Aereo CEO Calls Fans To Action

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After getting shot down by the Supreme Court, what do you think the odds are of this succeeding?

"Today, I'm asking you to raise your hands and make your voices heard," Aereo Chief Executive Chet Kanojia said in a statement Tuesday. "Tell your lawmakers how disappointed you are that the nation's highest court issued a decision that could deny you the right to use the antenna of your choice to access live over-the-air broadcast television."
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Sorry Chet, but you were up against our corporate overlords and their sniveling judicial servants. You had no chance. When it comes to social issues the court splits liberal vs conservative, but when it's big business's knob to slob everyone suddenly starts getting along so well.
 
Quit the chit chat Chet.

:D

I agree... I hate that name.
 
Don't blame Chet, blame his parents, they gave him the name!
 
I can use whatever antenna I want, wherever on my property I want. That in no way was endangered by this. I get direct action, but Aereo shouldn't have been very surprised about this.
 
For capitalism to occur, you need an arbiter to enforce property rights. This is the government enforcing property rights.
 
spintroniX said:
why is that ironic?

In a purely free market society, there is no need for government. Of course the gov't is going to oppose pure capitalism.
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It is ironic because these huge companies thrived on capitalism to become what they are. Now they despise it because capitalism could possibly dethrone them. So they use the courts and bri- lobby our politicians to make sure that the status quo does not change
 
TwistedAegis said:
For capitalism to occur, you need an arbiter to enforce property rights. This is the government enforcing property rights.
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an agency that is built on the systematic violation of property rights, cannot be the protector of property rights.

in case I'm being obtuse, I'm referring to taxation.
 
Uhm, they're still free to sell the antennas. What they're not allowed to do is rebroadcast shows without license.
 
Aereo lost, they should get on with it and change their business model to selling you their technology as an appliance you install at your own home so you can watch your own shows remotely. It's really a no-brainer, I don't get why they didn't think of that as Plan B. Pretty much everyone who has broadband has enough upload bandwidth to stream 480p to mobile devices where it makes little difference that the stream isn't 1080p.
 
Teenk9 said:
Uhm, they're still free to sell the antennas. What they're not allowed to do is rebroadcast shows without license.
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So basically streaming content from the cloud violate copyright.

Next in the cross-hairs, Dropbox? Amazon Prime Music? Pandora?
 
TwistedAegis said:
:rolleyes: Welcome to a representative democracy.
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Any form of society in which someone's rights don't exist simply because they happen to be outnumbered is not legitimate.

Ah, Austrian economics..."Screw quantitative analysis; follow your heart and rainbows, butterflies, and a strong economy will follow!"
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Stop worshiping at the alter of Paul Krugman. It should be obvious by now that he is an idiot.
 
jpm100 said:
So basically streaming content from the cloud violate copyright.

Next in the cross-hairs, Dropbox? Amazon Prime Music? Pandora?
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Amazon Prime, iTunes, Pandora, and Spotify all pay licensing fees to the content owners (in the case of licensed content) so they are all safe ... if Aereo agrees to licensing fees I suspect they will be safe too :cool:
 
damicatz said:
Any form of society in which someone's rights don't exist simply because they happen to be outnumbered is not legitimate.
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Indeed. I would submit then that most societies at some point in their history were not legitimate according to this criteria. And by this criteria many to this day probably aren't still.
 
kbrickley said:
Amazon Prime, iTunes, Pandora, and Spotify all pay licensing fees to the content owners (in the case of licensed content) so they are all safe ... if Aereo agrees to licensing fees I suspect they will be safe too :cool:
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Licensing and rebroadcasting are two different things. One is copyright and one is FCC. I'm sure their lawyers are drawing up new deals to cover them, but the content owners would have the upper hand and in some case would like to redo their past deals. This leading to increased costs or more intrusive ads, etc for consumers.. Then Amazon Prime music may be able to bake rebroadcasting into Prime fees, but one-time purchased music prior to any new deals that may not have any protection against their streaming being classified as rebroadcasting.

What does that leave for Dropbox and the like. Anyone who streams their music from the cloud is potentially SOL.
 
jpm100 said:
Licensing and rebroadcasting are two different things. One is copyright and one is FCC. I'm sure their lawyers are drawing up new deals to cover them, but the content owners would have the upper hand and in some case would like to redo their past deals. This leading to increased costs or more intrusive ads, etc for consumers.. Then Amazon Prime music may be able to bake rebroadcasting into Prime fees, but one-time purchased music prior to any new deals that may not have any protection against their streaming being classified as rebroadcasting.

