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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.
mp3.com stored a single copy of each song - and streamed copies of that shared song to users who had shown (by inserting a CD or buying the song from a mp3.com associate) that they owned it. While mp3.com claimed that they were protecting individual Fair Use (or was it First Sale?) rights, the technical point on which they were crucified was not the streaming to individual users, but the creation of the shared database (for their own commercial benefit).
In the Aereo case, they are not taking the signals from a single shared antenna (or from a small group of shared antennas) and replicating them. That would open them to the sort of attack that destroyed mp3.com. Instead, Aereo is taking the technically-very-ugly, but legally-more-likely-to-be-sound approach of having huge farms of micro-antennas, and renting individual antennas to individual customers. It is the broadcast signals from the plaintiffs that are replicating the programs – same as if the broadcast signals hit an equivalent number of rabbit-ears antennas in an equivalent number of houses.
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.