I don't think many people had the opportunity to use Aereo. They had a decent presence in New York City, and as the company expanded across the country reporters cited customer numbers in the mid five figures.
As an Aereo user, let me tell you what you missed out on: one of the most amazing products I've ever used.
Aereo "worked." It worked like magic.
First, it lived up to its claim. You could stream live, broadcast television to your phone or computer, and you could AirPlay it to your television. Everything was in HD. It worked incredibly well. So many video products fail to deliver on the user experience, or the video is choppy, or it crashes all the time. Aereo's software had its struggles, but it worked far more often than not. I could have people over and stream the Super Bowl and never worry that Aereo would crap out.
Aereo also worked remarkably well during Hurricane Sandy. I live in Brooklyn, and Aereo's Brooklyn HQ was less than a mile from my apartment, but we streamed Aereo until we went to sleep that night. Considering reports that their antennae sucked a ton of power, that's incredible on a night when power was out all across the city.
I also interviewed with the company in 2013 for a business development role. Everyone that I met was really great. They treated me well during the process while clearly balancing a million things, including their legal concerns. I really, really wanted to work there, but it wasn't a fit for a lot of reasons, their uncertain future being one of them.
When my girlfriend told me that they were filing for bankruptcy, I was sad. This is innovative technology that worked for consumers, squashed by antiquated government regulation and a highly litigious, innovation-resistant, influential media industry.
Progress, halted.
A winning product that could have delighted millions, squashed.
Aereo also worked remarkably well during Hurricane Sandy.
Provided you had internet, yes. Which a lot of people didn't. Over the air broadcasts - which Aereo were retransmitting - don't require any internet connection. In an emergency situation like Sandy a bunny-ears antenna is infinitely more useful than a bandwidth-chewing internet streaming service.
Have you ever tried using one? Given that you live less than a mile from where Aereo is receiving its signal, you might be surprised at the crystal clear, HD quality TV you can get without paying a company $7 a month. Aereo's biggest triumph was making free, over the air broadcasts look like their premium product.
Yeah, that would make some sense back in 2005, maybe. During Sandy in 2012, Aero was infinitely more useful: when power ran out your TV with bunny ears became completely useless. On the other hand, you could still watch Aero on your battery powered HSPA connected smart phone. While I am sure bunny-ears antennas work great in more rural areas, they are completely useless on Manhattan.
Most people have a several-hundred-watt backup generator at home: their car. You can idle most cars for at least 2 hours per gallons of gas. That means with a 20 gallon tank, you have 40 hours of charging time for electronics. If you need to charge for an hour every six hours, for example, you'd have 10 days of phone usage.
I've had uninterrupted internet through many multi-day power outages with just my car and a $20 inverter to recharge my phone and laptop. I always fill up the car before a dangerous storm.
No car? You can buy pocket-sized power banks that recharge a phone to full multiple times for $5 a piece. Keep one per phone around for power outages and enjoy your movies.
P.S. If you have Verizon FiOS, you can keep your wired internet on too. The ONT uses almost no power; with a little hacking you can hook that up to a backup battery or your car too. Unlike cable, which needs powered repeaters on the phone poles every mile or so, your fiber's probably still connected in a power outage so long as the line hasn't physically been broken.
OTA is pretty terrible throughout Brooklyn. Unless you live at the top of a tall building, you're basically out of luck. I have a fairly clear view of the sky from my window, and I "get" 2-3 channels (my TV can identify them as channels, but you can't actually watch anything).
Bought one, it didn't work for me. Couldn't pick up a signal anywhere. Also, if I wanted to record shows I'd have to hook it to a Tivo (or similar device) which has an up-front cost and a monthly fee. Aereo provided the whole package in a low monthly cost.
You don't need a Tivo - just a USB tuner stick and MythTV, or some other open source solution. Granted if the antenna doesn't work then it doesn't work - I had some success buying a powered one.
You don't need Dropbox, just a Linux box and some rsync scripts. $7 is approximately 5 minutes worth of income for a lot of people on here...so if it takes longer than that per month to set up and maintain your solution then it's not a good deal.
What is antiquated about the idea that you don't get to use other peoples' valuable content without paying for it?
Look: the valuable product here is the content. All the technology can do is get in the way. It's great Aereo's technology got in the way less than its competitors, but that still doesn't mean people found the technology itself valuable. The content is what matters. The content is what delights consumers.
Given that reality, I think it's absurd to say that regulations protecting the people who create the content, the product without which the whole downstream ecosystem of streaming services and content consumption devices are utterly irrelevant, it's absurd to say those regulations are antiquated.
Keeping in mind that this content is being broadcast over public spectrum, you're right: the content is the most valuable product.
As a consumer, I want to access that content in an efficient, functional manner. My tax dollars are paying for it. So, I bought an antenna. It couldn't pick up any stations in my apartment, and this is a very common problem in NYC. Even if it picked up stations, I'd have to buy a separate device to record shows so that I can watch them on my schedule.
With Aereo, I was renting an antenna. The company built capital-intensive, power-sucking data warehouses in every city in which it operated and filled them with antennae for every customer. Aereo provided me with a cloud-based antenna, no different than buying one from Best Buy or Amazon.
Only:
(a) the signal was clear and reliable, not fuzzy. My friend has a long coaxial cable connected to his television and he tapes a 12" x 12" antenna to his window. Kind of ridiculous.
(b) they included a cloud-based DVR that allowed me to watch what I want, when I want. They improved the relationship that I had with broadcast content.
