Judge Shuts Down Aereo In Utah, Colorado → Re: They had it coming

What Aereo is doing is what we are all allowed to do. Put up an antenna and use the signal. There is no law stating that the antenna has to be a certain distance from your tv. I know some buildings actually share 1 antenna with all users. The bottom line is that we are free to capture the signal from the airwaves and use it without paying. The networks should be happy people are watching and they can charge a lot for commercials. \

You are free to do it yourself for yourself, but Aereo is doing it for someone else and charging a subscription fee for the service. That is where things start to get fuzzy.

What no one can do legally is put up an antenna and then turn around and sell the broadcaster's signal to others, which is what Aereo is doing.

Aereo argues they are selling the antenna, digitizing, compression, and DVR service - not the underlying signal

The broadcasters argue it's their signal Aereo is capturing, digitizing, compressing, distributing, and selling. They would argue it should be entirely within their discretion to deny the service or charge a fee to Aereo.

The two are arguably inseparable. It'll be interesting to see how the Supreme Court rules on this.

They are not selling the signal.

They are leasing the hardware that allows you to receive the signal (antenna) along with DVR service to time shift it.

This would be no different then if I rented an antenna that someone put on my roof and connected it to a DVR that I also rent from them because I didn't want to pay it all up front. The only issue is the length of the cable from the antenna to the DVR and from the DVR to my TV.

+1. All that technical excuse about renting an antenna is BS.

If Aereo actually was a shared antenna, and they didn't modify, store, and retransmit the streams, it would be legal. In fact this is how cable TV started long ago, as "CATV" or Community Access TV. But, Aereo does not do that.

"we are free to capture the signal from the airwaves and use it without paying" -- not exactly. You can use it for personal use: view it, place shift or time shift it via SlingBox or recorder. But the work is still copyrighted, you don't own it.

You can't record it and then start a business selling those recordings (either as physical media or streaming over the net). That is a "public performance of a copyrighted work" and you will be sued and put out of business, most likely. You can't even post them to a sharing site for free, although you're much harder to catch in that case.

This is exactly where the court dispute lies. Has Aereo done enough to qualify their offering as a private performance?

"the networks should be happy they can charge a lot for commercials"... well, clearly they are not happy since they're suing Aereo. Their business model is ad revenue PLUS retrans fees, they don't want to miss half of that model.

The difference is, renting an antenna and a DVR and a long cable IS perfectly OK. It's yours and yours alone. If this is actually what Aereo was doing, they'd be fine. But it's not. The devil is in the details.

They have a shared antenna farm, which they dynamically allocate to users as they request streams. They have a shared datacenter, which recodes and stores the streams on shared hard drives, for later additional processing and streaming over a shared network connection to the Internet.

The differences between the two are:
a) the infrastructure between you and the broadcaster is not owned or rented by you exclusively, it's shared across the subscriber base. They do some fig-leaf type things like only pull one signal from one antenna at a time for one user, but it's a massively shared infrastructure.
b) they record and store the streams, they don't just pass them through.

Aereo is trying to piggyback on two things at once: OTA broadcasts which are free to receive, and the Cablevision cloud DVR case that allowed a fees-paying service to remotely record and playback streams for its customers. It's not at all cut and dried that these two things, while separately legal, are still legal when conjoined.

The judge in this case rightly points out this huge distinction between CableVision and Aereo's cases: CableVision already had licensed the streams for its users, while Aereo has not.

i'm no expert about the law, but i love what Aereo is doing. They are giving a great option to the folks who no longer want to pay for cable service, but want to see the major networks w/o installing antennas. Keep going Aereo.

Mahalo!

I concur. I have wanted to say, "I concur" since the days of Dr. Kildare and Ben Casey.