Supreme Court Rules Against Aereo Streaming Service 484
New submitter Last_Available_Usern (756093) writes that the Aereo saga is likely over. "The U.S. Supreme Court today dealt a potentially fatal blow to Aereo, an Internet service that allows customers to watch broadcast TV programs on mobile devices by renting a small DVR and antennas (in supported cities) to record and then retransmit local programming on-demand over the internet."
Ruling (PDF). Aereo was found to be publicly transmitting, according to SCOTUSBlog "The essence of the Aereo ruling is that Aereo is equivalent to a cable company, not merely an equipment provider."
Re:This now requires (Score:5, Informative)
No, nothing about this ruling was based on the constitution. It was ruling whether or not Aereo fell under the provisions of the Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act of 1992, specifically the provisions requiring cable TV system operators to pay broadcasters to carry those channels.
Fixing this would simply require an amendment to that act.
Re:Wrong decision (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, but your cable company has a license from the content providers to transmit those channels to you. My understanding is that Aereo did not.
Re:One disturbing bit: (Score:5, Informative)
D - The court actually does mean for the ruling to be narrow; does not see this case as setting a strong precedent and will grant certiorari for what might otherwise be seen as similar media delivery technology cases
Re: Remind my why they are being sued (Score:5, Informative)
Most people think broadcasters still operate under an ad revenue model. This not true today. Cable retransmission deals is where the real money is. If broadcasters were limited to the old ad revenue model, the industry would implode.
Personally I think we should have the UK model with a TV license. The programming is far superior and enriching to the minds of the citizenry.
Re:Wrong decision (Score:5, Informative)
"Unlike video-on-demand services, Aereo does not provide a prearranged assortment of movies and television shows. Rather, it assigns each subscriber an antenna that — like a library card — can be used to obtain whatever broadcasts are freely available. Some of those broadcasts are copyrighted; others are in the public domain. The key point is that subscribers call all the shots: Aereo’s automated system does not relay any program, copyrighted or not, until a subscriber selects the program and tells Aereo to relay it."
Re:One disturbing bit: (Score:5, Informative)
The supreme court is different. They're supposed to look at issues and decide if this is how our country was supposed to work. If certain actions criminalize a religion without just cause (i.e. the criminalized set of acts is representative of a harmless behavior, or a set of non-criminal acts that only happen under this religion in this way), the Supreme Court may interpret not only that religion is a shield (i.e. Peyote for shaman religions), but also that the law has no other reasonable purpose and is thus wholly invalid so it can fuck off.
That doesn't mean they always do a good job of it; I only intend that the supreme court is tasked with interpreting the standing of the law itself as well as the standing of the law against a person.
Re:This now requires (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, it was more based on the amendments the Congress made to the Copyright Act in 1976, to overturn two previous Supreme Court decisions (Fortnightly and Teleprompter). The Court had ruled that CATV (Community Antenna Television, which is exactly what it sounds like, put up one big antenna, and run coax from there to people's houses; it was used to get signal to areas that couldn't get good broadcast quality) was outside the scope of the Copyright Act, and Congress changed the law to clarify that it was.
In Aereo, the Court ruled that Aereo was largely similar to those CATV operators - it took the broadcast signal off the air and distributed it to multiple viewers, essentially simultaneous.y.
Re:Wrong decision (Score:5, Informative)
Here's the actual decision text: http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/13pdf/13-461_l537.pdf [supremecourt.gov]
It's "publicly transmitting" inasmuch as the people it is transmitted to are "unrelated and unknown to each other", to quote the actual decision. Netflix very likely would be considered to be publicly transmitting as well, but because they've worked out licenses with the content owners, they're not running into any of these problems.
Mind you, I'm not suggesting by any means that I agree with the decision. I'm merely providing it.
Disclaimer: IANAL.
Re:This now requires (Score:5, Informative)
In Aereo, the Court ruled that Aereo was largely similar to those CATV operators - it took the broadcast signal off the air and distributed it to multiple viewers, essentially simultaneous.y.
And that receiving and carrying it separately for each customer (using a separte tiny antenna and cheap-in-quantity integrated circuit digital radio receiver) was a transparent workaround that attempted to use an interpretation of the letter of the law to violate its intent).
The key distinction in the ruling (Score:5, Informative)
This case boiled down to one major issue: Whether the allegedly infringing conduct in this case was engaged in by either Aereo, or by its users. Don't get hung up on the public performance v. private performance issue; it was really certain that if Aereo was liable, that the performance was public; if it were the users, it would be private.
J. Scalia's dissent does a good job of explaining the issue:
Re:One disturbing bit: (Score:5, Informative)
Re:One disturbing bit: (Score:5, Informative)
You don't remember correctly. Breyer voted against Citizens United.