The only problem with your rant is the fact that an entity that looks like a conventional looking company can in-fact be a non-profit enterprise. Hospitals notably fall into this category and they hardly give stuff away for free. They are some of the most notorious high way robbers on the planet.

This is a situation where the "quacks like a duck" legal principle doesn't quite work out.

Clearly.

As any Tea Bagger will tell you, the IRS only bullies charities that have some obvious ties to some Republican cause.

> You are mischaracterizing the Supreme Court decision Citizens United.

Not at all. He's merely disagreeing with it. This is America. We get to disagree with Kings and Popes and idiots who have the gall to call themselves judges.

There is no direct 1:1 person -> corporate pass through. The whole POINT of a corporation is to prevent that.

What we have here are a legal fiction being granted MORE power than real people while still retaining all of the extra protections they get from not really being people.

> (1) Groups of people have the same free speech rights are individual persons.

Groups of people don't have the same moral awareness or legal responsibility as individuals do. They are at best, like children and should be thought of as such.

When you take a group of people and put them together, you end up with a rampaging mob. You don't end up with a Bog hive mind with the soul of a Greek poet.

Your entire line of reasoning is pure bullshit that blatantly ignores human nature.

...I seem to recall making that same remark myself in response to the first Aereo message posted here.

Some guy's black robe won't magically prevent everyone from trying to get that rule applied in the lower courts. It will have to be litigated back up to the SCOTUS before 9 guys can declare that "sorry, it doesn't apply to you". Although even that's not assured. By the time it gets back up to the SCOTUS, it could be different guys or case could just come out different.

That's when SDL was developed. More than likely, any of the interesting games used that.

Cable companies operate a single antenna for a large group of people.

Thus you have something resembling a public performance.

Aereo didn't do this. They operated single antennas for single individuals. They rented a single piece of hardware to a single individual. There are older cases with DVD rental setups that are very analogous. Those were protected as not being public performances because they weren't really.

Now potentially any file transfer on the web is a public performance.

...and who determines what this "spirit" is exactly?

Is the "spirit" of copyright law to enable abusive monopolies or is it to be fodder for the young starving artist?

The really sad part here is that the victim was going out of it's way to abide by a previous SCOTUS ruling. The idea that you can't cater your business to recent judicial findings is an especially troubling one. It destroys the entire basis for commerce.

No. A better analogy would be transmitting a recording from one Tivo in your house to another.

This ruling potentially makes a whole-home PVR illegal.

Forget about streaming from that Tivo to your tablet while you're on the road. That will likely be "very illegal".

His black robe doesn't allow him to alter the natural laws of the universe or the basic principle that a rule once made applies to EVERYONE.

Declaring that a file transferred to a single person constitutes a "public performance" applies to EVERYONE.

That's the way the law works.

That's what Aereo was depending on. They exploited the rules created by another SCOTUS precedent. They abided by those rules.

The lower courts will apply this rule. It will have to be litigated all the way to the supremes before they can declare that some rule doesn't apply to a particular person.

It's funny you should mention package delivery because we already have a great example of this: the Netflix DVD-by-mail service.

This has always been a very efficiently handled product since the relevant middle man has no conflict of interest.

It's amazing how much less problematic that dinosaur of a product is. You have first sale protecting the right of Netflix to continue offering stuff and a parcel service that is a common carrier.

Meanwhile, the streaming service is surrounded on all sides by evil jack*sses with some entrenched monopoly interest.

It's like Walmart owns the road out to the freeway and they don't want you shopping at Target or Costco. They will charge you $100 to get on or off the freeway if they find out you've shopped at one of their competitors.

This is also a regional thing.

You can't judge the entire industry based on a single location. This goes triple if that location happens to be Silicon Valley. It's a tournament mentality over there. The gold rush started in 49 and never stopped really.

You've got tons of young talent feeding itself into the grinder.

> I was productive at my first job out of college after a month.

I was also productive pretty much immediately. Then again, I had an internship for 2 years before I graduated from school. In my day, it was a trendy thing to get job experience while you were still in school.

Do they not do that anymore?