It's probably not up the guy who is responsible. It was one of the leaders, and it went something like this..
You really fucked up. You are going to be punished, maybe put to death. But we cannot let your mistake become fodder for the enemies of our noble struggle so we're going to take care of you quietly.
The problem is that libertarians always try to make the distinction that they're not anarchists and that they're not like the current government
No that's wrong, libertarians are "like" the current government, just smaller.
1 requires taxes, an organization to collect it, laws on what is taxed, lawmakers to write those laws, courts to enforce those laws, lawyers to argue court cases, law enforcement officers to enforce court decisions, and it's suddenly government all the way down. We're right back to where we were before.
Yes, that's the libertarian platform. The difference is in how large the government is and what its responsibilities are, not fundamental changes like eliminating lawmakers... honestly that's a ridiculous notion.
There are two types of libertarians. Those who think that government should be tiny, with everyone being some glorious self-sufficient pioneer in the new world. Those are the ones who should be hanging out in Somalia and Sudan, but don't, because those places a shit holes of failed states.
You hear that argument so much, and it's just so silly. It shows such ignorance of Somalia and Sudan, as well as ignorance of libertarianism.
Libertarians demand strong property rights and protection of those rights. They demand a small government that has limited rights and responsibilities.
Somalia and Sudan both have central governments with overreaching power in the areas they control based on Islamic law that any libertarian would find abhorrent. Furthermore, there are a number of competing governments disputing territory within each country, also seeking to impose Islamic law (but, you know, the "true" Islamic law).
Now it's a great talking point to say "overlapping disputed territories = no real government = libertarian paradise" but it's completely wrong, and you know it, because you yourself pointed out above that as soon as you get a group with the self-appointed moral right to apply violence, collect taxes, issue laws, enforce laws, etc... you have a government. So saying there's no government or "a" (there's more than one) "weak" (each one is very strong and overreaching) government in Sudan and Somalia is simply incorrect.
It sounds like you're talking more about anarchists than libertarians. What makes you think libertarians are against having a national standing army for defense, which would include the "warlords" you're speculating about?
There is a difference between accepting the idea that others might disagree with you and acting to support those you disagree with to the detriment of your own principles and interests.
I guess it's a foreign concept to you that some people hold principles higher than self-interest. As an example, some people would rather not accept food stamps, even if they qualify, because they believe it's wrong or that the qualification level is too easy (they feel they don't really need it, even though they qualify).
Or to take a personal example, I don't support the individual mandate in Obamacare even though it doesn't affect me, and in theory helps me by expanding the pool of risk for health insurance. Why? Because I'm an idiot? Because I don't realize that it benefits me in some ways? No, because I value the principles of freedom higher than the small benefit of imposing this law on unwilling people.
So it's ok for conservatives to not be open to liberal ideas but it's not ok for liberals to be cool with conservative ideas? Nice double standard you have there.
That's not a double standard, that's holding each group accountable to their own espoused beliefs.
What you're unable (or unwilling) to see is that having a goal of "diversity and inclusion" is difficult for precisely the reasons you're bringing up and may end up being self-defeating. What you really want is "diversity and inclusion that I like and approve of" which is what most people do anyway.
I think this here sums up libertarianism nicely, as well as how anyone who isn't a true believer can expect to be treated should they ever win. Most might not be so blunt about it, but it's the idea behind all the sweet words about liberty. [...] And it's interesting to note that this is pretty much exactly what Nazis themselves, or hard-line communists, or really any totalitarians spouted.
Appropriating mythological characters is fine and dandy, but making fundamental changes to them that don't serve a greater purpose to the audience is not.
To take a non-mythological example, I've enjoyed the change from "John Watson" to "Joan Watson" in Elementary (the John Watson associated with Sherlock Holmes, in case you aren't familiar with it). Why? Because in the original Sherlock stories there has always been a kind of weird relationship between Sherlock and John. Changing John to a female character presents those relationships in a different light, just as it would if the characters were gay. So that's interesting.
But if they took John Watson and said, okay, not only is he now a woman, but he's a scuba instructor instead of a doctor, she's never been to war, and she's actually smarter than Sherlock, and oh she's not interested in solving crimes or documenting or anything, it's now become a cooking show... well you can see how fundamental identity changes *can at least hypothetically* change the character so much that it's worthless crap (unless the cooking show is actually good, and then it should be thought of as a new thing with new characters).
To take another example, in the Thor movie, making Heimdall black was stupid. That added nothing.. though since he was a minor character it wasn't a big deal. Hypothetically, if they had made Loki black to make his "otherness" more obvious, that could have been interesting on many levels so it would be a worthwhile change to explore.
So what does changing Thor into a woman bring to the table?
For now, I can't think of anything interesting that comes up as a result of Thor being a woman. So to me this was a stupid change.
Why would some random person, alien, frog (based on other comments), etc who wields Mjolnir suddenly be called Thor? That's just... dumb. It's insulting to the reader not only because of the rewriting of the character's mythological basis, but because it's just incredibly stupid and doesn't match the common situation where when you pick up an object that belongs to someone else and you don't become that person.
