Times media reporter David Carr has a great piece on the Aereo case
One excerpt:
Aereo may be small — Mr. Diller called it “a pimple” — but it represents something mighty important. If Aereo is allowed to store and transmit signals without payment, the television industry will be profoundly reconfigured.
And this reconfiguration can’t come a second too soon. Telecom law is insanely complicated I’m sure, and probably ad hoc as all get out, but how the court could find that a scheme that lets you use a public good (the airwaves, granted via licenses by the government) is infringement, and also that retransmission fees and other behaviors of cable and network are in the consumers’ interest, is beyond me. It’s also an interesting case to see how a court that is sometimes seen to be pro-big business, will deal with a mouse (or as Barry Diller would say ‘a pimple’) that roars.
I agree with Carr, although Aereo may not be the case that rejiggers the industry, it’s at a minimum the “save the date” postcard. Their days are numbered. Some of us are not unhappy about that.
A Few Reasonable Words 