So last Tuesday the Supreme Court finally heard oral arguments in ABC v. Aereo, and I've been meaning to write about this for days because it's actually relevant to my life in a way most Supreme Court cases aren't. I have a roof antenna. I have had one for two years. This case is, weirdly, about me.
Quick background in case you've been ignoring this the way you ignore most copyright litigation (fair, honestly): Aereo is the Barry Diller-backed company that rents you a tiny individual antenna, about the size of a dime, sitting in a warehouse somewhere, that pulls in over-the-air broadcast signals and streams them to you over the internet for something like $8 a month. You also get a cloud DVR. The broadcasters, ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, all of them, hate this and have been suing Aereo since basically the week it launched, arguing it's public performance of their copyrighted content without a license. Aereo's whole legal strategy hinges on the idea that because each subscriber gets their own dedicated tiny antenna, it's more like renting you a personal antenna and a personal DVR than it is like a cable company retransmitting a signal to thousands of people at once. Technologically dumb, legally maybe clever.
And that's basically what got picked apart in the argument. From what I've read, one of the justices called the setup something like a "Rube Goldberg-like contrivance" designed purely to get around copyright law rather than for any real engineering reason, and I laughed out loud reading that because, yeah, that's exactly what it is. Nobody needed ten thousand dime-sized antennas. You need one antenna. I have one antenna. It cost me $34 at a hardware store and it sits bolted to a chimney bracket and pulls in eleven channels crystal clear, including two PBS stations, in from about 30 miles out. Aereo built an absurd Rube Goldberg machine specifically so a judge could look at it funny, and now a judge has looked at it funny.
Here's my actual complaint, and it's not really about the legal reasoning, which I'm not qualified to grade anyway. It's that this entire fight only exists because broadcast television, a thing that is legally required to be free and public, has been made confusing and expensive by everyone standing between you and the signal. I pay Comcast $141 a month for internet and basically nothing else at this point, and any time I've called to ask about "just internet, no cable box" they act like I've asked for something exotic. Meanwhile the actual broadcast signal — ABC, NBC, CBS — is sitting in the air over my house for free, and has been since before I was born. Aereo's whole business model exists in the gap between "this content is legally supposed to be free" and "practically nobody can access it without paying a middleman $80 a month for a bundle they don't want." That gap shouldn't exist. The fact that a company had to build a warehouse full of toy antennas to technically comply with copyright law while giving people something the law already entitles them to is the actual absurd part, not the antennas themselves.
I don't think Aereo wins this, for what it's worth. The Cablevision precedent they're leaning on (about remote DVR storage) feels like a stretch when you put it next to actual live streaming, and several justices seemed skeptical in the coverage I've read. If they lose, and I think they will when this comes down sometime this summer, cord-cutters like me are back to just antennas and Hulu and whatever else we can cobble together, which honestly is fine, that's what I already do. I just wanted to write this down now, in April, before the ruling comes out and everyone forgets there was ever a hearing.
Also, small unrelated aside: my antenna fell off the chimney bracket in a windstorm two weeks ago and I had to climb up there and re-bolt it myself at 7am on a Saturday, and I am extremely aware of the irony of complaining about media monopolies while personally maintaining Reconstruction-era broadcast infrastructure on my roof. Anyway. We'll see what the Court decides.