Basing a character on Thor and having him eat a shawarma and live in the US in modern times is a different ballgame and I think you know that, so that part of your argument doesn't make sense. You can make up a story while still respecting the cultural basis of your character.
Oh well, this is probably part of the reason that comic book movies are so much better than comics themselves. I doubt they'd pull this kind of stunt in a movie with major characters.
Big ugly chick: Hi I'm Thor! Because I have that hammer thing. Fat guy: Hi I'm Superman! Because I found his tights. Another guy: Hi I'm Wonder Woman! Because I'm wearing Wonder Woman's bracelets and Wonder "Woman" is just a title really. And together we are... the box office bomb!
True, it's silly that cable companies have to pay rebroadcast fees either. The content is available free to the subscriber, it shouldn't matter which middle men are involved. I would, however, distinguish between middle men who edit the broadcast (such as cable companies inserting their own commercials into a show, or even minor things like adding an overlay) versus those who simply retransmit it (even including things like transcoding or changing mediums).
That's a good point but you're not considering that what people do within a society may be different than what they do pre-society. When we were all living in a jungle, perhaps the selfish need for communal protection outweighed other selfish drives. When society is established, one of the benefits is more privacy (property ownership, no trespassing, etc... the legal system keeping others away from you with little effort on your part) which lets you indulge your darker drives.
My point is that societies can change over time and what started as a good society could become a colonial, slave-holding, child-murdering (when the children are "other") society at some point, while still being large and advanced relative to others.
Aereo lost at the Supreme Court, there's nowhere else to appeal. They could change their business model/technology slightly, re-open, and wait to get sued again though.
If Aereo set up the same antenna, the same DVR, the same transcoding hardware, but they came out to your house and did it on your property, then I would think it's pretty clearly legal. Even if they charged you for it. Because of that, I don't think it's the money that makes it legally problematic. It's just an idiotic opinion by the Supreme Court. They happen from time to time. Their insistence that this only applies to Aereo and not the underlying technology implies that they understand the technology is fine, they just don't like Aereo for doing it for some reason.
I don't think that makes it meaningless, but you have to be careful in applying it to yourself versus judging others. If "me" is relative then it allows you to apply the standard to others and say whether they are a good person even if they don't benefit (or harm) you. You can say the people behind the holocaust were bad, because they did not care about their close neighbors, friends, relatives, etc.
While I agree with GP on that respect, I disagree that large societies are evidence that people are good. Even in a large society, most people don't interact directly with the majority of that society. Your neighbor could be one of those people who kidnaps children and keeps them in a dungeon for 12 years (amazing how many stories like that have come out in the last few years) and you wouldn't know. Thought experiment: what if everybody in your neighborhood except you did that? Everybody in your city? It would appear the same as now, but pretty obviously it's not a "good" society.
Fencing means you receive stolen property for resale. Generally you buy it from a criminal and sell it to the public and profit off the low price you paid to the criminal.
I don't think it really applies to child porn. It's possible that some child porn is fenced, but from stories I've read over the years most child porn is used to gain access to a child porn ring where it's traded with other child porn producers. Some of it leaks out, but not through selling... it's just posted on some forum or usenet or whatever. Your average child porn consumer is not paying for it certainly, and has no plans to resell it.
How is their business model obsolete? Producing desirable content and charging for it? The thing that's obsolete is providing free OTA transmission of this content, because the content costs more to produce than the networks recoup from advertising alone.
[...]
If Aereo becomes legal, a whole shitload of people (or, rather, their cable/telco/satellite provider) will do it and that business model (free OTA transmission) will indeed become obsolete very, very quickly.
It's obsolete in that the revenue stream the networks are depending on from cable is a result of people finding it inconvenient to access the content with their own antenna, and as a result of Aereo that's changing.
If you rent this stuff from someone else, it's tantamount to a cable company and thus that company is required to pay the licensing fee.
That's the key point, and it's where I disagree. (The retransmission stuff was a red herring, because retransmission is obviously okay to do in and of itself.)
A cable company exercises selection and control over the content they retransmit. For example, I know that my local Time Warner Cable antenna that picks up Fox, ABC, etc can also pick up MeTV and ION TV, because MY antenna picks up those channels and my antenna sucks.
But guess what, they don't offer MeTV and ION TV in their "local broadcast stations" package. And that's a huge difference between them an Aereo. Aereo offers dumb access to an antenna and whatever it receives. It's antenna rental. The cable company takes stewardship of the service and customizes it based on their own product offering. Perhaps they have a cable channel that shows old TV shows, so they don't want to offer MeTV on the cheap package. And that's their right... AS A CABLE COMPANY. Because they are in charge of the content.
Aereo is not.
This was also noted in the dissent, though without a specific example.
