[HN Gopher] A $795M analogy: Locast, broadcast copyright, and th...
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A $795M analogy: Locast, broadcast copyright, and the fall of big
antenna
Author : bluecheese33
Score : 62 points
Date : 2021-09-17 13:20 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ravik.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (ravik.substack.com)
| enzanki_ars wrote:
| What infuriates me the most about this ruling is that long term
| effects of it. Locast did what they did and inserted ads every 15
| minutes because they knew nobody would not contribute to hosting
| costs without some reason. Had they made it so it was
| interruption at the start only, _maybe_ it could have held up
| better in court. And I agree on that front. Remove the donate
| video from showing every 15 minutes, and only show it at the
| start. Encourage funding through better on screen messages and
| make it more clear that it's voluntary.
|
| But the big part of the ruling was that it wasn't just how they
| requested funding, but the why. The ruling argued that collecting
| funds to expand more throughout the US was not valid for their
| non-profit status for some reason that made no sense. And as a
| result, it appears that a replacement will never exist, because
| the cost of pulling all of these channels with careful and
| specific antenna placement in a city, the hardware to pull all of
| those channels in real time, re-encoding the feed from MPEG2 to
| HLS/MP4 for the web, potentially making different qualities to
| account for network conditions (can't remember if the M3U8
| playlists from Locast did that or not), and the networking costs
| of transmitting video are expensive.
|
| And the lawsuit was stupid too. US TV channels are crammed to the
| max with advertisements, so much so that it feels more like an ad
| delivery mechanism than an entertainment delivery system. Locast
| could have been advantageous as they would have actual data of
| who is watching what when and where. Ad companies love that data,
| and with traditional OTA feeds, they don't have that. Instead,
| all of these OTA companies actively refuse offering the ability
| to watch their streams online for free. Other than local news
| content, everything else is locked behind a paywall of having an
| active cable subscription. Why should I, as a consumer, pay $100
| a month to watch this same OTA content, just so I can watch it
| online, especially for a medium so jam packed with ads?
|
| I live in the edge of Columbus, Ohio in an apartment. I'm still
| within 10 miles of the transmitters for the big 6 stations (the
| local affiliates of ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, CW, and PBS collectively
| only use 4 transmitters.). My apartment is luckily facing sort of
| line of site to most of those transmitters. But even then, I
| still have bad signal issues with those channels, and in some
| cases leading to an unwatchable recording. The signal was bad
| enough that my recording of the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Opening
| Ceremonies was bared by loss of 2 to 5 seconds of video and audio
| every 2 minutes. My only alternative was to play $65 to $100 a
| month to cable or cordcutting subscription to watch that
| broadcast online. And out of spite for continuing to shutdown any
| free way to watch their OTA content online, I will _never_ pay.
| Our laws regarding OTA broadcasts and how people can use and view
| them need to change ASAP, otherwise what is the point of having
| them if is not accessible to all.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > actively refuse offering the ability to watch their streams
| online for free
|
| They probably have exclusivity contracts with the cable
| providers. They're sliding into irrelevance already, but will
| probably make their services completely available on the
| internet a few years after their slide into total irrelevance
| is complete.
| LocalH wrote:
| Regulatory capture at its finest. I presume you're aware of
| retransmission consent, the mechanism that allows local
| stations (whether network-owned or not) to demand payment for
| carriage of their signal, that carries 90% or more content that
| the station does not own, but merely has license to broadcast.
| This would be fine if most stations weren't part of large
| station groups that own dozens of stations. These large station
| groups demand higher and higher fees from operators (and both
| sides of every argument are always presented as "[the other
| side] wants to take your [network] away because they [want too
| much/won't pay enough], call them to demand they stop doing
| that", when the average person who would see those messages
| does not have the knowledge to understand how it works, because
| they quite rightly have more important things to worry about).
|
| The networks can be shitty to their non-owned-and operated
| stations too. The long-term local ABC affiliate got shafted a
| few years back. They'd been an affiliate since 1969. ABC
| demanded a substantially larger amount of money to renew the
| affiliation than they had in the past. The station initially
| tried to negotiate the amount down, ABC refused to budge. After
| careful consideration, the station decided to nonetheless agree
| to ABC's demands. After all that, ABC still turned around and
| basically said "nah, forget it" and went with their direct
| competitor in the market, who already operated the CBS
| affiliate. ABC and CBS are now subchannels of the same
| broadcaster, who happens to be owned by one of the larger
| station groups. The networks do this because it gives the
| stations more leverage to demand more from operators, and the
| station groups have more capital than smaller independently-
| owned stations. The networks also directly benefit, as the
| stations in the larger, more flagship markets tends to be
| network owned and operated (O&O). A station group that says "we
| own X number of stations and unless you pay us more money,
| we'll restrict your carriage of _all of them_ " has a lot more
| pull than a company that owns one station.
