Supreme Court Rulings: Strikes Down Warrantless Cell Searching and shuts down Aereo

[Captain Butterscotch]

A lot of decisions are coming down in the next few weeks from SCOTUS, so I figured a thread would be good.

Supreme Court bans warrantless cell phone searches, updates privacy laws

Searching a phone is obviously not the same as just searching a car. There are countless pages of personal data on a cell phone and I'm glad this ruling happened.

They've also sided with broadcasters on the Aereo stuff.

U.S. Supreme Court Pulls the Plug on Aereo's Streaming TV Service

 

[ferret]

Yay to the first.

Nay to the second.

 

[Explorer]

Why "nay" to the second?

In other words, if someone rebroadcasts, say, HBO, wouldn't that be a copyright violation?

Just because someone broadcasts copyrighted material, that doesn't mean they don't retain copyright on that material.

I'm interested in your reasoning.

 

[PlumbTheDerps]

Broadcaster copyright violations = no Game of Thrones. Media companies are like oil companies; you hate them because they're scuzzy, but somebody has to do what they do or else we wouldn't have nice things.

The phone thing is nice. Really shows how the judicial system can work out when legislators are too wimpy to make substantive changes on important issues.

 

[TemjinStrife]

Why "nay" to the second?

In other words, if someone rebroadcasts, say, HBO, wouldn't that be a copyright violation?

Just because someone broadcasts copyrighted material, that doesn't mean they don't retain copyright on that material.

I'm interested in your reasoning.

Aereo was *completely* legal, actually, under established legal precedent set in Cartoon Network v. CSC Holdings (aka Cablevision) for their "DVR-in-the-Cloud" service.

What the Court did in Aereo was abandon Cablevision's methods for determining infringement, which essentially looked at whether the user controlled what was copied and when, and switch to a "it looks like cable, so it has to license like cable" standard. This is incredibly confusing and unclear, and may have done exactly what the Court stated it wished to avoid, which was threatening cloud storage systems and cloud players with litigation and chilling innovation.

For some background on what spawned Aereo, here's some recommended reading:

Why Johnny can’t stream: How video copyright went insane | Ars Technica

 

[ferret]

TemjinStrife already said most of what I would have replied. But to do a rough review: Aereo wasn't reboardcasting HBO (Or any cable networK), they were reboardcasting over-the-air broadcasts. It was the equivolent of having a DVR at your house, except the DVR was stored at Aereo's office instead. They had an antennea for every customer, and an individual copy of each recorded show for every customer (Versus a single copy of a show, streamed to many customers, it was one copy streamed to one customer only)

Granted it's been a while since I refreshed the details of it in my mind.

 

[Captain Butterscotch]

I like things like Aereo. They are part of a new wave of tech startups that force giant industries to rethink the way that they do business. I am always for making old clunky industrial giants rethink and evolve.

This happened today too.

Supreme Court Curbs President’s Power to Make Recess Appointments

A unanimous vote against the appointments the President made during a Congressional recess in 2012.

 

[tacotiklah]

I like things like Aereo. They are part of a new wave of tech startups that force giant industries to rethink the way that they do business. I am always for making old clunky industrial giants rethink and evolve.

This happened today too.

Supreme Court Curbs President’s Power to Make Recess Appointments

A unanimous vote against the appointments the President made during a Congressional recess in 2012.

I like this. I've long a been a proponent for cutting back executive power. Having said that, I understand why it has grown, given the major decline of Congress to get anything meaningful done.

 

[asher]

Recess appointments have been common practice since Andrew Fcking Jackson and are like one of the only ways that a lot of Obama's confirmations will get anywhere.

 

[celticelk]

This happened today too.

Supreme Court Curbs President’s Power to Make Recess Appointments

A unanimous vote against the appointments the President made during a Congressional recess in 2012.

Which, to be sure, explicitly preserved a great deal of the president's power to make recess appointments.

 

[Hollowway]

Yeah, this Aereo thing is weird. I really don't see why their business model is illegal. They're taking free content and redelivering it. I understand why it might be so disruptive as to harm the idea of free TV, but I just don't agree with their assessment of it from a legal standpoint.

 

[Explorer]

That Aereo decision is indeed strange, now that I understand their method.

If you pay someone to house your DVR and antenna, and then only you can access your hard drive of recorded content, it is hard to believe that someone would say your DVR is "rebroadcasting," especially since it's not being cast broadly.

Put me down in the "Nay" column. Thanks for the info.

 

[MaxOfMetal]

Eh, while I think they went about it the wrong way I didn't see Aereo staying around (in it's current form) for too long. I mean, it was a business idea based entirely around loopholes and semantics to bring content without even talking to the content creator.

Lets flip this around, say a company found a way to record music off the radio and sell it to folks without paying the artist a dime. We musicians would be all in a huff.

As stated above by Captain Butterscotch, folks like seeing the big guys squirm and love plucky underdogs.

I see it like this: Someone [Aereo] was making cash off of content they did not create. It's the same as someone ripping an album off of YouTube or the radio and passing it as a legitimate copy.

Once again, I don't like how the judgement was reached and the wording of the ruling is quite scary, but I'm not going to sit here and pretend Aereo is some angel.

The term "cord cutting" is becoming too trendy for its own good, but that's off topic.