(from your other comment):
with the equipment rental and delivery system over the internet
And again, to me that means the court doesn't understand the technology. A point to point connection over the internet is still point to point. It's equivalent to a long wire from a single antenna to a single house (in Aereo's case). Perhaps Breyer says "Oh, a big network of cables, it's so similar to a cable company" but that's just wrong.
I'm sorry that this doesn't agree with how Slashdotters like to interpret the letter of the law, but that's precisely what the courts are there to do - consider intent, consider grey areas, draw arbitrary lines.
I agree with you, but courts occasionally make poor decisions and that's what I'm complaining about. I think this is a bad decision, you apparently don't. I can't fathom how Aereo is a cable company, you apparently see it plain as day. That's all... it doesn't mean I don't think courts should be allowed to interpret, if that's what you're implying. That's clearly their job.
Furthermore, when I first started complaining about this decision (on a CNN comment feed, not here) I was open to the idea that there was some deep principle in the decision that would make sense. There sometimes is, even with a decision I initially disagree about, because the Supreme Court judges are very smart and usually do a good job of distilling things down to fairly simple principles. Nobody was able to shed light on what I'm not seeing, they just keep regurgitating lines from the decision. Aereo is a cable company, so it's obvious! Well, except it's not. They took a BIG leap that is not intuitive at all. Nobody can bridge that gap and elaborate on their argument because it's a leap of faith. You either agree that Aereo is a cable company, or not. As Scalia noted in the dissent, it's a really stupid thing to just assert "it looks like a cable company so we'll regulate it like a cable company" without being able to justify WHY it looks like a cable company, because eve
A TV decodes the transmission but doesn't re-encode it for subsequent retransmission
Yes it does.. it takes a sequence of a few bits, does its MPEG4 decoding or whatever, then looks at a particular pixel value like (0, 0, 255) and says "Oh, turn that into an electrical signal that tells this LCD sub-pixel to open fully, and these others to close fully." It then shines a light through the LCD and literally transmits that value to your eye. How is that not re-transmission?
As for the "it's a performance" aspect, the TV itself doesn't consider where it is and who is watching it, i.e. the private home vs. bar example we have been discussing.
That's right, and your antenna also doesn't know who is watching it. And the cable leading from the antenna to the TV doesn't know who is watching it. And if we make that cable 80 miles long, and put the antenna in Aereo's building, it still doesn't know. And Aereo, the landlord, doesn't know. And if we replace the cable with a fiber optic cable going to an internet backbone, it doesn't know, and the routers don't know, and the ISPs involved don't know. I think we can agree that the minutia of how often, and by what device, a broadcast signal is retransmitted, translated to different media, routed around by wires, etc, it doesn't matter. What matters is the end effect.
And if it ultimately ends up being shown to one guy and his family sitting in his living room, then all is well. That's a private performance.
I think something like this is necessary. Maybe it's improvised, but we need it. Someone has to pay for content to be produced, and it's no longer (completely) covered by advertisers alone.
I can understand why the networks feel like this is needed, but honestly the Supreme Court's job isn't to prop up obsolete business models. And there's no evidence that this would have a widespread enough impact to affect the networks... I mean you can already get this exact same content for free by setting up your own antenna. People aren't doing it enough to make a difference. That's why this is so mind boggling... Aereo isn't giving you access to something you can't already get for free (as opposed to someone rebroadcasting a cable TV channel for instance). They're just making it easier for you.
If in the unlikely scenario comes to pass and a bunch of people canceled cable and made do with 95% fewer channels, well, I guess advertising on those channels would rightly become more valuable and more expensive, so the fantasy problem of networks going broke most likely wouldn't happen.
If cable companies implement Aereo-like technology so they could stop paying rebroadcast fees, then networks would have a problem. So let them go off-air and become cable-only like HBO or something. Good for them if they can make more money doing that. Then the airwaves will be freed up for people with fresh ideas and lower overhead. Or maybe not.. maybe we could reallocate the TV spectrum to enable more unlicensed Wifi. That would be an excellent trade in my opinion. Well worth the loss of quality ABC shows like "The Chew" and "General Hospital..."
I don't think Breyer's opinion is what you think it is. Scalito said it explicitly - Breyer made up a new "looks like cable TV" standard and is judging Aereo by that standard. You don't have to like it, but don't misrepresent it.
Perhaps not. I don't think Aereo resembles a cable TV company in business model or technology, unless you think of the Internet as the cable network and the signal as being broadcast to everyone.
How did you acquire the TV show that is hosted on your private storage in Amazon's cloud? The cloud storage piece assumes you acquired that content some other legal way.
Presumably this would work with OTA transmissions, which you legally received with an antenna.
If it's remote DVR for cable TV service and you pay
My logic was a smart-ass reply to a smart-ass comment that qualified "it's illegal" with "everywhere I've been to", which is actually wrong if he's been to America, where it's legal in at least some places.
I find it highly unlikely that any city has a law that says "You can't save a parking spot for someone by putting your own car there and feeding the meter as long as the law allows." (I mean, some meters say 2 hours max no matter how much money you're willing to spend.)
