Also, what type of asshole employee would separate a man from his two young children?
The employee suggested no such thing. She said that the man would have to wait until his children were able to board, and then they could board together.
Speaking only to the example in the L3 blog post: the utilization on L3's network before hitting the L3/Verizon connection point is about the same as it is in Verizon's network downstream of that connection point. That suggests that each company's network can handle about the same bandwidth. Any additional traffic on Verizon's network coming from L3 would obviously also be on L3's network. Why is L3 willing to take on this additional traffic, but Verizon isn't?
If you own the equipment, it's legal.
Replying to myself, this is obviously an incorrect statement. You could rent a VCR or DVR or whatever and an antenna from someone, bring it back to your house, and record stuff there, and that would be legal. It's the combination of the entire service together, with the equipment rental and delivery system over the internet, that makes it "substantially like a cable company" which makes it subject to Breyer's standard. I'm sorry that this doesn't agree with how Slashdotters like to interpret the letter of the law, but that's precisely what the courts are there to do - consider intent, consider grey areas, draw arbitrary lines.
How is that not re-transmission?
Oh my god, please stop. No, you haven't won.
That's a private performance.
Absolutely, I agree with you 100%.
the Supreme Court's job isn't to prop up obsolete business models.
How is their business model obsolete? Producing desirable content and charging for it? The thing that's obsolete is providing free OTA transmission of this content, because the content costs more to produce than the networks recoup from advertising alone.
I mean you can already get this exact same content for free by setting up your own antenna. People aren't doing it enough to make a difference.
If Aereo becomes legal, a whole shitload of people (or, rather, their cable/telco/satellite provider) will do it and that business model (free OTA transmission) will indeed become obsolete very, very quickly.
If cable companies implement Aereo-like technology so they could stop paying rebroadcast fees, then networks would have a problem. So let them go off-air and become cable-only like HBO or something. Good for them if they can make more money doing that. Then the airwaves will be freed up for people with fresh ideas and lower overhead. Or maybe not.. maybe we could reallocate the TV spectrum to enable more unlicensed Wifi. That would be an excellent trade in my opinion. Well worth the loss of quality ABC shows like "The Chew" and "General Hospital..."
This is absolutely the most likely scenario. I'm glad you at least acknowledged it. I feel terrible for you that your TV show preferences aren't matched by 100% of the shows that ABC airs.
Presumably this would work with OTA transmissions, which you legally received with an antenna.
Exactly, provided that you own the antenna and some sort of recording device. I'm glad we agree on this.
That's a big assumption, and it's pretty shitty considering you can legally record shows that you receive over the air and watch them later, and have been able to do that since the Supreme Court ruled that VCRs are legal.
On a VCR that you own.
This Supreme Court decision, and the hypothetical you're proposing, take away consumer rights that have been around for decades,
On equipment that they own.
Are you seeing the common theme? If you own the equipment, it's legal. (And this will only continue to work if the cost of owning the equipment makes it not worth bothering for most people.) If you rent this stuff from someone else, it's tantamount to a cable company and thus that company is required to pay the licensing fee. If you want it changed, go complain to your local politician that everyone deserves ad-supported TV for free. Maybe the laws will change and these companies will become taxpayer-subsidized like the BBC.
prevent innovative businesses
How is Aereo innovative? It provides exactly the same service as cable+DVR, which has been around for over a decade. The only innovative thing is the lack of content cost for Aereo, which is unsustainable.
that consumers want
Of course consumers want it, who wouldn't want something that's much cheaper by virtue of having almost none of the cost structure required to deliver the service because the cost is being borne by other companies?
If that's not retransmitting, then what is? It's jumping mediums (wire to air), it's transforming the signal (compressed ATSC stream to discrete RGB values to signals to the LCD or whatever).
You've got to be kidding, right? A TV decodes the transmission but doesn't re-encode it for subsequent retransmission. You would need a camera and a microphone for that. As for the "it's a performance" aspect, the TV itself doesn't consider where it is and who is watching it, i.e. the private home vs. bar example we have been discussing. The party responsible for considering the context in which the performance is happening would be the bar owner or homeowner/renter, not the TV rental company.
And yet, he doesn't give a satisfying justification about why Aereo is a public performance, despite their concerted effort to keep it private by having dedicated antennas per subscriber, and no sharing of stored data, and no multicast transmissions.
It's because while it's not that by the letter of the law, that's what it is in spirit. Aereo is providing cable TV service, just without having to pay for the content. The entire point of Aereo's microantenna setup is to use a technicality to get around the "public performance" wording of the law that made (multicast, retransmit) cable providers have to pay the networks. I think one of the justices asked this at the trial (although he said that even if it was, that may not mean it's illegal). I don't know what Aereo's response was.