|
| There is actually a choice, but it's on the broadcaster's end.
| A station can elect to choose "must-carry" status, where the
| operator transmits the signal with no compensation (which
| generally only applies to a station's primary subchannel), or a
| station can demand payment for retransmission.
|
| If cable was invented today, the networks would have it shut
| down in a hot minute.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| _The ruling argued that collecting funds to expand more
| throughout the US was not valid for their non-profit status for
| some reason that made no sense._
|
| The law granting them the exception from copyright law that
| would have allowed them to stream in the first place strictly
| limited the way funds could be raised and spent by entities
| claiming the non-profit exemption.
|
| The law is several decades old, and predates the internet. It
| wasn't the subject of regulatory capture by the cable
| companies, who were in their infancy when the law was first
| passed.
|
| Locast chose not to operate like a non-profit, and made a
| profit on their streaming services, in violation of the law.
| It's really that simple.
| enzanki_ars wrote:
| Edit: Not a lawyer, and what follows is intended to be more
| of outlining my understanding and trying to ask clarification
| on what I'm clearly missing. Sorry if it sounds a bit
| defensive. Just a very strange lawsuit, specifically in how
| the service was forced to shutdown instead of being allowed
| to continue to operate.
|
| Isn't that a valid use of the non-profit status? That as long
| as the funding from donations was going towards that
| expansion only, it can still be considered a non-profit?
| Looking at the quick Wikipedia definition, that seems to be
| the case, if you consider Locast's mission is to provide
| retransmission of OTA broadcasts to all people in the US.
|
| > "A second misconception is that nonprofit organizations may
| not make a profit. Although the goal of nonprofits isn't
| specifically to maximize profits, they still have to operate
| as a fiscally responsible business. They must manage their
| income (both grants and donations and income from services)
| and expenses so as to remain a fiscally viable entity.
| Nonprofits have the responsibility of focusing on being
| professional, financially responsible, replacing self-
| interest and profit motive with mission motive." [1]
|
| PBS is also a non-profit, but PBS does something similar in
| that certain content is locked behind their "PBS Passport"
| subscription. If this ruling that requiring donations view
| without interruption, then PBS is also violating non-profit
| status based on your statement regarding "Locast chose not to
| operate like a non-profit." But Locast attempted to resolve
| that and remove the interruptions entirely, but was still
| required to completely shutdown and was given 0 chance to
| adjust... My understanding about hte reasoning for shutting
| down is that using collected funds, via any means, expansion
| across the US isn't allowed for some questionable reason
| under the section of the law Locast was using.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonprofit_organization#Man
| agem...
| gamblor956 wrote:
| 1) This isn't about their 501 non-profit status, it's about
| their use of the non-profit exemption for re-transmission
| of copyrighted materials through a service that would
| otherwise be classified as violating copyrights.
|
| 1) No, it's not a valid use of the money under the
| restrictions of the non-profit exemption from copyright for
| re-transmission. The law is quite clear on this point:
| revenues derived from the violating service _must not
| exceed_ the actual costs of providing that service.
| Expansion costs are not related to the costs of providing
| _existing_ service, therefore they are not permitted under
| the exemption.
|
| 3) PBS is not even remotely the same thing, because it's
| not the non-profit status that is at issue. PBS _owns and
| /or licenses_ the content they broadcast and stream, so it
| does not need an exemption from copyright laws. Locast does
| not own or license the content it streams, so it does need
| the exemption, and it violated the explicit requirements
| for the exemption it needed.
|
| 4) _But Locast attempted to resolve that and remove the
| interruptions entirely, but was still required to
| completely shutdown and was given 0 chance to adjust
| Historically, using someone 's IP without their permission
| resulted in statutory damages, and Locast should consider
| themselves lucky they're not on the hook for those, as
| statutory damages for copyright law can be as much as
| $150,000 _per violation* for willful violations of
| copyright law. * Tech was able to get away with the ask for
| forgiveness business model for 3 decades, but generally the
| law does not operate on "ask for forgiveness" basis. It's
| irrelevant that they got "0 chance" to adjust since the
| onus was on them to plan their activities in a way that
| complied with the law.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| I like how much of this is due to ever-racheting copyright laws
| that America never, ever asked for - laws that were almost
| certainly passed in response to seemingly endless campaign
| donations.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| _CHIEF JUSTICE SCALIA: But his question is, is there any reason
| you did it other than not to violate the copyright laws?_
|
| It's awesome how Aereo's efforts to _obey the law_ are what the
| court didn 't like.