Aereo was very clear about the fact that they built a solution that adhered to the law because everyone had an individual antenna. This solution was very expensive, but it worked and though it was described as a Rube Goldberg machine, it made sense.
And here's the ultimate rub for content companies: now I don't watch your content at all. I don't see your ads. I have someone else's cable password, and I watch things sporadically, but I don't discover new shows like you want me to.
No. But our eyeballs watching those paid ads on free broadcast TV are enabling payments + profit for the production of that content. The numbers may vary by broadcaster and program, but the business model is clear, or atleast was.
I come down on the other side. The networks get the airwaves for free. It was a reasonable deal -- free bandwidth in exchange for a public service and an ad supported business model.
If the networks want to give up their bandwidth and let the government auction it off, fine. I just don't like this crap that they get the spectrum for free, and I can't rent an antennae of my choosing.
IMO, either we allow Aereo, or we make the networks pay for the spectrum, or we get rid of over the air and use it for cell data.
I am all for people getting paid for their content, but your argument is like saying libraries should be outlawed.
You're precisely right: it was a deal.[1] The broadcasters get the airwaves for free, and the public gets TV over those airwaves for free. The deal said nothing about allowing people to capture content over those airwaves and broadcast it over the Internet. You can hardly blame companies for not wanting to give up more on their end of a deal than they agreed to give up!
[1] I think it's a waste of valuable spectrum on creaky inefficient technology, mind you, but it's the deal the government made.
I think you Kennedy and Roberts are all on the same page in thinking Aereo quacked like a retransmission company.
The problem is Aereo got greedy and screwed up the marketing. Had their homepage always said, rent a streaming DVR for $10 a month, it wouldn't be a problem. Capturing content and streaming it over the internet is perfectly legal. TiVo does it. Cablevision does it. Slingbox does it.
Aereo should have acted like a hardware rental company until after the supreme court ruling.
"broadcast" is the wrong word here. The whole point of Aereo is that it was unicast, which is hard to rationalize as being different from running a wire.
"I am all for people getting paid for their content, but your argument is like saying libraries should be outlawed."
I suspect if you set up a privately owned library and lent out bestsellers, that's exactly what would happen.
That said, it'd be a real kicker IMO if the government stepped in and started broadcasting everything on the public airwaves for free anywhere in the world over the Internet. If the broadcasters don't like that, tough, go broadcast on cable. Of course, this will never happen because corporatocracy...
> What is antiquated about the idea that you don't get to use other peoples' valuable content without paying for it?
Slingbox allows you to stream broadcast content without problems. Broadcasters are OK with that. So Aereo was basically renting out 1000s of little slingboxes; how's that a problem now?
Also, it's worth noting that there are slingbox colocation services in the world where you can rent a slingbox in a remote datacenter in the TV market you prefer...
Can you replicate the functionality of Aereo that way? If so, why is Aereo's bankruptcy a loss? Could all of Aereo's customers just go rent a Slingbox instead? Legitimately curious here.
No one is claiming Aereo has that right. They're claiming that the person renting the antenna does.
The implication of the case seems to be that renting an antenna does not give you those rights in the same way buying one does, which is bizarre and kind of hard to rationalize.
Except the whole argument was that the 3rd party company wasn't doing it, it was simply providing a location for the customer's rented property to sit, wasn't it?
Because cable companies pay broadcast companies to redistribute broadcast content - it's a major source of income for the broadcast companies. The cable companies said that if Aereo were allowed to get away with what they were doing then they'd do the same thing themselves.
So Aereo was screwed because _cable_ companies decided to overpay? Can you imagine if you bought a car, and then the dealership comes back to you for more money because your neighbor paid much more for the same model?
So a completely unrelated third party has a completely separate deal with content producers that has nothing to do with the legal free OTA broadcasts. Still doesn't add up.
Then tell ABC, CBS, FOX, & PBS to get off the effin airways and become cable-only. Surely there are those who would find uses for the bandwidth that would serve the community
You can protect your content, up until you broadcast it publicly; then people who want to can watch it. If aereo is over the line, but having an antenna on your roof isn't, then it starts to become unclear where the line is.
If the value of Aereo's service was the technology, then couldn't they have stayed in business by paying licensing fees on the content? Ultimately, that's what the legal disagreement was over--the fees, not the technology.
Hardly, there is no such thing as intellectual property.
With property you have exclusive access over a physical item, with intellectual privilege the government is granting you the exclusive control over an idea, visual or audio representation of an idea, or some other non-physical concept.
for example Copyright does not apply to a DVD it applies to the visual idea's and representation of those idea that happened to be stored on a DVD
The government created this artificial privilege and enforces that with threats of violence.
It is in no way akin to property, nor does is have any analogous relationship to property.
> Hardly, there is no such thing as intellectual property.
There absolutely is such a thing as intellectual property.
> With property you have exclusive access over a physical item
With property, you have exclusive rights with regard to something, but the exclusive rights may not be specifically to "access", and it may not be in a "physical item". Intangible personal property (which includes intellectual property, but also lots of other property rights in nonphysical things -- like securities, rights to legal action, etc.) is hardly a new thing.
> The government created this artificial privilege
Property is artificial, man-made, exclusive privilege with regard to something -- all of it is created through government, and all of it is enforced with threats of violence.
> It is in no way akin to property
Even your own description is exactly like every form of property.
Yes, the content is what's valuable. And it's already paid for by the ads, which are part of the content stream. As far as I know, Aereo wasn't interfering with those ads in any way. The providers are getting exactly the same deal that they always have - your eyeballs on their ads in exchange for content.
