A $795M analogy: Locast, broadcast copyright, and the fall of big antenna

I think the issue is that the public hasn&#x27;t been invited to participate in the discussion of what we want copyright law to look like in a very long time. Considering the last major change, the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, was 23 years ago, and essentially written by the industry and never seriously debated in the public interest, I don&#x27;t have good hopes for the future in this area.<p>I think the Supreme Court is going to continue to rule that neat hacks are not really going to get you out of what the law says, but also that the &quot;content producers&quot; are not going to be able to arbitrarily restrict a reasonable service as in the Cablevision case.<p>What the public really wants is a way to enable the thing they want without either exorbitant costs or heavy annoyances. We&#x27;re not getting that because the system is not set up for automating micropayments or microdonations and the big operators are writing all the rules. For example, if I pay for a streaming service and listen only to one obscure band, I would expect that my monthly fee would go to them. Instead it goes to the top 100 and a tiny fraction goes to my obscure band, who really don&#x27;t benefit at all from being on the service. If I had a micropayment platform, my consumption could be going to that band with a fraction going to support the platform.<p>In other words, record companies are killing music, and it&#x27;s legal. That&#x27;s what we need to fix.

This article is making the engineer&#x27;s mistake regarding reasoning about copyright infringement and the law.<p>The courts do not care <i>how</i> the copy was made, they care about what markets the copying would allow someone to get into. &quot;Cloud DVRs are OK but only if the kernel, filesystem, and hardware take great pains to ensure separate physical storage locations for and no compression on each customer-created copy&quot; is absurd and no judge is going to go for that.<p>No, the courts aren&#x27;t saying &quot;if you waste a bunch of money on extra hard drives, you can infringe copyright&quot;, either. Their concern is providing a demarcation line between &quot;things the customer has done with your service&quot; and &quot;things your service provides on it&#x27;s own&quot;. Yes, this line is going to be fuzzy, but it&#x27;s fuzziness has nothing to do with how the bits are stored. It has to do with the context of the markets in which works are ordinarily sold.<p>&gt;I originally thought the strangeness of digital copyright outcomes reflected a lack of technical literacy in the courts. But for the most part, I find the Aereo discussion shows general digital competency, and an appropriate aesthetic disgust for the “identical bits are different” problem.<p>Remember how after the Napster lawsuit, everyone was parroting the thought-terminating cliche &quot;the law needs to catch up to technology&quot;? Yeah... no. In reality the law is almost always three steps ahead of technology, because the law is written in a programming language that executes what you intended to write, not what you actually wrote.

<i>CHIEF JUSTICE SCALIA: But his question is, is there any reason you did it other than not to violate the copyright laws?</i><p>It&#x27;s awesome how Aereo&#x27;s efforts to <i>obey the law</i> are what the court didn&#x27;t like.

&gt; Since congress included [the non-profit] exemption, presumably there is some way to qualify for it, otherwise it wouldn&#x27;t exist.<p>Puffer is probably that: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;puffer.stanford.edu&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;puffer.stanford.edu&#x2F;</a>

I like how much of this is due to ever-racheting copyright laws that America never, ever asked for - laws that were almost certainly passed in response to seemingly endless campaign donations.

I thought it would have been a better workaround to the Aereo ruling to have separate companies for the antenna + digitizer hardware and the DVR software. If one company simply offers a VM in the cloud that has an antenna and digitizer of various frequencies, it could be used for many different purposes (streaming TV, research like politicaladarchive.org, police scanners like broadcastify.com, learning GPS, etc.), and as long as they don’t provide the DVR service themselves they aren’t acting like a cable company. And separate companies can sell software to run on the VMs to make it all user friendly.

For anyone that was using it personally, and was sad to see it go:<p>I had a decent experience switching to using the Tablo Dual Lite. It&#x27;s a local TV tuner and DVR. Mine has 2 tuners, but they also a 4 tuner device.<p>It does, unlike Locast, require fiddling around with an antenna, but I guess the upside is that nobody can sue it into oblivion.<p>It does require a subscription for the guide ($5&#x2F;month) and for the built-in commercial skip (another $5&#x2F;month), which isn&#x27;t terrific. But, the UI and the DVR seem more polished than what I was getting using Locast with Stremium (cloud DVR) before. It does take a few seconds to tune into a channel also, which can be annoying.

I sympathize with the guy who had line-of-sight issues. Or anyone who lives in a multi-unit building, or far from the Big Antennas.<p>However, I just got an antenna ($80) and had it installed on my roof. 40 miles or so to Twin Peaks&#x27; antennas, no obstacles. Boom: 800 channels (some paywalled), many in languages other than English.<p>Next is to roll my own DVR. Should be easy, right?

What infuriates me the most about this ruling is that long term effects of it. Locast did what they did and inserted ads every 15 minutes because they knew nobody would not contribute to hosting costs without some reason. Had they made it so it was interruption at the start only, _maybe_ it could have held up better in court. And I agree on that front. Remove the donate video from showing every 15 minutes, and only show it at the start. Encourage funding through better on screen messages and make it more clear that it&#x27;s voluntary.<p>But the big part of the ruling was that it wasn&#x27;t just how they requested funding, but the why. The ruling argued that collecting funds to expand more throughout the US was not valid for their non-profit status for some reason that made no sense. And as a result, it appears that a replacement will never exist, because the cost of pulling all of these channels with careful and specific antenna placement in a city, the hardware to pull all of those channels in real time, re-encoding the feed from MPEG2 to HLS&#x2F;MP4 for the web, potentially making different qualities to account for network conditions (can&#x27;t remember if the M3U8 playlists from Locast did that or not), and the networking costs of transmitting video are expensive.<p>And the lawsuit was stupid too. US TV channels are crammed to the max with advertisements, so much so that it feels more like an ad delivery mechanism than an entertainment delivery system. Locast could have been advantageous as they would have actual data of who is watching what when and where. Ad companies love that data, and with traditional OTA feeds, they don&#x27;t have that. Instead, all of these OTA companies actively refuse offering the ability to watch their streams online for free. Other than local news content, everything else is locked behind a paywall of having an active cable subscription. Why should I, as a consumer, pay $100 a month to watch this same OTA content, just so I can watch it online, especially for a medium so jam packed with ads?<p>I live in the edge of Columbus, Ohio in an apartment. I&#x27;m still within 10 miles of the transmitters for the big 6 stations (the local affiliates of ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, CW, and PBS collectively only use 4 transmitters.). My apartment is luckily facing sort of line of site to most of those transmitters. But even then, I still have bad signal issues with those channels, and in some cases leading to an unwatchable recording. The signal was bad enough that my recording of the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Opening Ceremonies was bared by loss of 2 to 5 seconds of video and audio every 2 minutes. My only alternative was to play $65 to $100 a month to cable or cordcutting subscription to watch that broadcast online. And out of spite for continuing to shutdown any free way to watch their OTA content online, I will _never_ pay. Our laws regarding OTA broadcasts and how people can use and view them need to change ASAP, otherwise what is the point of having them if is not accessible to all.