What does that leave for Dropbox and the like. Anyone who streams their music from the cloud is potentially SOL.
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As long as you're rebroadcasting to yourself and only yourself media that you are licensed to then there's no issue. The justices themselves took extra care to make sure that this ruling does not affect that.
 
jpm100 said:
What does that leave for Dropbox and the like. Anyone who streams their music from the cloud is potentially SOL.
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The big difference between what you mention and Aereo is monetization. I know that many think that this is technical issue, it's really an economic one. No matter if Aereo was renting antennas individually or rebroadcasting without a licensing free or both, they were still generating money from a product that had no value without free broadcast transmissions. Individuals streaming their own content are not monetizing the activity, not generally.

Just from a common sense view, why would a broadcaster go through the trouble and expense of creating a free transmission that other could then monetize without any compensation to those creating the transmission? Yes, the public air waves a public, but those transmissions are made by for profit entities for the most part aside from PBS and other public broadcasters.
 
Teenk9 said:
As long as you're rebroadcasting to yourself and only yourself media that you are licensed to then there's no issue. The justices themselves took extra care to make sure that this ruling does not affect that.
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The justices tried to plug a loophole (which is Congress' job) and in doing so have mucked up the whole situation.
 
jpm100 said:
The justices tried to plug a loophole (which is Congress' job) and in doing so have mucked up the whole situation.
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But is it really a loophole? Aereo went out of its way with the one antenna per customer design to try to create a loophole. But whether it's a million antennas or just one, the actual service that Aereo provided wouldn't have been any different. And individual streaming isn't monetized.
 
Thuleman said:
Aereo lost, they should get on with it and change their business model to selling you their technology as an appliance you install at your own home so you can watch your own shows remotely. It's really a no-brainer, I don't get why they didn't think of that as Plan B. Pretty much everyone who has broadband has enough upload bandwidth to stream 480p to mobile devices where it makes little difference that the stream isn't 1080p.
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I think that device is called a Slingbox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slingbox . The thing Aereo improved upon was allowing OTA reception/antennas to be bypassed in situations where say I have an apartment in a giant building with no exterior walls/windows/balconies. Cable-like signal quality oon local channels without the expense of cable.
 
ChefJoe said:
I think that device is called a Slingbox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slingbox . The thing Aereo improved upon was allowing OTA reception/antennas to be bypassed in situations where say I have an apartment in a giant building with no exterior walls/windows/balconies. Cable-like signal quality oon local channels without the expense of cable.
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The problem is, as stated, you have to have reception. And a lot of people don't.

ATSC is a crap standard. It was pushed because the patent holders bribed the FCC to mandate it so they could collect royalties. 8VSB is terrible for multipath reception which is why most of the world uses COFDM. But in the Corporate States of America, we don't choose standards based on technical superiority but who has the most money to bribe government. The end result is a lot of people who can't get reception.

The networks can go fuck themselves. Cable is dying and their retransmission extortion fees will be going away. If they don't provide the service that people want, BitTorrent will.
 
heatlesssun said:
The big difference between what you mention and Aereo is monetization. I know that many think that this is technical issue, it's really an economic one. No matter if Aereo was renting antennas individually or rebroadcasting without a licensing free or both, they were still generating money from a product that had no value without free broadcast transmissions. Individuals streaming their own content are not monetizing the activity, not generally.

Just from a common sense view, why would a broadcaster go through the trouble and expense of creating a free transmission that other could then monetize without any compensation to those creating the transmission? Yes, the public air waves a public, but those transmissions are made by for profit entities for the most part aside from PBS and other public broadcasters.
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They weren't charging for the content, they were charging for space to rent the antenna. And it DOES matter if they were rebroadcasting (which they weren't), as that is for sure not legal. They also did nothing to the video stream, so it included all commercials exactly how a user would get them if they had the antenna on their house. Which is where the broadcaster gets it's compensation anyway. So how is aereo taking anything away from the original broadcaster? If anything they are allowing more people to view those stupid commercials, who wouldn't see them otherwise. Like my house next to a hill, which effectively blocks all OTA signal.
 
damicatz said:
Any form of society in which someone's rights don't exist simply because they happen to be outnumbered is not legitimate.
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Welcome to imperfect humanity, where trying to juggle the needs of the many with the rights of the few; this is why we have a federal republic and not a pure democracy. It's the worst system out there, except for all the others.