I don't see how they can legitimately claim that they are entitled to more money because it's all happening over the internet instead of in your living room, especially when they aren't lifting a finger to distribute over the internet themselves.
Copyright law forces cable companies to pay to retransmit content. According to the Supreme Court, Aereo is "substantially similar" to a cable system, so it's bound by the same requirements. Unfortunately for Aereo, it's not actually a cable company, so it can't participate in the compulsory licensing scheme.
I was a big fan. I live behind a hill, so getting the local terrestrial channels OTA is impossible. Aereo made this possible plus some great features like the DVR functionality for $8/month, with the ability to watch in my kitchen (on a laptop/tablet) was great because I live in an old building and running coax to all the rooms isn't really an option. We are a household with minimal live TV requirements. It was nice to watch the Olympics.
Unfortunately, we're back on Cable. Luckily there was a cheap package for 12 months to get us back on. I'll likely be cancelling at the end of the time, though.
I listened to a talk by an Aereo exec at SXSW and he made it clear then that there was no plan B. This was an all or nothing fight.
Unfortunately the Supreme Court squashed them, but they really could have changed the world had the ruling gone the other way. ABC, NBC, CBS, and all the other broadcast networks would have had to change their business model and adapt or slowly die like the Blockbusters of the world.
Despite the fact that it didn't work out, I respect teams like this with ambitious goals that put everything on the line without compromise. Kudos to the team and investors that supported Aereo.
" ABC, NBC, CBS, and all the other broadcast networks would have had to change their business model and adapt or slowly die"
But here's the thing. They still have to do that
TV viewing is at an all-time low. Broadcast TV has a different business model than Cable, but viewings have been going down for both.
Aereo's was too much a bet for too small of a win. "Now you can watch open TV on the internet" Any broadcaster could decide to do this in house and it's done, no Aereo needed.
"TV viewing is at an all-time low. Broadcast TV has a different business model than Cable, but viewings have been going down for both."
Kind of. Viewership numbers for individual networks and shows have been declining, but only because there is much more high-quality programming available to watch on cable. Used to be, networks like TBS, AMC, etc. only showed reruns of shows in syndication. Now they produce a significant amount of their own content, adding to the pool of high-quality shows. These shows draw viewers away from the historically "top" networks because TV entertainment is a fully mature /saturated market and thus zero-sum rules apply.
Also, while viewership numbers may look like they're declining overall, it's really because nobody can agree on the best way to measure viewership that is fragmented across the various title VI video services (live, DVR, on demand). People are undisputedly watching more video content than ever, and the vast majority of it comes from cable or broadcast. But it looks like viewership is declining because advertisers and broadcasters can't agree on a consistent measurement and ad sales methodology across the broadcast windows.
In Germany you can watch a lifestream of all the public and some of the private tv stations on their website in HD, more often than not together with some form of interactive chat. They even have a 2 hour time shift function and offer past broadcasts for on demand viewing, subject to some restrictions (After some lobbying by private tv stations the public stations are forced to delete certain content after a some period). You could have watched both the Olympics and the Worldcup at your own convenience that way, for example.
how is that implemented though?
In italy basically all tv stations have online broadcasts, and the national TV (RAI) has both streaming and a huge online archive.
You could have watched the olympics and FIFA WorldCup in streaming (if you were in the country) but you'd likely have to use youtube, a custom flash player and silverlight :/
In Portugal all the broadcast TV have internet interfaces somewhere, you can point rtmpdump at their servers and watch TV with VLC. It's not a supported thing, just a backdoor to their own flash plugins.
You actually watch 200 TV channels? Also, why would apps be required? If they did this it would probably also work on the web. Take a look at BBC iPlayer/ITV Player/4OD in the UK. On demand and streaming via the web or mobile apps. Works pretty well.
Sure, but for things like tight integration with set-top boxes / consoles / mobile devices, a thick application would be required (unless every device gets magical, stable browsers with good non-desktop UXs), and if each provider creates their own media streams, you'll have enormous fragmentation of experiences and interfaces, as well as software clutter.
I don't want BBC iPlayer, ITV player, 40D, Fox Sports player, HBO player, Showtime player, Paramount player, Miramax player, Comedy Central player, AMC player, NBC player, Sony Pictures player, et al.
It doesn't matter if they are web apps or other apps. They are separate, and because of this, shitty.
Edit: Itunes for music was massively dominant because it has everything. Separate stores for every single music publisher would be ridiculous. The same goes for other media.
I take your point, I just don't think it's as shitty as you I guess. Obviously one, integrated solution would work best. But with music you only have half a dozen companies to deal with and you just have to sell their stuff. With TV you have hundreds of channels, different production companies, several revenue models, and huge variations in rights across the globe. Look at how long Apple has been supposedly working on a TV and even they can't make it work.
One of the things that Ted Turner did was turn WTBS into "The Superstation" by licensing it to cable operators across the country. And the rest is history.
I don't know why any broadcaster doesn't make the same move, becoming the "Internet Superstation".
> I don't know why any broadcaster doesn't make the same move, becoming the "Internet Superstation".
I'd argue Netflix beat them to the punch when it started creating original, acclaimed content. How many < 30 year olds don't regularly watch TV, but pay monthly for Netflix? I'm one.
I'm the same, no cable subscription, but I have both Netflix and Amazon Prime. However, I do miss slumping down after work and seeing some real-time, curated content like Adult Swim or Stewart / Colbert. It would also be nice to catch some morning news while I'm getting ready, or the occasional baseball game. All those things require real TV, not Netflix, and although I'm happy living without them, people like those kinds of content experiences and they are admittedly nice sometimes when vegging out is the purpose, and you don't want to even make a choice about what you watch.
