What's Free, and What Must Be Paid For

If you take something free and resell it, are you breaking the law?

Quote :

Anyone with an antenna can pick up a TV station's signals for free. But cable and satellite companies typically pay stations and networks for the right to distribute their programming to subscribers. Industrywide, those retransmission fees add up to billions of dollars every year.

Last week, that business was shaken after a federal appeals court issued a preliminary ruling siding with Aereo, which contends that it doesn't have to pay those fees because it relies on thousands of tiny antennas.

As long as the resellers are leaving the advertisements in place, I see no violation of any law, or any loss to anyone.
But, of course, out wonderful Congress will side with the corporate whores every time.

aereo appear to be winning the case so presumably they're not breaking the law. But I would have thought you can't sell something if its owned by somebody else, even if it is 'free to use'. Broadcasters could argue they own the signals they transmit.

aereo are out to make money out of content that cost the broadcasters money to produce, so what they are doing is not much different from video piracy.

I'm all for a bit of entrepreneurship and clever ideas, but I do have a problem with people making money out of content paid for by other people - the morality and justice of the case is not black and white.

What I don't understand is, almost all of my local TV (and radio!) stations simulcast online already. Why would Barry Diller's Aereo (which I keep wanting to read as Phyllis Diller's areolas) be attractive to someone with an iPad, where's the value-added?*

As to ownership, case law has consistently held that anything released free-of-charge to the greater world is no longer yours -- the FBI can raid your trash if it's on the street, trademarks must be protected from common use, celebrities cannot prevent theur likenesses being published (as long as the accompanying stories aren't slanderous).






* - I guess this is just another case of a smart businessman figuring out how to sell something people can get for free, like bottled water (costs more than gasoline).