Stop worshiping at the alter of Paul Krugman. It should be obvious by now that he is an idiot.
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Never read Krugman, he's brilliant but now a partisan hack. I'm talking about Keynes, Adam Smith, etc. You can't have an economics model that says, "Ignore all facts, and go with what feels right." That is nonsense.

And don't tell me Keynsian economics is what people are doing now and it isn't working; that's like saying someone who claims to be Christian who goes around murdering people means Christianity is in itself evil. Politicians, of all stripes, simply follow the spend side of Keynsian economics, not the save/contract side.

heatlesssun said:
Indeed. I would submit then that most societies at some point in their history were not legitimate according to this criteria. And by this criteria many to this day probably aren't still.
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We're never going to reach utopia, whether it is the communist, socialist, democratic or libertarian one. Those who completely check out and claim no government or society is legitimate short of perfection are petulant children.
 
TwistedAegis said:
We're never going to reach utopia, whether it is the communist, socialist, democratic or libertarian one. Those who completely check out and claim no government or society is legitimate short of perfection are petulant children.
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you missed the point completely. Nobody is asking for Utopia..I can't speak for anyone else, but I am asking for a voluntary society where all exchanges are free of coercion. The existence of the state, regardless of which paradigm it espouses (communist, socialist, etc.), makes this impossible.

How we organize a society around voluntary interactions isn't as important as achieving that goal (i.e. it doesn't matter how roads are built or children are educated as long as it is a system people can opt in and out of and is free of violent coercion).

It's not being a petulant child to demand that society be organized around the same principles you apply in your every day life. It's good policy.
 
Steve said:
After getting shot down by the Supreme Court, what do you think the odds are of this succeeding?
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I don't really give a fuck whether it's chance of succeeding are dim. I still Tweeted my so-called representatives to do something about it. Fuck those corporate whores in the Supreme Court! :mad:
 
spintroniX said:
I am asking for a voluntary society where all exchanges are free of coercion.
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You're kidding yourself if after a review of human history you claim that this isn't a utopia. Coercion comes from all corners, not just government.
 
TwistedAegis said:
You're kidding yourself if after a review of human history you claim that this isn't a utopia. Coercion comes from all corners, not just government.
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I'm not asking for a complete elimination of coercion. I'm asking for the elimination of the systematic and institutionalized coercion that is government.

A free society would still have to deal with the problem of sociopaths, sure. But at least the sociopaths wouldn't have access to armies and weapons of mass destruction.
 
TwistedAegis said:
You're kidding yourself if after a review of human history you claim that this isn't a utopia. Coercion comes from all corners, not just government.
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Re-review human history.

It is the state that starts wars. It is the state that is responsible for institutionalized discrimination, for racism, for sexism. It is the state that is responsible for the vast majority of genocides and mass murders. It is the state that gives coercive power to the oligarchs and allows an elite few to control all of the wealth and resources. It is the state that allows corporations to get away with theft, coercion, and murder and then shields them behind non-voluntary limited liability. It is the state which has developed some of the most monstrous and destructive weapons in human history.
 
damicatz said:
Re-review human history.

It is the state that starts wars. It is the state that is responsible for institutionalized discrimination, for racism, for sexism. It is the state that is responsible for the vast majority of genocides and mass murders. It is the state that gives coercive power to the oligarchs and allows an elite few to control all of the wealth and resources. It is the state that allows corporations to get away with theft, coercion, and murder and then shields them behind non-voluntary limited liability. It is the state which has developed some of the most monstrous and destructive weapons in human history.
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Genghis Khan anyone? Really? You can't look at history and blame it all on "the state". Individual actors rise up and people follow them. The end result may be a "state" but it didn't start that way. What you need to do is engineer a state with balances of powers and controls, which is what our founders attempted. But this slavish finger pointing of all wrongs being righted by the abolition of the state is ridiculous and flies against all logic and basic observation of interactions of even small groups of people.
 
TwistedAegis said:
Genghis Khan anyone? Really? You can't look at history and blame it all on "the state". Individual actors rise up and people follow them. The end result may be a "state" but it didn't start that way. What you need to do is engineer a state with balances of powers and controls, which is what our founders attempted. But this slavish finger pointing of all wrongs being righted by the abolition of the state is ridiculous and flies against all logic and basic observation of interactions of even small groups of people.
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The last time I checked, an empire was still a state. How a state originates is irrelevant.
 
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