You can get Stewart and Colbert on Hulu for free if you don't mind the ads, and TPB if don't care about IP rights. I'd pay for Adult Swim though, and I'm 32 (I grew up on Adult Swim late nights; still remember their hilarious bumps).
A lot. Its a fairly common topic of conversation with the <30 demo when you move calling comcast/time warner and requesting "Internet without TV or phone".
Most sales people get kinda bent hearing this. Hearing some of the deals they throw at you is hilarious, "We'll throw in channel package XYZ for only an extra $15 a month more then your internet." "Why would I pay more for something I'm not going to use?" "Well you own a TV don't you?" "Yes and its connected to a computer."
> Any broadcaster could decide to do this in house and it's done
Interestingly, in the UK, many broadcasters already do this. I can watch any BBC, ITV, or Channel 4 channel live from their websites, so long as I have a TV license.
Yes, changed the world by making it legal to build a business off someone else's content that you got for free through a legal hack. Tragic it didn't work out.
The Blockbuster analogy is frankly insulting to people who built real technology for video delivery. Blockbuster went bankrupt because technology made their middle-man position obsolete. In contrast, there is nothing obsolete about making content. Even in the face of modern technology that makes content creation cheap, peoples' demand for high-quality studio content is higher than ever.
DISCLAIMER: Former Aereo employee. Views do not reflect those of my former employer. Blah blah blah.
This all goes back to the core of the argument though: Is Aereo a content provider or an equipment company?
Obviously SCOTUS disagreed with several lower courts and determined that we were infringing. But to paint it as a black and white issue strikes me as a gross oversimplification.
Just out of curiosity (I'm legitimately not trying to start an argument), do you think Cablevision* should have been overturned? If not, how do you reconcile the fact that their RS-DVR doesn't publicly perform, but Aereo did?
*I seem to recall seeing you comment on Aereo stuff a bunch in the past and knowing a fair bit about the case, so I assume you're familiar with the Cablevision decision. Apologies if I misremembered or assumed incorrectly.
I'm having trouble understanding the ruling, so maybe those here with more knowledge can help.
As a thought experiment, assume I live in a building that gets spotty OTA reception on my antenna. However, there is an apartment for rent on the top floor, and I decide to rent it for the sole purpose for storing property. If I set up an antenna in that apartment, but do not live in the space, and run a long cable from the top floor to my apartment, am I in violation of the law? I do not own the apartment that the antenna resides in, and I do not physically live there.
If this is not illegal, does it become illegal when I cut the cord between the apartments and instead encode the signal and stream it to my laptop?
So, said a different way, does the legality depend on whether I live in the same physical space as the antenna, or the fact that I have digitized the content between my two rented spaces?
It would seem that the courts view a company such as SlingMedia as a hardware provider and Aereo like the landlord of my second rented apartment. However, I can't resolve at what point what I do with my rented space and equipment becomes illegal.
SCOTUS never really addressed this. The majority opinion was basically just a bunch of vague hand-waving that amounted to "if it looks like a duck...".
That was one of the most frustrating things for me when the decision came out. Obviously we all understood that we might lose, but to have a decision handed down that was so completely devoid of any sort of definitive logic or reasoning was really, really demoralizing.
They effectively just said "You look like a cable company, and even though we accept that legally you are most certainly not a cable company, we still find that you publicly perform... because cable companies publicly perform".
Aereo argued that what they were actually doing in their datacenter mattered.
American Broadcasting Companies argued that the equipment you were running was irrelevant and what mattered was the service you were selling (streaming unlicensed TV over the internet).
I don't think the latter point is unreasonable. And I don't think your company thought it was unreasonable either (except when trying to win court cases). When trying to market your product to customers this is what your website said(1):
"Watch Real, Live TV on the Internet. Finally. With Aereo you can now watch live broadcast television online. No cable required."
The customer doesn't care about what's going on in your datacenter. Why should SCOTUS?
I think the latter point absolutely is unreasonable.
That marketing tagline you pulled could just as easily have come from Sling (i.e. "Put an antenna in your house and hook it up to a Slingbox"). But nobody seems to think that would be a public performance.
By your logic, Aereo should have been legal if the website said "User-controlled, individually assigned remote antennas and DVRs in the cloud".
The way you market yourself has nothing to do with copyright law. You need to look at what's actually happening under the hood – not just base your decision on whatever the "user perception" is of the service.
I didn't say that Aereo was legal or not based on its marketing, I said that there was a common cause to both Aereo's lack of legality and the marketing the company chose to sell the product.
Where you would probably cross the line is you sold this as a service. Doing this for personal use is one thing, selling your apartment's antenna connection over the internet to a single other person is another.
In both examples I am renting space in which to place my antenna. In the first example, I own a single antenna and pay fees to my landlord. In the second example, I own a single antenna and pay fees to Aereo. I would argue that the only difference is marketing.
Cable companies acquire a license to rebroadcast. That is how they operate.
Aereo didn't have that.
I think that is more than enough to distinguish Aereo from the cablevision law. But the Supreme Court doesn't haven't to follow Cablevision. That wasn't a SCOTUS case. And other circuits had conflicting rulings.
Cable companies have a license to retransmit live programming. That's a completely separate issue from time-shifted transmissions.
Cablevision didn't have a license that allowed consumers to remotely record and play back shows. But the courts decided that the company didn't need a license, because it was the users rather than Cablevision who were performing in that instance, and thus it was considered a private performance.
