What is aereo

Is it free? And this is legal? Yes, at least according to a federal appeals court ruling earlier this month. According to All Things D , "the court said that Aereo's technical architecture — which pulls down broadcast TV signals from the air… and retransmits them to its users over the web, without paying the broadcasters for the rights to do so — may well hold up to further legal scrutiny.

But the networks aren't happy, right? Not one bit. On Tuesday, News Corp. And we believe we will prevail. Update: An earlier version of this story used Monday Night Football as an example of programming you can stream via Aereo. As a commenter points out, that is not the case, as it airs on ESPN.

Just like with a home DVR, each customer can choose programs to record, and then watch later with the same fast-forward and rewind capabilities. Q: Where can people subscribe? Q: Why does that bother broadcasters? Broadcasters say that infringes on their copyrights. A: Broadcasters also fear that they could lose a fortune.

Q: What does Aereo say? A: Broadcasters already distribute their signals for free to anyone who has an antenna. Aereo says it simply leases the technology that consumers need to take advantage of their right to access free, over-the-air TV.

Q: What issues will shape the eventual ruling? A: There are several. A: Yes, but the U. Q: Is Aereo a serious threat to broadcasters? Q: What does that mean? Q: Who supports the broadcasters? A: A lot of people were surprised when the Obama administration, through the U. Solicitor General, filed a friend of the court brief supporting their case. Q: What happens if Aereo loses the case? Cable companies began as "community antennas" services that set up antennas on tall hills in order to provide better reception to households that had trouble getting signals from a pair of rabbit ears.

When the courts ruled that these companies didn't owe broadcasters royalties, the broadcasters convinced Congress to change copyright law to require cable companies to pay. Before the ruling, many people argued that an Aereo loss could have big implications for the future of the internet economy, though it depended on how broad the Supreme Court's ruling turned out to be.

Aereo bet the company on the Cablevision decision. While that decision was officially about Cablevision's remote-storage DVR, the case had major implications for "cloud storage" services on the Internet. Services such as Dropbox and Microsoft OneDrive allow users to upload their personal files to secure private storage online. Some services, such as Amazon Cloud Player and Google Music, are specifically designed for users to store their personal music collections.

Cablevision provided the legal foundation for these services, because like the RS-DVR, these services store content only at the direction of users. Aereo supporters worried that if the Supreme Court accepted the broadcasters' arguments against Aereo, it could call the legality of services like Dropbox and Amazon Cloud Player into question.

James Grimmelmann, a legal scholar at the University of Maryland, told me in April that the broadcasters' argument was "so broad that anyone who transmits a work to a stranger or the same work to more than one person is now prima facie an infringer.

Others predicted that the Supreme Court could rule for the broadcasters without endorsing their sweeping arguments.

Instead, the court could rule against Aereo on grounds that distinguish the service from Cablevision's DVR and cloud storage services. Indeed, a number of parties filed briefs in the case urging the court to do just that. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the Aereo case on April 22, Aereo's video streaming service had a vast array of tiny antennas, each of which is rented to an individual user.

The justices seemed to suspect that this was little more than a gimmick to avoid paying fees to broadcasters. Aereo seemed to face more skeptical questions than the broadcasters did. On the other hand, the justices seemed anxious to avoid a ruling that would imperil the legal foundation of cloud computing services such as Dropbox and Amazon Cloud Music.

The justices peppered him with questions about how Aereo compares to other services. Is Aereo a cable service? Is it like a record store? Like Dropbox and iCloud?

He analogized it to the difference between a valet service and an auto dealership. In Clement's view, Aereo claims to help users manage stuff they already own, but it's really giving customers stuff they don't own. Clement also urged the justices not to worry too much about the legal implications for cloud storage. Next the court heard from Malcolm Stewart, who represented the Obama administration. Stewart echoed the broadcasters' central argument, telling the justices that there is a "distinction between the company that provides content in the first instance [like Aereo] and the company that provides consumers with access to content that they already have [like Dropbox or Amazon Cloud Player].

But Stewart refused to endorse another one of the broadcasters' arguments: that siding with Aereo would violate US obligations under international treaties. Aereo attorney David Frederick spoke last, and the justices badgered him to concede that the thousands of tiny antennas in Aereo's data centers were nothing more than a technological gimmick to avoid paying fees to broadcasters.

Frederick refused, claiming that using thousands of tiny antennas actually helped the company scale its service up quickly. The justices didn't buy it. Which is fine. I mean, lawyers do that. Frederick repeatedly emphasized that Aereo was simply renting antennas and video recording equipment to consumers.

Consumers, he said, were the ones who made copies of programs and viewed them. Therefore any liability for unauthorized copies would rest with consumers. The justices seemed extremely reluctant to overturn Cablevision, a court decision that helped to establish the legality of modern cloud computing services.

On multiple occasions, the justices asked Aereo's critics to assume hypothetically that the Cablevision decision was settled law and suggest arguments that would lead to a different result for Aereo. That suggested some justices want to rule against Aereo in a way that doesn't imperil the cloud economy more generally.

In a decision written by Justice Stephen Breyer, the court sided with the broadcasters. Some observers were concerned that a loss for Aereo would place music lockers and other cloud computing services in legal jeopardy. The majority was at pains to say that wasn't the case.

He said that he agreed with the Obama administration's view that "questions involving cloud computing, remote storage DVRs, and other novel issues not before the court should await a case in which they are squarely presented. Many of the arguments broadcasters made against Aereo could just as easily be made against conventional cloud storage services such as Google Music and Dropbox, which also transmit copyrighted content to consumers.

A legal scholar whose work was heavily cited by Justice Antonin Scalia's dissenting opinion told me in that the case will have cloud storage and consumer electronics companies "looking over their shoulders. But when asked how, it says, 'They're just different, trust us. The problem, Grimmelmann argued, is that "trust us" isn't going to be very reassuring for entrepreneurs and investors building the next generation of media technologies.

Silicon Valley needs clear rules about what's legal and what isn't. The Supreme Court didn't just fail to provide such clarity, it blew up the "volitional conduct" rule from Cablevision , the legal ruling that has served as the foundation for the cloud storage economy since If you upload a pirated movie to your Dropbox account or fill your Google Music account with pirated music, you might be guilty of copyright infringement.

But under the Cablevision decision Dropbox and Google don't have to worry.