> To me, it seems like the Court is hung up on how similar the end result is to the cable providers', even though the means are different. Not just the modern

> To me, it seems like the Court is hung up on how similar the end result is to the cable providers', even though the means are different. Not just the modern cable providers, the historical CATV analogy is much tighter. The original cable entrepreneurs served valley communities that couldn't get OTA signals. They put up giant antennas at the top of the valley and cables from there to individual houses below. The broadcast television industry tried to destroy those companies using very similar arguments as in this case, and the Supreme Court sided with the CATV companies (Fortnightly Corp. v. United Artists Television, Inc., 392 U. S. 390 (1968) and Teleprompter Corp. v. Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc., 415 U. S. 394 (1974)) But those decisions were a matter of statutory interpretation, not constitutional law. Such decisions are always subject to be overruled by Congress, and that's exactly what happened in 1976 with the The Copyright Act of 1976. In passing that law, Congress specifically intended to overrule the earlier Supreme Court cases. Aereo's technology might be slightly different, but if you can't run a passive cable from an antenna to a subscriber's house which is perhaps the most straightforward possible arrangement, it's hard to see how anything along these lines is going to pass muster. It's easy enough to blame the Supreme Court and accuse them of not understanding technology, but it is Congress that specifically went out of its way to advantage broadcast companies in this way. The fault and solution lies there.