As for the example in this article, the law that this Herrera (the city attorney) is citing says you can't rent or lease a public parking space. Great, good for him... but it's not up to him to decide the law or the interpretation of the law. He'd have to go to trial. Maybe a judge will buy the argument that bidding on knowledge of when a parking spot is going to be vacated is "leasing" that spot... an argument I find to be utterly stupid. But whatever. My point is, applying that law to this app is not proven in court yet, so it's not a great example of this practice being *explicitly* illegal, as opposed to some asshat stretching an existing law to cover a novel practice that he just doesn't like.
If I'm sitting in a parking spot and you come by looking for a spot, then you're out of luck because I already have the spot. I'm certainly preventing you access to my spot, because I'm in that spot. That's different than blocking your access to another spot where I'm not, which would be illegal and immoral.
Practically though, that wouldn't be very profitable for Aereo because the equipment would be too big
If you read the decision, they said remote DVR and cloud storage could be okay, i.e. this decision should not be read to constrain them. So most of the Aereo equipment is fine. I hope Aereo does re-launch with the "antenna ownership" feature, just so this idiot Breyer has to say "Yeah, well, I didn't really mean that.."
Simply displaying a picture on a TV isn't a retransmission, so the TV rental company is off the hook.
If that's not retransmitting, then what is? It's jumping mediums (wire to air), it's transforming the signal (compressed ATSC stream to discrete RGB values to signals to the LCD or whatever).
If you rent a TV and show some content to the general public for a fee, I believe that constitutes a "public performance" or something like that and you would need some sort of license to show it. Bars, for example, subscribe to a different type of cable or satellite service that allows them to do this.
Yeah, Breyer goes into that at length in the decision, and offers that a performance to your family and immediate social circle is not a public performance. A bar would be.
And yet, he doesn't give a satisfying justification about why Aereo is a public performance, despite their concerted effort to keep it private by having dedicated antennas per subscriber, and no sharing of stored data, and no multicast transmissions.
Scalia's dissent says:
The Networks sued Aereo for several forms of copyright infringement, but we are here concerned with a single claim: that Aereo violates the Networks’ “exclusive righ[t]” to “perform” their programs “publicly.” 17 U. S. C. 106(4). That claim fails at the very outset because Aereo does not “perform” at all. The Court manages to reach the opposite conclusion only by disregarding widely accepted rules for service-provider liability and adopting in their place an improvised standard (“looks-like-cable-TV”) that will sow confusion for years to come.
I totally agree with that and wonder how anybody could think like Breyer did unless they just don't understand that a point-to-point TCP/IP connection, even if it's going over a "public" network like the internet, isn't really public. And since Breyer goes through pains to say "Oh but don't worry, remote DVR and cloud storage are still fine" he obviously is talking out his ass, since those would operate in *the exact same way* when it comes to public vs private. Otherwise perhaps you can explain how sending a copy of a TV show from your remote DVR hosted on Amazon's cloud is private, whereas a copy of a TV show from Aereo's cloud is public? It doesn't make sense.
If you own the equipment, you can do this without paying the licensing fee.
So if Aereo changes their model to "You buy the equipment and pay to store it here" (aka a signup fee) then it becomes legal? That seems too easy.
Because that someone is acting as a retransmission agent
I don't know if you're right, but if that's the logic behind this decision it's even worse than I imagined. By your logic, if you rent a TV, then since the TV takes a signal and retransmits it as visible-spectrum light, the rental company is acting as a retransmission agent and you have to pay extra licensing fees. But of course that's ridiculous.. isn't it?
Tech people often like latching on to literal interpretations, loopholes in language, or novel technological work arounds. However judges take into account the 'spirt' of the law
That's ridiculous, that's the opposite of this Aereo case. The "spirit" of what's going on is that Aereo lets you substitute the Internet for a cable from an antenna to your TV. That should be totally legal. Instead, the COURT jumped through hoops to try to paint it as a public performance, when in reality it's no different from a long cable.
These idiot justices see the world "internet" and are like "Oh shit, Napster! Illegal! Alert!" and just assume it's public, it's a broadcast for anybody who knows the URL, it's piracy, etc.
Oh yeah totally nailed it, except for where people are paying, and the product is freely available to them anyway.
You know why? Because they're paying for the convenience of having someone else set up the antenna and internet retransmission, rather than legally doing it themselves with something like the HDHomeRun.
Please, show me just one example of someone who has been sued for retransmission done for personal use. Just one.
Umm. Aereo.
People paid to have a signal retransmitted for their personal use. Not for broadcast, not for a public performance, just so they could personally use a signal that they already have a right to use. Only they substituted the internet for one of the many cables and retransmitting products that are already along the signal path to their eyes in a conventional setup.
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It's probably not up the guy who is responsible. It was one of the leaders, and it went something like this..
You really fucked up. You are going to be punished, maybe put to death. But we cannot let your mistake become fodder for the enemies of our noble struggle so we're going to take care of you quietly.
