Feds Now Oppose Aereo, Rejecting Cloud Apocalypse Argument 140
v3rgEz writes "TV streaming service Aereo expected broadcasters would put up a fight. The startup may not have seen the Justice Department as a threat, however. The Justice Department has now weighed in, saying in a filing that it's siding with major broadcasters who accuse Aereo of stealing TV content. In its filing, the Justice Department noted it doesn't believe a win for broadcasters would dismantle the precedent that created the cloud computing industry, as Aereo has previously claimed. The case is expected to go before the Supreme Court in late April."
In other news.. (Score:5, Insightful)
The same Justice Department officials will soon leave to work for the various broadcast networks.
Thank goodness for Obama (Score:4, Insightful)
Thank goodness we've got the Obama administration to bring some common sense back to government and stand up for the little guy.
Re:In other news.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Many of them are already industry lawyers to begin with.
http://www.wired.com/threatlev... [wired.com]
Re:... and nothing of value was lost [nt] (Score:2, Insightful)
As I have watched about 1 hour of TV over the past 10 years, I'm non-plussed. I have always felt the broadcasters were allowed to run roughshod over the public, with plenty of help from the federal government. It's a new century, can we start looking beyond 20th century business models, yet?
Re:Those with the money (Score:5, Insightful)
80 year old WHAT?
what could any 80 year old law possibly have to do with modern nuances of virtual, cloud, broadcast (in modern times), store-and-forward, proxy, repeat, bridge and route?
those didn't exist at all (in any real sense) 80 yrs ago.
besides, you can't have it both ways: copyright was supposed to expire in a 'normal' period of time, but we kept changing things as things were about to expire, so that public property would not be public YET. if the government won't respect its own laws, why should we?
anyway, copyright is not the same thing it once was, and broadcasting over the air is a trade: you get to use airwaves and you get funding from (lots of places). you have been funded and you chose to transmit data in the clear. what happens after that is NOT your business. it stopped being 'yours' once it hit the public non-encrypted airwaves.
Re:Those with the money (Score:5, Insightful)
Aereo is a public performance of copyrighted material. You cannot do that. You will get slapped.
A public performance?
You have every right to receive, for free, at no additional cost, any broadcast TV signal your antenna can bring in, and to record it on a DVR, and to have the DVR send it to the TV via Ethernet if you want to.
This is just subcontracting the antenna, DVR, and Ethernet part out to someone else.
Re:In my experience.... (Score:4, Insightful)
.... many networks will stream a good portion of the shows that they air, usually only a day or so after initial broadcast... and typically leave them available for about a week. There's commercials, of course, but it's really not that bad a way to watch television. I'm not sure what need Aero was really trying to fill.
Probably the needs of those for whom those qualifiers are problematic.
Re:... and nothing of value was lost [nt] (Score:5, Insightful)
Area Man Constantly Mentioning He Doesn't Own a TV. [theonion.com]
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Those with the money (Score:5, Insightful)
I disagree.
what was a public broadcast back then is not even close to what is a 'broadcast' now.
and, add to this the notion of 'store and replay later'. you could not DO that back then unless you were a recording studio. today, everyone is a 'recording studio' in terms of being able to save digital content and play it back later.
the # of people you could reach before was limited. now, the rules are all different and you don't have to have them all tuned in at the same freq, in the same area of the world at the same time.
add to this the fact that 'copyright' does not mean the same thing world wide and so when you send out content to the internet, not everyone is bound by US rules!
the world in tech is so different, its not sensible to apply what we considered 'content distribution' to today's world. too much is not applicable and some things we have today were not even conceived of back then.
laws should never be static. they need to be updated to fit the age. copyright was never updated in peoples' favor, only in corporations' favor. that, in itself, means that it was not maintained in a fair and just manner.
Re:Those with the money (Score:5, Insightful)
Although Aereo might simply be a remote antenna you pay another party to provide, keep in mind that cable companies are required to pay retransmission fees. How is Aereo's service different than cable? After all, if companies that provide traditional Community Antenna TeleVision service must pay, why shouldn't Aereo?
Whenever you broadcast, each person picking up the signal is effectively receiving a copy of the content. The purpose of retransmission fees is to cover those copies. In contrast, Aereo is not making new copies; it's merely working with the copies that have already been produced and to which each of its users is already entitled. That's why it's so important that they have a 1:1 ratio between antennas, storage of content, and user accounts: it proves that each of those users is legally entitled to the copy that Aereo is receiving, storing, and unicasting to them. Were they doing something like having one antenna and allowing anyone to tune into it over the 'net, this would be an entirely different matter.