![\"Copyright\"](\"http:\/\/www.digital-digest.com\/blog\/DVDGuy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/04\/copyright.gif\" "\\"Copyright\\"")
<\/p>\nWelcome to another WNR. It’s getting colder here where I am, winter is certainly\u00a0coming (in the southern hemisphere). Makes it just that much harder to get work started, especially on a Sunday.<\/p>\n
Let’s get started anyway.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
![\"Aereo](\"http:\/\/www.digital-digest.com\/blog\/DVDGuy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/aereo_array.jpg\")
<\/a>Aereo’s dime sized antennas – smart or too clever for their own good?<\/p><\/div>\n
Trying to abide by copyright laws in the digital age can be tricky. Or rather, there are some tricky ways you can try to obey the letter of the law, if not\u00a0exactly in\u00a0spirit. Which is what Aereo’s business model seems like to me –\u00a0completely legal (as tested in court, twice already), but\u00a0does not quite pass the smell test.<\/p>\n
For those that don’t know, Aereo allows subscribers to stream TV channels to their mobile devices, and even record programs to a cloud based DVR. Aereo gets around the “problem” of paying for a broadcast or re-transmission license by providing each\u00a0subscriber with their own dime sized TV antennas,\u00a0and each antenna is only used to provide content to one unique subscriber. So instead of broadcast or re-transmission, there’s a 1-to-1 relationship between each received signal and streamed or recorded content. It’s\u00a0a technically sound and legal solution, but it’s seems to me like a\u00a0ridiculous solution intended to be used as\u00a0a loophole, and not a genuine piece of innovation.<\/p>\n
Still, the only outcome I would want to see in the much publicized Aereo Supreme Court case<\/a> is a victory for the start-up. With the lower courts and the appeals court already siding with Aereo, the Supreme Court would have to set new precedent, and do so in an incorrect way (not the first time with this court), to side with big business interests (again, not the first time with this court).<\/p>\n ——<\/p>\n Going to the cinemas and not get accosted by law enforcement is getting harder and harder these days it appears. While\u00a0wearing a pair of Google Glass to the cinema (even if it is turned off, and only using it as normal\u00a0prescription glasses) might be the very definition of asking for trouble<\/a>, having a brick slider phone in your pocket is surely not going to attract any trouble, right? Well, an elderly woman in Provo Utah was not so lucky,\u00a0accused of trying to record a movie with her “classic” phone<\/a> and thrown out into the street for her troubles.<\/p>\n Is a slider phone like this a dangerous movie piracy tool?<\/p><\/div>\n The woman says the phone was in her pocket after her husband left half way through the movie and handed it to her. She was also using a closed captioning device, which may have been mistaken for recording equipment by whoever dobbed her in.<\/p>\n For me, even if she had been recording the movie on her phone,\u00a0as long as it’s not disturbing other cinema goers,\u00a0is it really such a big deal. The quality of the recording on a handheld phone, especially a classic slider style brick (probably only has a recording resolution of 640×480), is no threat to studios worried their films will end up online. The fact that the police officers who arrived to throw her out apparently did not find anything incriminating on the phone suggests no recording took place anyway.<\/p>\n So it looks this is a case of\u00a0more collateral damage in the paranoid driven War on Piracy. Going to the cinemas has never been so dangerous, and it almost makes you wanna, I don’t know, download the movie and watch it at home or something. I mean, that’s what the studios are trying to achieve right? To scare people from going to the cinemas and making piracy look like the more attractive choice? No?<\/p>\n Sony has issued the strongest indication yet that\u00a0physical media may be on the way out. The company wrote down nearly a quarter of a billion dollars worth of assets in its\u00a0disc manufacturing business, including Blu-ray manufacturing, due to slowing demand. You can blame Netflix for that, I guess.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n