That's hard to believe. Freeze/thaw cycles, heavy rain, etc are less than 1% of road wear?
The problem is that libertarians always try to make the distinction that they're not anarchists and that they're not like the current government
No that's wrong, libertarians are "like" the current government, just smaller.
1 requires taxes, an organization to collect it, laws on what is taxed, lawmakers to write those laws, courts to enforce those laws, lawyers to argue court cases, law enforcement officers to enforce court decisions, and it's suddenly government all the way down. We're right back to where we were before.
Yes, that's the libertarian platform. The difference is in how large the government is and what its responsibilities are, not fundamental changes like eliminating lawmakers... honestly that's a ridiculous notion.
There are two types of libertarians. Those who think that government should be tiny, with everyone being some glorious self-sufficient pioneer in the new world. Those are the ones who should be hanging out in Somalia and Sudan, but don't, because those places a shit holes of failed states.
You hear that argument so much, and it's just so silly. It shows such ignorance of Somalia and Sudan, as well as ignorance of libertarianism.
Libertarians demand strong property rights and protection of those rights. They demand a small government that has limited rights and responsibilities.
Somalia and Sudan both have central governments with overreaching power in the areas they control based on Islamic law that any libertarian would find abhorrent. Furthermore, there are a number of competing governments disputing territory within each country, also seeking to impose Islamic law (but, you know, the "true" Islamic law).
Now it's a great talking point to say "overlapping disputed territories = no real government = libertarian paradise" but it's completely wrong, and you know it, because you yourself pointed out above that as soon as you get a group with the self-appointed moral right to apply violence, collect taxes, issue laws, enforce laws, etc... you have a government. So saying there's no government or "a" (there's more than one) "weak" (each one is very strong and overreaching) government in Sudan and Somalia is simply incorrect.
Correct.
It sounds like you're talking more about anarchists than libertarians. What makes you think libertarians are against having a national standing army for defense, which would include the "warlords" you're speculating about?
What makes you think libertarians don't want clean water? That's just ignorant.
Here's one example of a libertarian response: http://www.ruwart.com/environ2...
Basically it involves having private property rights to water, and suing people who damage your property.
There is a difference between accepting the idea that others might disagree with you and acting to support those you disagree with to the detriment of your own principles and interests.
I guess it's a foreign concept to you that some people hold principles higher than self-interest. As an example, some people would rather not accept food stamps, even if they qualify, because they believe it's wrong or that the qualification level is too easy (they feel they don't really need it, even though they qualify).
Or to take a personal example, I don't support the individual mandate in Obamacare even though it doesn't affect me, and in theory helps me by expanding the pool of risk for health insurance. Why? Because I'm an idiot? Because I don't realize that it benefits me in some ways? No, because I value the principles of freedom higher than the small benefit of imposing this law on unwilling people.
So it's ok for conservatives to not be open to liberal ideas but it's not ok for liberals to be cool with conservative ideas? Nice double standard you have there.
That's not a double standard, that's holding each group accountable to their own espoused beliefs.
What you're unable (or unwilling) to see is that having a goal of "diversity and inclusion" is difficult for precisely the reasons you're bringing up and may end up being self-defeating. What you really want is "diversity and inclusion that I like and approve of" which is what most people do anyway.
I think this here sums up libertarianism nicely, as well as how anyone who isn't a true believer can expect to be treated should they ever win. Most might not be so blunt about it, but it's the idea behind all the sweet words about liberty.
[...]
And it's interesting to note that this is pretty much exactly what Nazis themselves, or hard-line communists, or really any totalitarians spouted.
You're doing the exact same thing.
Appropriating mythological characters is fine and dandy, but making fundamental changes to them that don't serve a greater purpose to the audience is not.
To take a non-mythological example, I've enjoyed the change from "John Watson" to "Joan Watson" in Elementary (the John Watson associated with Sherlock Holmes, in case you aren't familiar with it). Why? Because in the original Sherlock stories there has always been a kind of weird relationship between Sherlock and John. Changing John to a female character presents those relationships in a different light, just as it would if the characters were gay. So that's interesting.
But if they took John Watson and said, okay, not only is he now a woman, but he's a scuba instructor instead of a doctor, she's never been to war, and she's actually smarter than Sherlock, and oh she's not interested in solving crimes or documenting or anything, it's now become a cooking show... well you can see how fundamental identity changes *can at least hypothetically* change the character so much that it's worthless crap (unless the cooking show is actually good, and then it should be thought of as a new thing with new characters).
To take another example, in the Thor movie, making Heimdall black was stupid. That added nothing.. though since he was a minor character it wasn't a big deal. Hypothetically, if they had made Loki black to make his "otherness" more obvious, that could have been interesting on many levels so it would be a worthwhile change to explore.
So what does changing Thor into a woman bring to the table?
For now, I can't think of anything interesting that comes up as a result of Thor being a woman. So to me this was a stupid change.
