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Comment by icebraining | Hacker News Reader

Hum, who says the broadcasters aren't supposed to have copyright on the material? That makes no sense, if they didn't everyone could just capture it and rebroadcast to the whole world at will.

I believe Aereo's position is not that the broadcasters don't hold the copyright, it's that they aren't violating it since they just do "location-shifting".

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>The Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed the lower court ruling on Monday in a 2-to-1 decision, saying that Aereo’s streams of TV shows to individual subscribers did not constitute “public performances,” and thus the broadcasters’ copyright infringement lawsuits against the service “are not likely to prevail on the merits.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/02/business/media/aereo-wins-...

That doesn't say they don't hold copyright over the material. In fact, it implies that they do, since otherwise, whether Aereo is doing a public performance or not would be irrelevant.

It only says they only copyright for those who are doing public performances with the broadcast, and that they don't have copyright on the signal itself.

they aren't violating it since they just do "location-shifting"

This is my understanding. For $8/mo, people are renting the physical space that contains an antenna. The crux of the case is whether renting a sensor, or access to a space with a sensor, is illegal.

The antenna by itself is useless until Areo transcodes and transports the content it receives. That is the issue.

Doesn't that just shift the argument to renting computation time?

Edit: Thinking on this I'd assume the whole argument is based on this whole sum of the parts thing. Obviously I wouldn't question if a machine shop is legal or any particular operation in making a gun is legal but I understand regulations on gun production as a reasonable law.

But then it comes to the sum of the parts thing I see Aero enabling a customer to do something legal he in theory could do already in an easier manner rather than broadcasting companies being screwed out of legitimate revenue (mostly because they don't offer equivalent services).

Why? If the stream is not HDCP (which currently it cannot be by law), then why does Aereo have a special obligation to treat the content as protected? Congress could end this whole debate by allowing broadcast DTV to require HDCP, which they have so far explicitly denied.

[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast_flag ]

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