You might also be thinking of Locast, which tried to take advantage of a very specific loophole Congress put in that same law that killed Aereo. Basically they didn't want to criminalize existing community antenna systems, so they said that ones that were operated as non-profits could still operate. They could recoup costs but that's it. This regime is so very specific that the judge was able to cut Locast out of it by merely pointing out that they used money recouped for costs to expand their operations.
how can Congress overturn a case? Are you implying that they would create new legislation that specifically makes rules to attempt to fix the loop hole the judges allowed in the first case? Clearly, that would start the march to the Supreme Court over to challenge the new law. However, I would disagree with the phrase "Congress would overturn the case" as anything accurate
> Although creating its own unsanctioned e-books triggered the lawsuit, Gratz argued that IA’s digital lending is fair use, precisely because it makes copies of the physical books in its Open Library collection. That, he said, is “transformative” fair use, utilizing technologies to transform millions of physical books in order to improve the efficiency of lending without encroaching on publishers’ or authors’ rights. Gratz said that IA avoids the conflict by only lending out e-books to one user at a time, causing no harm because it honors traditional lending in brick-and-mortar libraries that has been practiced for years without impacting publishers’ bottom lines.
> The only exception to this one-to-one ratio was when IA launched the “National Emergency Library” for 12 weeks when the pandemic started, offering “an enormous universe of scanned books to an unlimited number of individuals simultaneously,” the plaintiff's complaint said.
You can rip a movie or scan a book you own and share it with a million people at once. VidAngel wasn't doing that. Every stream was 1-to-1 with a real physical copy. If they had 1000 people streaming the movies at once, it meant they had 1000 physical copies as well.
CDL is the interpretation of law that many libraries rely upon to make digital copies available, and if the IA is on shaky ground here legally, then so is our library system.
When copyright was drafted, the idea was to protect a publisher (and his pipeline) from someone just selling cheaper copies. This was changed when our friends at the RIAA would win cases against music infringers but then were able to collect $0.00 because the infringers weren't charging or making a profit. This needed to change to discourage infringing (rather than, adopting a more reasonable pricing structure).
Looking at it through that lens, VidAngel was a commercial entity looking to profit on the (performance?) of the streamed videos, where the Internet Archive (to my knowledge) doesn't charge patrons for materials, akin to a library.
IANAL, but it seems feasible to me that the judge could agree that IA is in complete infringing territory, but COULD assess a fine of $0.00 as that was the "damage" caused. I think the preferred outcome is that he finds for their theory of fair use, as that allows all libraries to continue as they are today without fear another venue could assess a non-zero fine.