Why would some random person, alien, frog (based on other comments), etc who wields Mjolnir suddenly be called Thor? That's just... dumb. It's insulting to the reader not only because of the rewriting of the character's mythological basis, but because it's just incredibly stupid and doesn't match the common situation where when you pick up an object that belongs to someone else and you don't become that person.
Basing a character on Thor and having him eat a shawarma and live in the US in modern times is a different ballgame and I think you know that, so that part of your argument doesn't make sense. You can make up a story while still respecting the cultural basis of your character.
Oh well, this is probably part of the reason that comic book movies are so much better than comics themselves. I doubt they'd pull this kind of stunt in a movie with major characters.
Big ugly chick: Hi I'm Thor! Because I have that hammer thing.
Fat guy: Hi I'm Superman! Because I found his tights.
Another guy: Hi I'm Wonder Woman! Because I'm wearing Wonder Woman's bracelets and Wonder "Woman" is just a title really.
And together we are... the box office bomb!
Could make a good parody I guess.
True, it's silly that cable companies have to pay rebroadcast fees either. The content is available free to the subscriber, it shouldn't matter which middle men are involved. I would, however, distinguish between middle men who edit the broadcast (such as cable companies inserting their own commercials into a show, or even minor things like adding an overlay) versus those who simply retransmit it (even including things like transcoding or changing mediums).
That's a good point but you're not considering that what people do within a society may be different than what they do pre-society. When we were all living in a jungle, perhaps the selfish need for communal protection outweighed other selfish drives. When society is established, one of the benefits is more privacy (property ownership, no trespassing, etc... the legal system keeping others away from you with little effort on your part) which lets you indulge your darker drives.
My point is that societies can change over time and what started as a good society could become a colonial, slave-holding, child-murdering (when the children are "other") society at some point, while still being large and advanced relative to others.
Aereo lost at the Supreme Court, there's nowhere else to appeal. They could change their business model/technology slightly, re-open, and wait to get sued again though.
If Aereo set up the same antenna, the same DVR, the same transcoding hardware, but they came out to your house and did it on your property, then I would think it's pretty clearly legal. Even if they charged you for it. Because of that, I don't think it's the money that makes it legally problematic. It's just an idiotic opinion by the Supreme Court. They happen from time to time. Their insistence that this only applies to Aereo and not the underlying technology implies that they understand the technology is fine, they just don't like Aereo for doing it for some reason.
I don't think that makes it meaningless, but you have to be careful in applying it to yourself versus judging others. If "me" is relative then it allows you to apply the standard to others and say whether they are a good person even if they don't benefit (or harm) you. You can say the people behind the holocaust were bad, because they did not care about their close neighbors, friends, relatives, etc.
While I agree with GP on that respect, I disagree that large societies are evidence that people are good. Even in a large society, most people don't interact directly with the majority of that society. Your neighbor could be one of those people who kidnaps children and keeps them in a dungeon for 12 years (amazing how many stories like that have come out in the last few years) and you wouldn't know. Thought experiment: what if everybody in your neighborhood except you did that? Everybody in your city? It would appear the same as now, but pretty obviously it's not a "good" society.
Fencing means you receive stolen property for resale. Generally you buy it from a criminal and sell it to the public and profit off the low price you paid to the criminal.
I don't think it really applies to child porn. It's possible that some child porn is fenced, but from stories I've read over the years most child porn is used to gain access to a child porn ring where it's traded with other child porn producers. Some of it leaks out, but not through selling... it's just posted on some forum or usenet or whatever. Your average child porn consumer is not paying for it certainly, and has no plans to resell it.
How is their business model obsolete? Producing desirable content and charging for it? The thing that's obsolete is providing free OTA transmission of this content, because the content costs more to produce than the networks recoup from advertising alone.
[...]
If Aereo becomes legal, a whole shitload of people (or, rather, their cable/telco/satellite provider) will do it and that business model (free OTA transmission) will indeed become obsolete very, very quickly.
It's obsolete in that the revenue stream the networks are depending on from cable is a result of people finding it inconvenient to access the content with their own antenna, and as a result of Aereo that's changing.
If you rent this stuff from someone else, it's tantamount to a cable company and thus that company is required to pay the licensing fee.
That's the key point, and it's where I disagree. (The retransmission stuff was a red herring, because retransmission is obviously okay to do in and of itself.)
A cable company exercises selection and control over the content they retransmit. For example, I know that my local Time Warner Cable antenna that picks up Fox, ABC, etc can also pick up MeTV and ION TV, because MY antenna picks up those channels and my antenna sucks.
But guess what, they don't offer MeTV and ION TV in their "local broadcast stations" package. And that's a huge difference between them an Aereo. Aereo offers dumb access to an antenna and whatever it receives. It's antenna rental. The cable company takes stewardship of the service and customizes it based on their own product offering. Perhaps they have a cable channel that shows old TV shows, so they don't want to offer MeTV on the cheap package. And that's their right... AS A CABLE COMPANY. Because they are in charge of the content.