But yeah, I'm fully aware that SCOTUS wasn't bound by the Second Circuit decision in Cablevision. I only brought it up as a thought experiment because I was interested in hearing rayiner's opinion on that.
The Scotus opinion didn't really differentiate between live and time-shifted transmission. It found that Aereo didn't even have the right to transmit at all. The issue of time-shifting then became unimportant.
I'm not sure how SCOTUS would come out if it had seen Cablevision, but I think there is clear room for differentiation.
I think you can say that time-shifting is not rebroadcast without allowing Aereo. Aereo went a step further and said well we'll rent you an antenna. That's really the part that didn't fly with SCOTUS.
>Yes, changed the world by making it legal to build a business off someone else's content that you got for free through a legal hack. Tragic it didn't work out.
I think I mostly agree with you, but just to play devil's advocate: this is broadcast television. It's already being given away for free. I could easily and legally build a kit to record this broadcast without a cable box/official dvr. I could also rewatch that stuff any time legally. In theory I could legally pay someone to do this for me, head over and pick up the DVDs/VHS tapes in person and rewatch them myself. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but up until this point it's all legal right?
But doing all this over the internet is suddenly illegal? (Or is it the point where I pay someone else to do it for me? Either way seems kind of arbitrary to me...)
More to the point, they sell USB->Digital TV Antennas adapters and software to turn your computer into a DVR.
I had one (eye-tv) with an antenna, my computer is essentially a DVR (You subscribe to a program guide too, which makes picking programs to record tivo easy). I don't use it anymore, the computer died and I pretty much stopped watching tv.
At the very least, if the court said Aereo was a cable company the other brances of government should have at least respected that and given them the license to be a cable company.
What else is going to made illegal when renting a cloud computer?
The court didn't buy that you were "renting a cloud computer." They were selling a service.
There are things that you can do personally and not as a business. Sometimes businesses try to thread this needle. It depends on many factors and luck whether they succeed.
Doing it in someone else's facility I think is what makes it illegal. IF you had exactly the same scheme but hosted the equipment in your customer's houses, Aero's business model would be perfectly legit. (I think, it's been a while since i read the opinion)
That makes about as much sense to me as the Vatican saying it's OK to employ the rhythm method as contraception technique but don't you dare put on a condom! Sigh...
I think that's right. Its about the similarity of Aero to any other cable company, who also use antennae to distribute media. Its about where we're at and taking small steps. So maybe it seems odd from close up (why does it matter if I rent/own the receiver?), it makes whatever sense it makes from a bigger view - the state of the current industry of cable and broadcast.
Yes, changed the world by making it legal to build a business off someone else's content that you got for free through a legal hack.
So did cable television which, in the early days, was notorious for not paying for broadcast network programming they could get over the air.
That was solved by introducing a compulsory licensing scheme: any cable company could retransmit an over-the-air broadcast network, so long as they paid up.
Which also solved a massive logistical headache of each cable provider potentially having to negotiate a license with the parent network (for its programming) and each affiliate (for the local programming such as news or local sports), by creating a consolidated administered fund to collect and distribute the payments.
All Aereo really needs is enough money to buy itself a few members of Congress and get a similar scheme set up. That is the real, literal legal "hack".
What legal hack? The content is flowing freely over the air, they are just transforming it's timing and delivery... Just like banks (for current accounts), or like batteries (for electricity).
The model was even opt-in; only content that was already broadcast was available, and if any producer didn't want to be offered on Aereo, they could simply stop broadcasting!
Content being broadcast on ostensibly publicly owned airwaves (not that the "public" ever seemingly gets any say in this). While I agree with your point that they didn't own the content, making it illegal to provide a service that improves the reception on those public airwaves to local customers doesn't sit well with me. I'm equally annoyed with the shenanigans employed with Dish and DirectTV to block their broadcast of local channels to local customers. If the content owners are really that concerned here, they can simply move their content to privately owned channels.
Not that I ever expect a court ruling to say anything close to this because lobbyists and money, just saying...
Isn't the content paid for by advertisers in exchange for your eyeballs? Wouldn't Aero increase the eyeballs? Wouldn't the advertisers be happy about more eyeballs?
First the engineers run the company, then the marketers, then the finance people, then the lawyers. TV is being run by lawyers.
It's telling that in your list of jobs there you completely left out any of the creative people (writers, directors, actors, etc) that actually make TV shows.
Use these synonyms if you do not like engineer.
synonyms: originator, deviser, designer, architect, inventor, developer, creator; mastermind
"the prime engineer of the approach"
If you do not think that engineers can be creative then we disagree. And if you think that every writer, actor, director is creative, then we also disagree.
In the future, it's not just eyeballs, but qualified eyeballs. Marketing used to be regional now it's getting really personal. Tracking data allows you to do so much stuff:
What is your opinion on TuneIn? I feel like if Aereo is illegal, TuneIn is just as illegal...they basically provide the exact same service just different sources.
Also, would you consider it equally illegal if I paid "Bill" 6 miles down the road to put up and antenna and stream the feed online for me (and only me) to view?
The main problems right now are the IP laws IMO. They are way too heavily skewed for the benefit of the creator and not society, which makes building any innovation a game of begging. And gives the creator power to kill said innovation.
I would love shorter terms and some form of FRAND compulsory licensing.
All property (intellectual or physical) is partly shared between the owner and society; you can't really do anything you want with your land or building. Why should intellectual property be any different, especially after you've distributed copies to others?
You're just repeating what was said; what is missing is a justification. You may believe it's self-evident that creation should confer absolute control, but it really isn't - especially after copies have been sold to others.
