So the Supreme Court heard oral arguments yesterday in ABC v. Aereo, and I've been refreshing Techdirt and SCOTUSblog all morning trying to get a read on which way this is going to go. I have a personal stake in this one that goes beyond the usual "interesting copyright case" nerd-out. I've been an Aereo subscriber since it came to my city last fall, and if the broadcasters win this thing, my $8 a month DVR-in-the-cloud setup is probably dead.
For anyone who hasn't been following: Aereo rents you a tiny individual antenna, actually a whole warehouse full of dime-sized antennas, one assigned to your account whenever you tune in, that pulls in over-the-air broadcast signals and streams them to your laptop or your Roku. It also lets you "record" shows the same way, to your own little slice of cloud storage. The broadcasters (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, all of them) say this is just retransmission without paying retransmission fees, dressed up in enough technical gymnastics to dodge the law. Aereo's argument is that because each antenna and each recording is assigned to one individual subscriber, its more like renting someone a physical antenna and a DVR than broadcasting to the public, which under the old Cablevision ruling from a few years back is legal.
From what's coming out of the transcripts, it did not sound like a great day for Aereo. Roberts apparently pushed pretty hard on the idea that the only reason for the individual-antenna setup is to engineer around the copyright statute, not because there's any actual technical reason to do it that way. And Breyer reportedly went off on a tangent worrying about how a ruling against Aereo could accidentally nuke cloud storage services generally, which, fair, but its not exactly a ringing endorsement either. Nobody on the bench sounded thrilled with either side, honestly, which from everything I've read tends to mean a narrow ruling rather than the sweeping "cloud computing is dead" outcome everyone's been catastrophizing about.
I'll be honest, I signed up for Aereo mostly out of spite. My cable company (I won't name them, you know who they are) called me three separate times last August trying to get me back after I canceled, and the third rep actually argued with me about whether I "really" watched enough TV to justify not having cable, as if that was any of her business. So when Aereo expanded to my market a couple months later for eight bucks a month, less than what my old company charged just for the DVR box rental, I jumped on it. It's not perfect. The picture quality depends entirely on how good your local broadcast signal is (mine is fine, my neighbor two blocks over gets pixelation during storms), and you obviously don't get cable channels, no ESPN, no FX, nothing like that. But for local news, network shows, and the occasional Sunday football game, it's been genuinely great, and the DVR interface is honestly nicer than anything Comcast ever put in my living room.
What gets me is how much this case seems to hinge on a technicality about antenna architecture rather than anything about what Aereo actually does for people. Nobody arguing in that courtroom yesterday, from either side, seemed to be talking about the actual experience of a person who just wants to watch the local news without paying for four hundred channels they don't want. It's all retransmission consent fees and public performance doctrine and Cablevision precedent. I get why, that's how copyright law works, but it's a weird feeling watching a service you like get argued over as an abstraction.
A ruling isn't expected for a couple months at least, so I guess I just keep paying my eight dollars and hoping. If it goes against Aereo I honestly don't know what I do next, probably just an actual antenna on my roof and accept that I lose the DVR part of it. Not the end of the world. But it'd be a shame to lose the whole model over what basically amounts to a very elaborate legal workaround that, as far as I can tell, never hurt anybody except a few networks' negotiating leverage.