| tyingq wrote:
| For anyone that was using it personally, and was sad to see it
| go:
|
| I had a decent experience switching to using the Tablo Dual Lite.
| It's a local TV tuner and DVR. Mine has 2 tuners, but they also a
| 4 tuner device.
|
| It does, unlike Locast, require fiddling around with an antenna,
| but I guess the upside is that nobody can sue it into oblivion.
|
| It does require a subscription for the guide ($5/month) and for
| the built-in commercial skip (another $5/month), which isn't
| terrific. But, the UI and the DVR seem more polished than what I
| was getting using Locast with Stremium (cloud DVR) before. It
| does take a few seconds to tune into a channel also, which can be
| annoying.
| magwa101 wrote:
| Here's another one, I rent a movie online and have only 24/48
| hours to watch it. Where does that come from??
| kmeisthax wrote:
| This article is making the engineer's mistake regarding reasoning
| about copyright infringement and the law.
|
| The courts do not care _how_ the copy was made, they care about
| what markets the copying would allow someone to get into. "Cloud
| DVRs are OK but only if the kernel, filesystem, and hardware take
| great pains to ensure separate physical storage locations for and
| no compression on each customer-created copy" is absurd and no
| judge is going to go for that.
|
| No, the courts aren't saying "if you waste a bunch of money on
| extra hard drives, you can infringe copyright", either. Their
| concern is providing a demarcation line between "things the
| customer has done with your service" and "things your service
| provides on it's own". Yes, this line is going to be fuzzy, but
| it's fuzziness has nothing to do with how the bits are stored. It
| has to do with the context of the markets in which works are
| ordinarily sold.
|
| >I originally thought the strangeness of digital copyright
| outcomes reflected a lack of technical literacy in the courts.
| But for the most part, I find the Aereo discussion shows general
| digital competency, and an appropriate aesthetic disgust for the
| "identical bits are different" problem.
|
| Remember how after the Napster lawsuit, everyone was parroting
| the thought-terminating cliche "the law needs to catch up to
| technology"? Yeah... no. In reality the law is almost always
| three steps ahead of technology, because the law is written in a
| programming language that executes what you intended to write,
| not what you actually wrote.
| zerocrates wrote:
| Engineer-types certainly do try to loophole their way around
| the law in a way that's not how the law actually works, but
| this article is not really engaging in that I don't think (for
| one, it calls out the practice).
|
| _Cablevision_ is absolutely by its terms hugely reliant on the
| nitty-gritty technical details of how the DVR service there
| worked. The court had to kind of wind itself up in knots to
| work around the existing _MAI v. Peak_ precedent (copies to RAM
| are actionable infringing copies) and the fact that the service
| existed just to make these copies, so it gets very in the weeds
| on how things are stored and the amount of time things are in
| buffers and so on.
|
| Ultimately, it's probably true the most important thing was
| that Cablevision were an established player in an existing,
| uncontroversial market and they were making an iteration on the
| already allowed and understood "time-shifting" recording
| systems. But other players in the market shouldn't really be
| faulted for taking the court at its word that the details
| actually mattered. Sometimes they really do!
|
| _MAI v. Peak_ , mentioned in the article and above in my
| comment is a great example of that: the 9th Circuit holds that
| a computer copying the OS into RAM is a "copy" for the
| Copyright Act, thanks to the statutory definition of a work
| being "fixed." Result: a repair technician violates copyright
| by turning on the computer because he doesn't have a license.
| This is kind of the polar opposite type of decision to, say,
| Aereo's case: it's actually quite disruptive but hinges more on
| the literal definitions in the law and things like the computer
| not being on already, thus requiring the "copy" to be made.
| Congress actually changed the Copyright Act to counter this
| decision but in an extremely specific way, so the general
| "stuff in RAM is fixed and therefore a copy" principle remains
| and comes up often.
|
| Aereo lost because they would upset the applecart of
| retransmission fees, Locast similarly though for nominally
| quite different reasons. It can be quite difficult to tell in
| advance if you're going to get a "letter of the law" decision
| from the courts or something more results-oriented, even from
| the same court.
|
| An often-unappreciated wrinkle is the more or less total
| dysfunction of Congress leading to court decisions taking on
| ever more importance. The courts themselves aren't blind to
| this, leading probably to more results-oriented decisionmaking
| than there might be otherwise.
