Supreme Court rules against Aereo

[SciFi Chick]

This seems tricky to me.

The tech is ahead of the ethics, and it's hard to say who is right here. At first glance, it looks obvious that Aereo is wrong, but closer examination makes it seem like what's being done to them is unfair.

Thoughts?

[Cyborg Girl]

The clincher to me is that they were leaching off the broadcasters and then asking people to pay for their service. There is a blurry line between "fair use that might be considered piracy" and "piracy that might be considered fair use," but this sounds like plain old piracy to me.

[The Supreme Canuck]

Yeah, we discussed this in law school. I'll have to read the final decision to be sure about it, but my intuition is that I have no issue with the ruling.

See, as far as I'm concerned, Aereo was rebroadcasting content, without permission and for a fee. Which is infringement. The peculiar set-up with the individual personal antennae was a cutesy, too-clever-by-half attempt to get around the law by exploiting a loophole. They were clearly intentionally trying to get around the law, otherwise they'd never create such a ridiculous infrastructure.

Courts don't like clever.

You try to get around the law like that, eventually the law bites back. The USSC saw what was going on, and closed the loophole in order to ensure that there was no way to subvert the intent of the law.

But I'll get back to you if I decide to read the ruling.

Edit: I took a quick look at the decision, and it seems I intuited correctly. The court basically said "Real cute. Good job twisting yourself through the loophole. Very nice. Not allowed; go home."

[SciFiFisher]

IIRC there was a law passed a few years back that essentially says "no matter what technology you are using if you are redistributing content you owe the content creators some form of royalty". Aero was essentially redistributing content.