Aereo is not.
This was also noted in the dissent, though without a specific example.
(from your other comment):
with the equipment rental and delivery system over the internet
And again, to me that means the court doesn't understand the technology. A point to point connection over the internet is still point to point. It's equivalent to a long wire from a single antenna to a single house (in Aereo's case). Perhaps Breyer says "Oh, a big network of cables, it's so similar to a cable company" but that's just wrong.
I'm sorry that this doesn't agree with how Slashdotters like to interpret the letter of the law, but that's precisely what the courts are there to do - consider intent, consider grey areas, draw arbitrary lines.
I agree with you, but courts occasionally make poor decisions and that's what I'm complaining about. I think this is a bad decision, you apparently don't. I can't fathom how Aereo is a cable company, you apparently see it plain as day. That's all... it doesn't mean I don't think courts should be allowed to interpret, if that's what you're implying. That's clearly their job.
Furthermore, when I first started complaining about this decision (on a CNN comment feed, not here) I was open to the idea that there was some deep principle in the decision that would make sense. There sometimes is, even with a decision I initially disagree about, because the Supreme Court judges are very smart and usually do a good job of distilling things down to fairly simple principles. Nobody was able to shed light on what I'm not seeing, they just keep regurgitating lines from the decision. Aereo is a cable company, so it's obvious! Well, except it's not. They took a BIG leap that is not intuitive at all. Nobody can bridge that gap and elaborate on their argument because it's a leap of faith. You either agree that Aereo is a cable company, or not. As Scalia noted in the dissent, it's a really stupid thing to just assert "it looks like a cable company so we'll regulate it like a cable company" without being able to justify WHY it looks like a cable company, because eve
A TV decodes the transmission but doesn't re-encode it for subsequent retransmission
Yes it does.. it takes a sequence of a few bits, does its MPEG4 decoding or whatever, then looks at a particular pixel value like (0, 0, 255) and says "Oh, turn that into an electrical signal that tells this LCD sub-pixel to open fully, and these others to close fully." It then shines a light through the LCD and literally transmits that value to your eye. How is that not re-transmission?
As for the "it's a performance" aspect, the TV itself doesn't consider where it is and who is watching it, i.e. the private home vs. bar example we have been discussing.
That's right, and your antenna also doesn't know who is watching it. And the cable leading from the antenna to the TV doesn't know who is watching it. And if we make that cable 80 miles long, and put the antenna in Aereo's building, it still doesn't know. And Aereo, the landlord, doesn't know. And if we replace the cable with a fiber optic cable going to an internet backbone, it doesn't know, and the routers don't know, and the ISPs involved don't know. I think we can agree that the minutia of how often, and by what device, a broadcast signal is retransmitted, translated to different media, routed around by wires, etc, it doesn't matter. What matters is the end effect.
And if it ultimately ends up being shown to one guy and his family sitting in his living room, then all is well. That's a private performance.
I think something like this is necessary. Maybe it's improvised, but we need it. Someone has to pay for content to be produced, and it's no longer (completely) covered by advertisers alone.
I can understand why the networks feel like this is needed, but honestly the Supreme Court's job isn't to prop up obsolete business models. And there's no evidence that this would have a widespread enough impact to affect the networks... I mean you can already get this exact same content for free by setting up your own antenna. People aren't doing it enough to make a difference. That's why this is so mind boggling... Aereo isn't giving you access to something you can't already get for free (as opposed to someone rebroadcasting a cable TV channel for instance). They're just making it easier for you.
If in the unlikely scenario comes to pass and a bunch of people canceled cable and made do with 95% fewer channels, well, I guess advertising on those channels would rightly become more valuable and more expensive, so the fantasy problem of networks going broke most likely wouldn't happen.
If cable companies implement Aereo-like technology so they could stop paying rebroadcast fees, then networks would have a problem. So let them go off-air and become cable-only like HBO or something. Good for them if they can make more money doing that. Then the airwaves will be freed up for people with fresh ideas and lower overhead. Or maybe not.. maybe we could reallocate the TV spectrum to enable more unlicensed Wifi. That would be an excellent trade in my opinion. Well worth the loss of quality ABC shows like "The Chew" and "General Hospital..."
I don't think Breyer's opinion is what you think it is. Scalito said it explicitly - Breyer made up a new "looks like cable TV" standard and is judging Aereo by that standard. You don't have to like it, but don't misrepresent it.
Perhaps not. I don't think Aereo resembles a cable TV company in business model or technology, unless you think of the Internet as the cable network and the signal as being broadcast to everyone.
How did you acquire the TV show that is hosted on your private storage in Amazon's cloud? The cloud storage piece assumes you acquired that content some other legal way.
Presumably this would work with OTA transmissions, which you legally received with an antenna.
If it's remote DVR for cable TV service and you pay
My logic was a smart-ass reply to a smart-ass comment that qualified "it's illegal" with "everywhere I've been to", which is actually wrong if he's been to America, where it's legal in at least some places.