| laserlight wrote:
| > "Cloud DVRs are OK but only if the kernel, filesystem, and
| hardware take great pains to ensure separate physical storage
| locations for and no compression on each customer-created copy"
| is absurd and no judge is going to go for that.
|
| Reminds me of Aereo, the company that rented remote antennas to
| customers so that they can stream over the Internet what their
| antennas captured. Supreme court decided that they were
| violating copyright law [0].
|
| [0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/06/supreme-court-
| pu...
| laserlight wrote:
| I just noticed that Aereo was already part of the discussion.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| To put it in other terms it didn't fall, it was slammed to
| the ground.
| bluecheese33 wrote:
| Thanks for the read (post author here)!
|
| As I mentioned, I am willing to admit that I came into this
| expecting to find technical illiteracy, and I didn't find much.
| I agree that the mindset to look for hacks and oversights in
| laws is a naieve engineer tendency.
|
| > No, the courts aren't saying "if you waste a bunch of money
| on extra hard drives, you can infringe copyright", either.
|
| I agree no court wants this, and I didn't intend to imply
| otherwise in the post. Regardless, as a result of these cases,
| this is the current state the DVR industry is in as I
| understand. Wasting money on storage does insulate you from
| infringement, and people do it to be safe.
|
| > a programming language that executes what you intended to
| write, not what you actually wrote
|
| This is a great analogy. It does clearly get more complex when
| the court is executing "what you would have intended had you
| known about the internet" though.
|
| Edit: On,
|
| > The courts do not care how the copy was made
|
| In Cablevision, they did for two reasons:
|
| 1. To figure out whether buffering was copying, which is a very
| technical discussion. See the footnote on MAI Systems
|
| 2. To figure out WHO was making the copy, for the volition
| based infringement test
|
| My point here is that it really does get into the technical
| weeds. I know your point was mostly to just dismiss the
| deduplication discussion, which is reasonable. If one of my
| posed problems made it to court, the court would probably just
| do the "right thing". However, since they haven't made it to
| court yet, companies don't necessarily want to be the first to
| gamble on it.
| rektide wrote:
| It's possible that the courts/law are so absurd that they could
| be wrong. Rarely is that considered.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| In theory, that's what the legislature is for.
|
| In practice, the process for this is completely broken, so we
| have a system where the judicial branch pretends to divinate
| intent from the tea-leaves of legislation, even when it's
| clear that there could not possibly have been any informed
| intent because major relevant details were simply not known
| at the time.
|
| It's not great, but it's better than a system where the
| judicial branch just does anything it wants.
|
| All this said, instant communication and computers almost
| certainly introduced better forms of judicial and legislative
| process that haven't been experimented with because of
| inertia. I wouldn't volunteer our system as the guinea pig,
| but I hope that somebody gets around to experimenting with
| this, because our system sucks hard in a bunch of ways that
| seem like they are probably fixable.
| madars wrote:
| > Since congress included [the non-profit] exemption, presumably
| there is some way to qualify for it, otherwise it wouldn't exist.
|
| Puffer is probably that: https://puffer.stanford.edu/
| projektfu wrote:
| I think the issue is that the public hasn't been invited to
| participate in the discussion of what we want copyright law to
| look like in a very long time. Considering the last major change,
| the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, was 23 years ago,
| and essentially written by the industry and never seriously
| debated in the public interest, I don't have good hopes for the
| future in this area.
|
| I think the Supreme Court is going to continue to rule that neat
| hacks are not really going to get you out of what the law says,
| but also that the "content producers" are not going to be able to
| arbitrarily restrict a reasonable service as in the Cablevision
| case.
|
| What the public really wants is a way to enable the thing they
| want without either exorbitant costs or heavy annoyances. We're
| not getting that because the system is not set up for automating
| micropayments or microdonations and the big operators are writing
| all the rules. For example, if I pay for a streaming service and
| listen only to one obscure band, I would expect that my monthly
| fee would go to them. Instead it goes to the top 100 and a tiny
| fraction goes to my obscure band, who really don't benefit at all
| from being on the service. If I had a micropayment platform, my
| consumption could be going to that band with a fraction going to
| support the platform.
|
| In other words, record companies are killing music, and it's
| legal. That's what we need to fix.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| _In other words, record companies are killing music, and it 's
| legal. That's what we need to fix. _
|
| Record companies are paying for the music. It takes a lot of
| money to produce tracks. Most artists never get enough fans or
| sales to pay off the investment the record company made in
| them, so the hits very much pay for the failures.
| shadilay wrote:
| The world no longer needs conglomerate record companies.
