How video copyright went insane

DfgDfg Admin
edited September 2012 in Life
I am posting this here mostly because I want to read this and also because it's pretty good information.

Suppose I could offer you a choice of two technologies for watching TV online. Behind Door Number One sits a free-to-watch service that uses off-the-shelf technology and that buffers just enough of each show to put the live stream on the Internet. Behind Door Number Two lies a subscription service that requires custom-designed hardware and makes dozens of copies of each show. Which sounds easier to build—and to use? More importantly, which is more likely to be legal?
If you went with Door Number One, then you are a sane person, untainted by the depravity of modern copyright law. But you are also wrong. The company behind Door Number One, iCraveTV, was enjoined out of existence a decade ago. The company behind Door Number Two, Aereo, just survived its first round in court and is still going strong.
The difference between them—and the reason for Aereo's willfully perverse design—originated in a critical 2008 DVR decision by the federal Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Cartoon Network v. CSC Holdings (which everyone just calls "Cablevision"). The tech at issue in Cablevision was a "DVR in the cloud," and because of the way the Second Circuit answered the question of whether a DVR "performs" a copyrighted TV show when the user hits "play," the decision opened a whole range of possibilities for entrepreneurs willing to mash up technologies in ways God never intended.
This is the story of Cablevision, the companies that followed in its wake, and how we got to the strange place where wasting resources on thousands of tiny antennas made you legal—but where using one antenna broke the law.



Read more here: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/08/why-johnny-cant-stream-how-video-copyright-went-insane/

Comments

  • bornkillerbornkiller Administrator In your girlfriends snatch
    edited September 2012
    Apperantly we use to get charged TV licenses here way back before my time. They'd travel the hoods in vans tracking air wave emissions from houses who hadn't paid their TV fees for the year. That is, until someone challenged the governments reasoning for charging the country for using airwaves. Thanks to that person, the following generations can enjoy feeless free air.
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