Those Who Insist Aereo Ruling Won’t Impact Cloud Computing Don’t Seem To Understand Cloud Computing

Grazed from TechDirt. Author: Editorial Staff.

A few weeks ago, we wrote about how the Aereo case, which will be heard by the Supreme Court in a few weeks, is likely to have a huge impact on the future of cloud computing, and went into detail to explain why. The primary issue is that, under copyright law, what Aereo is doing is effectively indistinguishable from what most cloud computing services do. However, a number of folks who really seem to dislike Aereo continually insist that the case will have no impact whatsoever on cloud computing. Variety’s Todd Spangler recently wrote a typical version of this argument, basically waving off the issue based on the idea that Aereo more or less feels different from Dropbox. But that fundamentally ignores the actual copyright issues at stake.

Matt Schruers has a blog post up at the Project Disco blog pointing out why this "cloud denialism" by the anti-Aereo crowd is both dangerous and misleading. It includes the money line that a bunch of folks have been quoting: "The only unifying characteristic I’ve discerned among the deniers is that none of them are actually in the business of providing cloud services."…

Indeed, a bunch of companies and organizations that actually are involved in cloud computing businesses have weighed in on the case, warning how a ruling against Aereo might create serious problems for their businesses. The issue, again, is very narrowly focused on what is a "public" performance when transmitting a single copy of a file to an individual in their home. The problem with the broadcasters’ position is that they want to declare that transmitting multiple copies of a single work magically makes something "public," even if each transmission is a unique copy that is transmitted only to the requesting subscriber. But that’s the same way cloud computing works, and it would create a massive headache…

Read more from the source @ http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140330/23341526739/those-who-insist-aereo-ruling-wont-impact-cloud-computing-dont-seem-to-understand-cloud-computing.shtml

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