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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.
Perhaps they're hoping to startle Amazon et al. into filing amicus briefs in their favor.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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 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.
I did the same thing. I cut the cord when I bought my first home, since at the time I couldn't afford the $200/month Comcast wanted for Cable, Internet, and Phone (which they all but demanded you bundle by charging twice as much for any one of them without the other two).
I got DSL from a CLEC (because you could still do that at the time) for $25/month, and got Fios internet-only when that came around about 5 years later.
I've moved since then, and I sold my TVs in the process. I don't have a TV in my house, now, and it has been absolutely liberating for the last 3 years.
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.
No, but various IP owners are lined up waiting to shut down the cloud providers and they would sure enjoy a ruling against Aero.
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.
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.
It might help, but while the MPAA might bitchslap dropbox, they're small potatoes compared to the likes of MS, Google, and increasingly Amazon (as they get their lobbying up to speed). Those 3 have insane amounts of cash compared to the MPAA members, and are starting to realize they need to get in the game.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
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.
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).
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.
yep - both Congress and the SCOTUS are ill equipped to deal with these issues - if a brief/lobbyist doesn't raise the interesting twist/conflict, they probably won't notice it when it comes to technology.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
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.