Court Rejects Fox's Attempt to Use Aereo Ruling Against Dish's Hopper

Fox and Dish have been locking horns over Dish over its streaming and PVR services for a while now, and immediately after the Aereo ruling Fox sought an injunction against Dish's services. The court rejected the request. From the article: Fox pointed out the Supremes had reflected Aereo's argument (which it said was Dish's as well) that a performance was not public under the Copyright Act if each sub watches a unique stream. Fox's lawyer, Richard Stone, argued that Aereo was also essentially about attaching a Slingbox to a DVR. But that got some pushback. One judge countered that it was "completely different technology" and said that while that was the argument, "the Supreme court has all sorts of caveats in the opinion about how this was about Aereo and nothing else and a lot of the 'nothing elses' seem to be pretty similar to Slingbox." The underlying case will continue moving forward (going to trial in early 2015).

Comments

Need a EULA for video

[paiute]

The networks want to be paid every time a consumer watches a program, live, recorded, restreamed, or whatever. I am surprised that they do not insert a screen before every show reading something along the lines of 'I agree not to redirect the following content.' If the user does not agree with that, they are instructed to stop the program at that point.

Re:Need a EULA for video

[SJHillman]

" insert a screen before every show"

Don't be silly. They'd insert the screen right over the damned show.

Can't use duck test and rational argument

[duckgod]

This is complete bullshit. The argument for Aereo was always that if I can rent an apartment in the same city, hook a slingbox up to an antenna, and stream the tv to my second apartment is legal then so is Aereo. This is what I believe to be a solid legal argument. The Supreme Court decided to go with a walk like a cable company, quack like a cable company than follow the rules of a cable company. Judge Scalia had it right in the dissent "It is not the role of this Court to identify and plug loopholes. It is the role of good lawyers to identify and exploit them, and the role of Congress to eliminate them if it wishes,". This was a loophole around a bullshit law. But it was definitely logically legal loophole.

Now the Fox Lawyers are trying to use this bullshit duck test ruling backwards towards slingbox. Good for the court to quickly reject this Monty Python and the Holy Grail witch logic.

Re:Can't use duck test and rational argument

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Your Aero argument is indeed solid...except for one thing. Congress deliberately mucked it up by preventing cable companies from being able to rebroadcast local broadcast channels, implementing this must-carry-for-free-or-negotiate-for-dollars, tv station decides.

Congress did it! However, Fox has no leg to stand on, with the the Aero ruling, anyway. You have your signal and shows already and are just using slingbox to transmit it around for you. This doesn't fall afoul of Congress' strange law for must-carry.

Re:Can't use duck test and rational argument

[GTRacer]

Slingbox is very different. It's a personal device that does nothing but forward a single channel from your own cable box (or DirectTV receiver) to your current location.

Um, that's EXACTLY what Aereo was doing. A single antenna, tuned to a single broadcast, streamed to a single IN-MARKET user. My dad and I actually discussed this over the weekend. He sided with the broadcasters cos Aereo was for-profit. That was it. He agreed with me on the technical merits but disagreed Kanojia, Diller et. al. should be able to profit.

Re:"The Supremes"?

[Applehu Akbar]

Ever since it voted 2-1 to stop in the name of love...