Only in copyright law does "The law is currently this" stand in as an argument for, "And, therefore, the law should exist in this form, or one even more stringent, for all eternity."
He is arguing the law should change, as it should. He advanced arguments, which you may dislike, for why it should. And you respond with, simply, "the law currently says this."
All of your posts pretty much talk about how you think "information wants to be free" (aka: free music, movies, games and other entertainment) so I don't see any strawman here.
Labeling people is easy, but it doesn't lead to fruitful discussion. You just end up talking past other people. If you wanted to discuss the propriety of abiding by the law, I'm sure there were more appropriate threads to do so.
If you sell me physical media containing a copy of your content, or transmit to me a digital representation of a copy of your content, the copy does not belong to you or to society. It belongs to me. If you want to kill it, that is not your right.
I agree with you in theory, in practice we know this isn't the case. The way content is shared in 2014 and data is duplicated you don't have that right anymore if you are creating any type of digital content. Not out of some "overarching evil" but out of people's desire to share.
Aren't you agreeing with me then? Let's use a real world example: Flappy Bird. It was the author's right to take down his creation from the App Store and he did. He owned that. People are still using it (he can't remove it from their devices) and as long as one copy exists outside of his hand's people can infringe on his right:
Except that Chapter 11 is a reorganization, not a liquidation. Aero are planning some level of operations going forward. Though the posting seems to suggest there's not a lot in play.
No. In a Chapter 11, the debtor (referred to in this context as the "debtor in possession") remains in control of the proceeding (with court oversight). Generally, the purpose of an 11 is to reorganize or restructure, but a company can also liquidate itself in an 11. Presumably by "debtee" you mean a creditor. Creditors can participate in a Chapter 11 proceeding as part of an "official committee", but they have limited powers and generally are left to complain from the sidelines. In a chapter 7, on the other hand, a trustee is appointed to liquidate the debtor's non-exempt assets, and the debtor is more or less out of the picture.
The biggest difference with Aero is that a bunch of their staff was lawyers and they had the financial backing to bring it to the supreme court. Without that any Aero like service is a non-starter.
Aereo was an important part of my cord cutting strategy here in NYC.
I can still get a lot of content from Roku + Chromecast but can't get the nationally broadcast channels (antennas won't work for my apartment location). Seems so backwards to me.
I can't wait for an Aereo replacement if anyone knows of one.
Seems like that's the point: There is no legal replacement.
Now, I'd love to hear about some kind of non-legal replacement. Like some kind of crowd-sourced antenna array that makes it difficult to target and shut down.
The best case for aereo was that they used their hack of the copyright system to eventually lobby to change the laws and become "legit". IMO there were always pretty slim chances of that happening.
Still sad though, I hate the current copyright system as much as anyone.
It seems that the Supreme Court took issue with the fact that Aereo operated not only the hardware, but also the DVR software (with similar functionality to that offered by the cable companies) that transmitted the copyrighted performance to subscribers. I wonder whether it would be legal to offer nothing but VMs in the cloud that happened to have a tuner attached, and let a separate company sell DVR software that records the TV show and transmits it privately. There must be some line between renting out one’s hardware and infringing copyright; Aereo just went a bit too far.
Aereo was great when I used it. I even tried applying to work there because I was super interested in their service. I only had one bad experience and it was trying to watch the SuperBowl using Aereo. It wasn't bad but wasn't great (freezing,buffering,slow speeds on a fios Connection) . I completely understood that it was a big national event and didn't hold it against them. It probably wasn't even their fault but their bandwidth providers was probably being hammered also.Unfortunately, because of that I ended up canceling and getting Fios TV.Mainly,because I hosted a Superbowl part at my house and everyone was upset at the stream so I ended up getting Fios TV that way for future events/parties I didn't have to worry about a buffer or people being upset again. Regardless I love what they stood for and used the service a lot when I had it. It's sad there's no real alternative.
Did Aereo as part of it's technology have the ability to strip out ads from content? Because honestly that's the only reason I haven't watched tv/cable whatever in years. Can't be bothered to waste my time on non-content when it's easier to just download a torrent and watch it via Plex. Or is this more aimed at sport, which necessarily needs to be "live" mostly?
I remain a diehard SageTV user primarily for the ability to run Comskip on all of my recordings to detect and then auto-skip all commercials on playback. Previously I used ReplayTV to do the same, as well as a JVC SVHS recorder that had commercial detection and skipping capability.
I wonder if they could have got away with it, had they not included the DVR feature and just strictly rebroadcast in real-time. As it was, they were too akin to something like The Pirate Bay to not get some sort of legal bruising.
Sad news. I'm not sure what their next business step will be, or if this is it, but I really do hope they open source anything they decide won't be a part of their future products.
This is yet another title change that removes context and makes it less difficult to understand why I want to read the article or comments. I really wish there was something beyond a mechanical "original titles only beep boop robot here" method for article titles.
It might help to consider the domain name part of the title. When I read this one that way, it doesn't seem to me to lack context.
I understand why the title changes sometimes seem mechanical, but in reality that is far from the case. Sample bias plays a huge role here, and rightly so, because titles and title edits shouldn't be the locus of attention. Unfortunately, though, when most of the data goes unnoticed, the remaining sliver of cases creates a misleading picture. I'm not sure what we can do about this.
You're probably genuinely confused about why you're getting downvotes, and I'm sorry about that. Hacker News, like any group, has a particular culture. If you're brave enough to stick around after the onslaught you're getting right now you'll find that posts that are longer and more thoughtful tend to be appreciated much more than short drive-by comments. For example, you might have explained why "it was about time" -- was there anything in their business practices that you particularly disagree with, or did you just mean that this seemed inevitable after losing in the Supreme Court?
