or DVDs or OTA, they want streaming.
Not if streaming incurs a $10 per GB overage payable to the satellite or cellular ISP. See how Hulu and Netflix waste cellular airtime.
Comcast and Time Warner ARE content companies.
True of the former, not so much of the latter. Time Warner no longer owns AOL, Warner Music Group, or Time Warner Cable.
The thing is. Content makers are not the buggy whip makers that are fighting here. The buggy whip makers are the old labels. People don't want drm, physical copies, area codes and all that crap the current sellers of content are desperately trying to push. Technology WILL beat them. It already has. It's only about time now. It's a lost war. They may still win some battles here and there, but as generations pass they will lose, because younger popolation has less and less people who support their point of view. Hard to enforce when nobydy thinks it's wrong. Laws will follow. Maybe with a big delay, but it will happen.
They are using public spectrum. If they can't make profit doing it tthen maybe they should not be doing it. There are plenty more uses for the radio spectrum. If they get a special lisence to transmit through the air, everyone capable should be able to recieve. If someone can take a public transmit, and redeliver it by cables, and turn profit, that's maybe what the original transmission provider should be doing instead of transmitting over air in the first place.
Define 1000 copies. If I take a video file, and make 1000 copies of it with different names it's 1000 copies, right? What if I compress one file to save space? It's still a separate copy, right? What if I run the whole "directory" that has 1000 files through some compression algorithm, that finds out all 1000 files are exactly the same, and so just makes a note of that as metadata, then keeps one copy, and ditches the rest? How many copies do I have? At which point is it ok to take a look at ones and zeroes, and store them more efficiently?
Same applies to invidual streams. What if I buy some transferring cabability from some company that rents a fiber or a couple from someone else, takes traffic, analyzes it on the fly, notices there are 1000 streams with the same content, only actually transfers one, then does some trick on the other end to "uncompress" the rest.
Current laws are way old fashioned in a world where data is concidered property, but for practical purposes computers are making thousands of copies of it, mangling it, reconstructing it from other data, encrypting it, decrypting it, transferrin git around the world by doing all this over a networked computers.
Just rent a shelf space then. And internet connection. And sell small computers with preinstalled software and antennas on the side, or let customers make their own setups. Is it ok for me to move data from my own computer across the internet? Can I buy support from some company? ( You know, just in case I happen to be far way from my computer when it does something funny?) I believe all of these are ok. Why is not stringing them together ok?
I think the tech time for this has come. But I think a revenue share model is better business approach. If I was business development manager at Aereo, I would find ways to work with terrestrial broadcasters to develop expanded distribution of their broadcasts, but monetize using percentage of advertisement revenue.
This means the original broadcast still control the selling of advertisements, but Aereo would report back to the original broadcasters viewing data and the original broadcasters would be able to sell larger audience to advertisers, and give Aereo a cut of the revenue for eyeballs that viewed original broadcaster feed via extended Aereo coverage.
There's lots of programming I'd like to watch outside of my terrestrial region that would be easy for Aereo to augment coverage, but not blockbuster enough for cable network to pick up in their one size fit all bundles.
What is stupid is that somehow the cable companies got government to make the common TV antenna illegal. That somehow if you receive PUBLICLY BROADCAST RF signal and redistribute it to people in the same reception area, it is somehow not the same thing as everyone receiving it individually.
There are buildings fully wired for a common TV antenna, sockets and all in each apartment, that cannot be used because they aren't allowed to use a common antenna.
My position is that once you broadcast your program free and clear for everyone to receive, you cannot further control how people choose to receive it.
You are fucking retarded.
This is simply transmitting what is already freely available in the air.
Shit, it is not a hard concept, even for the most fucktarded of retards.