So instead of 'leasing" an antenna what if Aereo sold their customers an antenna along with a device that took that signal and turned it into something you could stream of the internet?
Then Aereo could generate revenue by saying: Okay, we sold you the antenna device. It’s yours now. You can do with it as you please. You can stick the device on top of your house or you can stick the device on top of you friends house who gets better reception, OR we (Aereo) can lease you a space to put it on our tower and we’ll also provide you with a power source for a nominal monthly fee.
Now, how could THAT be seen as copyright infringement?
As I understand it, one of the reasons Aereo lost the case was because they couldn’t prove that every single one of their antennas was picking up its signal independently – instead, everyone who was watching Channel X was actually getting the signal from one (or maybe several) DVR’s that were taking the broadcast signal of Channel X and retransmitting it to the Aereo antennas.
Under your scenario Aerio would simply be something like a TV card for your computer, but I don’t think that’s the way it’s set up right now.
Now if Aereo wants to acknowledge that it retransmits TV stations just like cable TV, and if it wants to negotiate retransmission rights with broadcast stations, then it could start back up as soon as the contracts are signed.
It’s still retransmission. There wasn’t any difference between Aereo and a cable company except Aereo’s gimmick of the individual antennas and not paying retransmission fees.
The Court’s decision was basically “we don’t care about exactly how Aereo does what they do. What they do achieves pretty much the same result as cable companies, so we are going to treat them like cable companies.” The dissent gives a good reason as to why this is poor logic, but the majority opinion seems to cover any other tricks Aereo might come up with.
SCOTUS basically cited Quack vs. Duck. It doesn’t matter to them whether Aereo legally did everything right at each step, if it looks like a cable company to them, it’s a cable company. So now porn and cable companies are two things that only a Supreme Court justice can ascertain.
We need to gin up a case involving a semi-cable company airing semi-porn and send it to the Supreme Court. Maybe their heads will assplode.
Well, obviously, but skirting the edges of a law isn’t illegal. That’s why laws have edges.
In this case, we don’t know whether that would work because we don’t know where the edges of this specific law actually are. But that’s not a new concept, as ftg pointed out: Nobody knows for certain what’s pornography and what isn’t, when you get down to gray area cases, and there’s never going to be a full definition which eliminates the gray areas.
This is why I take the Copenhagen Interpretation when it comes to cases like these: Until something controversial goes to court and gets ruled on, it doesn’t have a defined legality. It has a probable legality, but until the wavefunction collapses there can be no solid answer. And sometimes the court collapses the wrong wavefunction…