This was a troll account too. It seems that other responses here took it at face value, which is unfortunate as the troll got a sincere reaction out of some Hacker News users.
The original comment has since been removed but it was a few lines done in the style of a stereotypical Reddit user: A smug, pseudo-intellectual, Fedora wearing faux-gentleman. This stereotype is widespread on reddit as a mockery of the kind of people that supposedly use the site, even if the parody has been blown out of all proportion by people parroting its in-jokes.
I'm not sure how much overlap there is between Hacker News and reddit users, so for the benefit of anyone who isn't familiar with the parody, this was just a parody and a troll. They do this to try and deliberately discredit the site. The comment section for almost any external link posted to major subreddits, particularly YouTube videos, rapidly fills up with parody accounts doing this. All doffing their hats, scratching their neckbeards, and professing their atheistic allegiance to reddit's intellectual paradise.
Given how serious some HN users are about preserving the quality of the comments section you probably seem like a pretty enticing target for provoking. If you see someone referencing reddit, Fedoras, and the tipping of those Fedoras, probably best to ignore them.
The problem is your post is contentless, and adds nothing to the conversation.
I also notice on Reddit, where there X1000 replies to a post, %90 of them are "me too" or variants on that. So, I end up reading Reddit's main tech forums, but come here to post.
While I applaud aereo's challenging of the law and twist on the law to create something. The outcome is correct! I read every day on hacker news; copyright laws are wrong, too long, not fair... I do not see it the same way. The hacker news community is a community who creates many things themselves; many of the community has chosen the path to give open licenses to their creation. This is their right and thankfully they do it. But. All things are not equal; while i think the giving open licenses to software benefits everyone. I do not see mandating open licenses and wide use of "The Arts" to do the same.
Creation needs to be a struggle. Taking someone else thing and modifying it is an easy path to create something. It also damages the original creation. Software and Art are NOT the same thing. Because software industry has chosen a different path should not mandate everything do the same.
Taking the collection of Marvel comic's characters and Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" and creating a movie would also be cool, but it damages the original. It also by-passes the true meaning of greatness; Original. We as a society have in the last few decades valued bullshit Art over copyright and originality. Why? because it is easy and gives a short amount of pleasure.
Great things to not need marketing. Tolkien does not need marketing. He and his family (example) should be compensated forever. there should be no termination to it and his family should profit from it forever.
We should never take away the rights of the people who create things. If is their choice to give openness to them.
You think Tolkien did not borrow? Where do you think the names of half the characters came from?
Our culture would be substantially reduced if we removed all copying.
> there should be no termination to it and his family should profit from it forever.
What purpose would that serve for society?
> We should never take away the rights of the people who create things. If is their choice to give openness to them.
We created those rights out of nothing to begin with. Without artificially created monopoly protections, these people would have no basis for preventing copying. People have the choice not to publish. Yet people willingly published before copyright too.
Those temporary rights were granted as a bargain: We give up the right to copy for some time, in return for hopefully gaining in the form of encouraging more creation of content. As it stands, it seems a lot of us believe that the bargain has been shifted too much in favour of content creators.
Creators can demand whatever terms they want - and they do, as anyone who's read an EULA knows. But creators shouldn't have unrestricted ability to use the public courts to enforce terms that the general public has no interest in aiding the enforcement of.
If artists want to control their creations forever, they can lock their stuff up in a vault and be cremated with them.
If they want to be immortalized as a contributor to the common culture, they will have to relinquish control sooner or later.
Otherwise, your creation loses relevance and fades away. Extant copies deteriorate. Collectors lose interest. Your work moves from the paragraph body to the footnotes. Artwork requires a continuous investment of creative energy, otherwise it is replaced by the work of other artists. Museums keep works on display, and encourage patrons to enjoy them as frequently as they are able. Corporations produce series sequels and souvenir merchandise. Artists cross-license their work to creators that work in different media, such as book authors optioning movie rights to film studios.
Works in the public domain get remixed into more contemporary works. Characters like Captain Nemo, Dorothy Gale, and Alice (in Wonderland) will never die because anyone who cares to do so can refresh and update their image in the zeitgeist.
Take the Norse deity Thor. Would the typical person outside of the Germanic and Scandinavian countries know anything about him if he were not included in non-original stories and artworks, like jewelry, altar carvings, and the eddas? Would anyone care if Marvel did not adopt him into its comic pantheon? Will he enjoy being a woman as much as his adopted brother?
The common culture evolves continuously. The laws are in place to encourage participation by folks who would not otherwise be able to expend the effort without compensation. They are not there to wall everything off and put locked gates everywhere. At some point, we need to be able to remember our childhood without paying someone a licensing fee.
If they want to be immortalized as a contributor to the common culture, they will have to relinquish control sooner or later.
This doesn't make sense to me. You can allow people to consume your work but not replicate it or consume it for free. The philanthropic nature of the artist is different than his creative ability.
copyright contains ownership, control, consumption, usage. It should be for the creator to determine.
It is not property. That is the entire point of copyright law: That property law does not apply to something intangible. You can not steal something without depriving the owner of use.
As such, copyright law established an artificial, temporary monopoly which from the outset it was acknowledged was separate from ownership.
And unlike property law, which is frequently (though not universally) seen as codifying "natural" rights to ownership and use, with copyright the bargain is explicit:
The copyright holder is granted restrictions on the rights that would otherwise be held by the public as an incentive to contribute to benefit society as a whole.
