Court case on streaming TV threatens to cloud our online equality 

online-copyrights

American Broadcasting Services v Aereo could potentially be viewed as a human rights issue rather than a copyright dispute

It is a very big court case about a tiny object. The American broadcasting industry is ferociously interested in its outcome, not least because it might change television forever. The lumbering case of American Broadcasting Services v Aereo is currently with the Supreme Court. In a nutshell the commercial broadcasters of American network television, ABC, NBC Universal, CBS and Fox, plus assorted interested parties such as the National Football League and Major League Baseball, want the highest legal authority in the land to tell a small New York startup that it is illegally rebroadcasting their programmes.

Aereo, which is backed by, among others, the former television executive Barry Diller, says it is just another version of the local hardware and electronics store, but with tiny compressed services not big pieces of metal, and most of it takes place “in the cloud”, not on your roof. For the low fee of $8 a month Aereo will stream broadcast television to your computer or tablet or phone. It does so by using a tiny antenna which is allocated to your account, and links it to a virtual version of a recorder or DVR.

So, should you want to be exposed to more entertainment and spray tan than you can consume through your television, you can watch and record it over the internet. The head-scratch here is that broadcast television is specifically designed to be free over the airways, and Aereo says it is just doing the job of the aerial on top of your house, and the dusty DVR box under your TV. Big broadcast and its sporting partners are clear, though, that they see this as an illegal re-broadcast service which needs the kind of $3bn in licence fees the cable companies currently pay to the big broadcasters to make it legitimate.

On a foggy day, what happens in the cloud, as opposed to what happens on your roof, is pretty indistinguishable. A metaphor that is not lost, I imagine, on the collected justices chewing over the case.

The alarm that the big networks feel over this inevitable turn of technological events has resulted in a warning that, should they lose the case, free-to-air broadcasters will be forced to put themselves on cable channels only. This seems a rather tame threat given that their main source of revenue is advertising, which is powered by people watching their shows. If Aereo loses, on the other hand, even the laziest student of recent developments in digital media could tell you this will be just a temporary respite for Canute, not a change in tidal patterns; something else will surely make the impossible dream of watching Masterchef on an iPad possible.

The case is interesting for the role it might play in the shifting landscape of media business, but it also raises far bigger issues than those being addressed directly. One of the Supreme Court justices has already fretted out loud that restraining Aereo might lead to other businesses which allow you to store and retrieve documents or video and sound files being vulnerable too. Courts, even in technologically smart America, are all a little like James Thurber’s imaginary aunt, who worried that switching on the light when no bulb was in the socket would fill the room with electricity. They are generally less well placed than the average 10-year-old to tell you what is actually happening on the open web (but then the average 10-year-old does seem to devote most of their cognitive space to this knotty question).

The discussion is about copyright, but the outcome is potentially about human rights. What happens when you knowingly or accidentally create a society where only those who have money and power can distribute or access information? We have, as they say, been here before, in previous centuries, but not many of us thought we might be heading back there so soon. This is really the philosophical question at the heart of all current debates about the control of our information infrastructure. Every extra layer of copyright protection, every fumble of the net neutrality ball, every case which only considers business rather than social outcomes, is a step towards an era of information inequality.

We built broadcast networks and then the internet with the naive expectation that, in the words of Tim Berners Lee, they would be for everybody. The broadcasters and internet service providers who benefited from this vision or coincidence at the outset are no longer prepared to acknowledge that it is a core shared principle, let alone act to protect it.

Meanwhile Silicon Valley looks puzzled on the sidelines. In their world, the tiny object that threatens your enormous business is best dealt with, not by a fight in the Supreme Court, but by a rapid acquisition and a cheque for $20bn. Justice it seems, runs on money, however you cut it.
(By Emily Bell)

Source: theguardian

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