I find it highly unlikely that any city has a law that says "You can't save a parking spot for someone by putting your own car there and feeding the meter as long as the law allows." (I mean, some meters say 2 hours max no matter how much money you're willing to spend.)
As for the example in this article, the law that this Herrera (the city attorney) is citing says you can't rent or lease a public parking space. Great, good for him... but it's not up to him to decide the law or the interpretation of the law. He'd have to go to trial. Maybe a judge will buy the argument that bidding on knowledge of when a parking spot is going to be vacated is "leasing" that spot... an argument I find to be utterly stupid. But whatever. My point is, applying that law to this app is not proven in court yet, so it's not a great example of this practice being *explicitly* illegal, as opposed to some asshat stretching an existing law to cover a novel practice that he just doesn't like.
If I'm sitting in a parking spot and you come by looking for a spot, then you're out of luck because I already have the spot. I'm certainly preventing you access to my spot, because I'm in that spot. That's different than blocking your access to another spot where I'm not, which would be illegal and immoral.
Practically though, that wouldn't be very profitable for Aereo because the equipment would be too big
If you read the decision, they said remote DVR and cloud storage could be okay, i.e. this decision should not be read to constrain them. So most of the Aereo equipment is fine. I hope Aereo does re-launch with the "antenna ownership" feature, just so this idiot Breyer has to say "Yeah, well, I didn't really mean that.."
Simply displaying a picture on a TV isn't a retransmission, so the TV rental company is off the hook.
If that's not retransmitting, then what is? It's jumping mediums (wire to air), it's transforming the signal (compressed ATSC stream to discrete RGB values to signals to the LCD or whatever).
If you rent a TV and show some content to the general public for a fee, I believe that constitutes a "public performance" or something like that and you would need some sort of license to show it. Bars, for example, subscribe to a different type of cable or satellite service that allows them to do this.
Yeah, Breyer goes into that at length in the decision, and offers that a performance to your family and immediate social circle is not a public performance. A bar would be.
And yet, he doesn't give a satisfying justification about why Aereo is a public performance, despite their concerted effort to keep it private by having dedicated antennas per subscriber, and no sharing of stored data, and no multicast transmissions.
Scalia's dissent says:
The Networks sued Aereo for several forms of copyright
infringement, but we are here concerned with a single
claim: that Aereo violates the Networks’ “exclusive righ[t]”
to “perform” their programs “publicly.” 17 U. S. C.
106(4). That claim fails at the very outset because Aereo
does not “perform” at all. The Court manages to reach the
opposite conclusion only by disregarding widely accepted
rules for service-provider liability and adopting in their
place an improvised standard (“looks-like-cable-TV”) that
will sow confusion for years to come.
I totally agree with that and wonder how anybody could think like Breyer did unless they just don't understand that a point-to-point TCP/IP connection, even if it's going over a "public" network like the internet, isn't really public. And since Breyer goes through pains to say "Oh but don't worry, remote DVR and cloud storage are still fine" he obviously is talking out his ass, since those would operate in *the exact same way* when it comes to public vs private. Otherwise perhaps you can explain how sending a copy of a TV show from your remote DVR hosted on Amazon's cloud is private, whereas a copy of a TV show from Aereo's cloud is public? It doesn't make sense.
If you own the equipment, you can do this without paying the licensing fee.
So if Aereo changes their model to "You buy the equipment and pay to store it here" (aka a signup fee) then it becomes legal? That seems too easy.
Because that someone is acting as a retransmission agent
I don't know if you're right, but if that's the logic behind this decision it's even worse than I imagined. By your logic, if you rent a TV, then since the TV takes a signal and retransmits it as visible-spectrum light, the rental company is acting as a retransmission agent and you have to pay extra licensing fees. But of course that's ridiculous.. isn't it?
Tech people often like latching on to literal interpretations, loopholes in language, or novel technological work arounds. However judges take into account the 'spirt' of the law
That's ridiculous, that's the opposite of this Aereo case. The "spirit" of what's going on is that Aereo lets you substitute the Internet for a cable from an antenna to your TV. That should be totally legal. Instead, the COURT jumped through hoops to try to paint it as a public performance, when in reality it's no different from a long cable.
These idiot justices see the world "internet" and are like "Oh shit, Napster! Illegal! Alert!" and just assume it's public, it's a broadcast for anybody who knows the URL, it's piracy, etc.
Oh yeah totally nailed it, except for where people are paying, and the product is freely available to them anyway.
You know why? Because they're paying for the convenience of having someone else set up the antenna and internet retransmission, rather than legally doing it themselves with something like the HDHomeRun.
Please, show me just one example of someone who has been sued for retransmission done for personal use. Just one.
Umm. Aereo.
People paid to have a signal retransmitted for their personal use. Not for broadcast, not for a public performance, just so they could personally use a signal that they already have a right to use. Only they substituted the internet for one of the many cables and retransmitting products that are already along the signal path to their eyes in a conventional setup.