Comment by ndiddy
19 hours ago
For one example of this, around 10 years ago there was a company called Aereo that tried to act as a "cloud television provider". The idea was that they had thousands of tiny antennas hooked up to servers in a warehouse, and they would lease an antenna to each subscriber. This gave an experience similar to cable TV but without Aereo having to pay broadcasters cable transmission fees. The major broadcasters sued Aereo and ended up getting it shut down for exactly the reason you mention. Despite Aereo technically being a TV antenna leasing service, it functionally acted like a cable TV service so they were violating copyright by not paying transmission fees.
They were accused of "public performance" which doesn't make sense to the spirit of the law to begin with. Avoiding technicality via technicality is fine. They should have been allowed to run their thousands of independent servers.
The reason cable companies have to pay these fees in the first place is a narrow and somewhat pedantic argument that is entirely based on connecting multiple households to the same antenna. Which Aereo doesn't do, no trickery involved.
If there had been a style of "cable" company that used one wire and antenna per house from the start, they could have avoided these fees too. They only didn't exist because cables and antennas are expensive.
Any single person could have legally set up their own server and antenna. But Aereo building these en masse makes them a cable company instead of an antenna-building company because... vibes, basically.
The best evidence that this was a failure of justice is that they pivoted to "okay, we're cable, we'll pay the fees for a mandatory license" and got rejected for not being a cable company.
This sort of legal workaround can work (see Uber) though.
Uber avoided medallions.
I guess that proves law is not code!
It depends on how much money you have to grease the wheels.