Now let's go to the dissent:
That claim fails at the very outset because Aereo does not “perform” at all.
I agree completely.
The Court manages to reach the opposite conclusion only by disregarding widely accepted rules for service-provider liability and adopting in their place an improvised standard (“looks-like-cable-TV”) that will sow confusion for years to come.
I think something like this is necessary. Maybe it's improvised, but we need it. Someone has to pay for content to be produced, and it's no longer (completely) covered by advertisers alone. They let people watch for free via OTA because the percentage of people watching that way is low enough that their costs are still covered.
I totally agree with that and wonder how anybody could think like Breyer did unless they just don't understand that a point-to-point TCP/IP connection, even if it's going over a "public" network like the internet, isn't really public.
I don't think Breyer's opinion is what you think it is. Scalito said it explicitly - Breyer made up a new "looks like cable TV" standard and is judging Aereo by that standard. You don't have to like it, but don't misrepresent it.
And since Breyer goes through pains to say "Oh but don't worry, remote DVR and cloud storage are still fine" he obviously is talking out his ass, since those would operate in *the exact same way* when it comes to public vs private. Otherwise perhaps you can explain how sending a copy of a TV show from your remote DVR hosted on Amazon's cloud is private, whereas a copy of a TV show from Aereo's cloud is public? It doesn't make sense.
How did you acquire the TV show that is hosted on your private storage in Amazon's cloud? The cloud storage piece assumes you acquired that content some other legal way. For remote DVR, I don't think he's going to have to go back on what he said at all. He's using a "this looks like cable TV" standard. If it's just cloud storage for shows you already have, that doesn't look like cable TV. If it's remote DVR for cable TV service and you pay for the remote DVR service, that service will be subject to the same "must pay the networks" standard as Aereo and the cable TV networks. Or you could separately pay for just the remote DVR service and have that be linked to a cable/telco/satellite/Netflix subscription as well if you want to decouple DVR from service provider.
So if Aereo changes their model to "You buy the equipment and pay to store it here" (aka a signup fee) then it becomes legal? That seems too easy.
Yes, I think it might be that easy. SlingBox comes to mind, so if you wanted to buy a SlingBox and an antenna and rent space at Aereo's location, that would probably be legal. Practically though, that wouldn't be very profitable for Aereo because the equipment would be too big, and for the end customer it's probably cheaper to just pay the cable/telco company for basic cable and DVR service.
I don't know if you're right, but if that's the logic behind this decision it's even worse than I imagined. By your logic, if you rent a TV, then since the TV takes a signal and retransmits it as visible-spectrum light, the rental company is acting as a retransmission agent and you have to pay extra licensing fees. But of course that's ridiculous.. isn't it?
Simply displaying a picture on a TV isn't a retransmission, so the TV rental company is off the hook.
The other piece of this, which others have pointed out, is that it is being offered to the general public. If you rent a TV and show some content to the general public for a fee, I believe that constitutes a "public performance" or something like that and you would need some sort of license to show it. Bars, for example, subscribe to a different type of cable or satellite service that allows them to do this.
What if he sets up HDHomerun and storage system for himself, and then sets up another one for me that he never uses? That's what Aereo was doing. Each customer rented their own receiver and their own storage.
If you own the equipment, you can do this without paying the licensing fee. If you don't own the equipment, you need to pay the licensing fee.
Why on Earth would it be illegal for me to rent an antenna (that only I use) from someone else who gets better reception?
Because that someone is acting as a retransmission agent, and there are licensing fees that apply to such retransmission agents such as cable/telco companies, and now Aereo.
Look buddy, I don't doubt that there are PCIe cards that are useful to professionals. What I doubted was the desire to hook them up to a laptop. This post happily provided one example, so I clearly stand corrected. I still don't buy your premise that Macbook Pros with external boxes for these sorts of things are going to be common.
Just so you know, the second link in your list shows a (non-PCIe card, but rather meant-to-be-external) device available with either a Thunderbolt or USB3.0 interface. There is still a Thunderbolt-only device there too that looks to be the higher-end device, and obviously there's the PCIe card version (which is clearly targeted at non-external use given their external device offerings, btw). But doesn't this demonstrate that USB3.0 *can* solve at least some of these more niche use cases, and thus there *is* overlap with/thread to Thunderbolt?
Arithmetic is being able to count up to twenty without taking off your shoes. -- Mickey Mouse