There is no inherent right for a creator of a work to expect society to limit the spread of information for their benefit. To grant copyright, society is limiting our freedom of expression to conjure out of thin air a commercial monopoly.
To argue that the bargain is fair is one thing, but confusing copyright with property is something else entirely.
> the creator should have the sole right to set the terms of use and transfer the terms.
The creator does not have the sole right to set the terms of use and transfer under any jurisdiction today. If you argue for that, you argue for a regime so restrictive that we have never seen its like. What you are implying is even far stricter than what applies to actual property.
For example, almost all countries have some system of compulsory licensing. All countries I'm aware of have expiring copyright terms (moves to try to perpetually extend the stated duration notwithstanding). All have exceptions of certain types of copying.
All puts limits as to the extent which the creator of a work may limit (even contractually) usage, even in cases where the creator explicitly avoids selling copies and instead merely licenses or leases instances of the work. (E.g. very few jurisdictions would allow the creator of a work to limit use by race or gender).
It is up to society to set these restrictions because these rights only exist because of the intervention of society in the first place. If a creator does not accept the bargain with wider society, they are free to never release their work. We are not obliged to support rent seeking - the bargain must be balanced accordingly to make up for the self imposed restrictions on freedom of expression that it creates.
Why should the family of Tolkien be compensated forever? What have they done to suddenly be entitled to this?
Also, how does mixing and modifying things damage the original? The original is still there and you can appreciate it without worrying about stuff someone else has done with it. That is specially true in software that's what makes it such a great medium.
My view is that the damaging is because 1.) people are not experiencing the original. 2.) the voice of the characters is not that of the creator and can not be true to their his intentions. When the allow others to create derivatives works there are always changes but they allowed those changes
"people are not experiencing the original."
Sure, but they're experiencing an original interpretation of another work, it'll be judged on its own merit. They can still look up the original if they want to. What's wrong with that?. As Newton said: "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants"
If we were to ban any derivative work you'd need to forget about pretty much any "art" done in the last 400 years (to say a number). As mentioned somewhere else Tolkien's work is not "original" in that case then, it's a mash-up of European mythology. What about music? most modern music relies on samples of other works (check this TED talk by Mark Ronson about it: http://www.ted.com/talks/mark_ronson_how_sampling_transforme...). And TV/Film? Many movie/tv scripts are just a modern version of Shakespeare's works. Anything we do now is influenced by something someone has done before, that's called progress and if we block this with made up "laws" we are going to be very impoverished as a society.
No one can ever experience the original, because the context of everyone's experience has changed. Would your perception of Lord of the Rings be the same before and after reading Wheel of Time or Game of Thrones? Would it even be the same before and after the France-U.S.-Vietnam War? Would it have been the same if written before World War 2?
When a work is created, the intention of the artist is fixed, but as artwork, it is continuously shaped by the perceptions of its audience. Art holds a mirror up to life, and that evolves.
So experiencing the original is quite impossible now. People who did experience the original have already gone on to reshape the culture with their own works, and we cannot, for instance, un-see the Peter Jackson films based on the books.
Yeah, but then the argument that allowing derivative works ruins the original is still flawed. If the way you appreciate art is directly linked to your past experiences (which obviously they are) then the original work is already "ruined" whether you've experienced a derivative work before or not.
The only way a derivative work can truly "ruin" an original is if it obscures the source material or otherwise prevents the audience from accessing it.
There may be a weak argument to be made there in favor of copyrights, since a derivative work could be so much more popular than the original that people are no longer willing to pay enough to maintain it. But it isn't as though a book will spontaneously burn itself if someone writes an unauthorized sequel or translation. The worst that could possibly happen to it is that people stop making fresh copies and forget that it exists.
That's the real ruin for artwork--being thrown into the Lethe.
It's ok, and I didn't downvote, but it's an extreme viewpoint, so it is unsurprising that he's been downvoted.
He is promoting a view of copyright that extends far past the rights granted by any extant copyright system, in a forum where a lot of us are very aware of how much of culture is constant remixing and borrowing, or outright "stealing" of past content that has only been possible because copyright law is not nearly as exclusionary as the property law principles he seems to believe should apply (and as I pointed out elsewhere, in his other comments he hints at support for a degree of control which does not even apply to any property law system in the world) .
As an Aereo user, let me tell you what you missed out on: one of the most amazing products I've ever used.
Aereo "worked." It worked like magic.
First, it lived up to its claim. You could stream live, broadcast television to your phone or computer, and you could AirPlay it to your television. Everything was in HD. It worked incredibly well. So many video products fail to deliver on the user experience, or the video is choppy, or it crashes all the time. Aereo's software had its struggles, but it worked far more often than not. I could have people over and stream the Super Bowl and never worry that Aereo would crap out.
Aereo also worked remarkably well during Hurricane Sandy. I live in Brooklyn, and Aereo's Brooklyn HQ was less than a mile from my apartment, but we streamed Aereo until we went to sleep that night. Considering reports that their antennae sucked a ton of power, that's incredible on a night when power was out all across the city.
I also interviewed with the company in 2013 for a business development role. Everyone that I met was really great. They treated me well during the process while clearly balancing a million things, including their legal concerns. I really, really wanted to work there, but it wasn't a fit for a lot of reasons, their uncertain future being one of them.
When my girlfriend told me that they were filing for bankruptcy, I was sad. This is innovative technology that worked for consumers, squashed by antiquated government regulation and a highly litigious, innovation-resistant, influential media industry.
Progress, halted.
A winning product that could have delighted millions, squashed.