| Their antiquated business model is not a valid reason
| government should step in to protect them. The barrier to
| entry for artists making and releasing/monetizing music has
| never been lower. The artists can just make music at home and
| bootstrap themselves, no investment needed.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| Artists have always been able to make music and perform by
| themselves. But all of that other stuff needed to make it
| big is expensive (marketing, paying for venues, logistics,
| recording and producing masters, distribution, etc.), and
| few artists have the trust fund money needed to handle
| those costs themselves.
|
| Even Justin Bieber, Lorde, and Billy Eilish depended on
| record labels to actually _profit_ from their music, though
| they all broke out on social media platforms on their own.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > The artists can just make music at home and bootstrap
| themselves, no investment needed.
|
| The barrier has never been lower indeed, but it's _the
| barrier to get started_ and it 's still easily a many-
| thousand-dollars affair - a good recording and Soundcloud
| isn't everything you need to make money, especially not on
| a scale you'll be able to make a living from. Production of
| physical media (especially currently en vogue vinyls) is
| expensive plus there is a very real "inventory risk" (aka,
| the risk of being stuck with a truckload of vinyls no one
| wants to buy). Events and concerts are expensive AF to set
| up if you want more than your local community center or
| pub, touring is even harder to pull off (and the bigger the
| venue the more expensive the upfront, non-refundable costs
| go).
|
| Most small cover and indie bands barely make ends meet,
| most work full-time jobs to finance their band hobby and
| spend sometimes their entire weekends and vacation time
| because they have to do lighting, rigging and sound system
| setup themselves wherever they get a gig. And corona has
| raided everyone's funds dry.
|
| Not to say big studios aren't a bunch of unscrupulous,
| exploitative vipers _because they are_ , but unfortunately
| their business model is far from dead.
|
| (Source: know people still in this business, did myself a
| stint as a stagehand and as a renter of my small scale
| sound/light setup a couple years ago)
| shadilay wrote:
| A few thousand dollars is no barrier for someone with a
| regular job and music for a hobby. As for vinyls and
| other physical products artists can always take
| refundable preorders. Not everyone can or should be a
| full time professional artist. Nor is the the role of
| record companies to decide what the public likes.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I sympathize with the guy who had line-of-sight issues. Or anyone
| who lives in a multi-unit building, or far from the Big Antennas.
|
| However, I just got an antenna ($80) and had it installed on my
| roof. 40 miles or so to Twin Peaks' antennas, no obstacles. Boom:
| 800 channels (some paywalled), many in languages other than
| English.
|
| Next is to roll my own DVR. Should be easy, right?
| nickysielicki wrote:
| Look into TVHeadend for this with xmltv for epg. It's awesome.
| I'm more into enigma2 because most of what I consume is DVB-S,
| but for ATSC you can't beat TVHeadend.
| flatiron wrote:
| i pay for plex (it was $75 when i got it years ago) and it has
| a very good dvr and hd homerunner support. it is closed source
| for profit but runs well on linux
|
| i was using locast as my "antennae" until weeks ago. my wife
| refuses to let me put an antennae on the roof or inside for
| aesthetics so its back to cable card from the darn cable
| company.
| kesslern wrote:
| It's not as good as a roof antenna, but attic antennas are a
| decent option.
| techsupporter wrote:
| > I sympathize with the guy who had line-of-sight issues. Or
| anyone who lives in a multi-unit building, or far from the Big
| Antennas.
|
| > However...
|
| I don't mean to be uncharitable, but the "however" you wrote is
| doing a lot of the work here. A lot of people are saying that
| Locast is pointless or not a big deal because, well, _they_ put
| up an antenna and it worked so no problem.
|
| Except that it is a problem. I used Locast from the day it
| became available in Seattle because, try as I might, I could
| not get reception from all of the TV channels. Standalone
| house, apartment, low to the ground, high up, didn't matter.
| There are three broadcasting sites in Puget Sound and the best
| I could do was 1 reliable, 1 iffy, and 1 not at all.
|
| > Should be easy, right?
|
| Should be, but isn't if you can't get signal. Locast offered
| that signal (Comcast charges about $19 a month for the
| privilege of having a plan with just local channels but also
| charges $19 a month as a broadcast channels surcharge) for a
| nice donation.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| > "I don't mean to be uncharitable, but the "however" you
| wrote is doing a lot of the work here"
|
| You are, though. I'm so sorry this happened to you. It must
| be awful for you. I'll try to never mention anything good
| that happened to me, ever again.
| pxl wrote:
| For $80/yr the Channels DVR is a great option
| https://getchannels.com/plus/. I'm using it along with a
| HDHomeRun and it just works great!
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