Locast Shuts Down, As Yet Again A Bad Interpretation Of Copyright Law Makes The World Worse

Locast Shuts Down, As Yet Again A Bad Interpretation Of Copyright Law Makes The World Worse

3 years ago
Anonymous $BH0TGXkyPe

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210930/14261847669/locast-shuts-down-as-yet-again-bad-interpretation-copyright-law-makes-world-worse.shtml

A few weeks ago I woke up one day to find the Lake Tahoe region on fire and the New York region underwater. Meanwhile the Supreme Court had just upended decades if not centuries of Constitutional law. But I could learn about none of it from watching local news because Locast had shut down overnight following a dreadful decision by a district court a few days before.

Locast was a service similar to the now-extinct Aereo, although with a few critical legal distinctions necessary for it to avoid Aereo's litigation-obliterated fate. But the gist was the same: it was another rent-an-antenna service that "captures over-the-air ('OTA') broadcast signals and retransmits them over the internet, enabling viewers to stream live television on their preferred internet-connected viewing device" [p. 1-2 of the ruling]. And, like Aereo, it is yet another useful innovation now on the scrapheap of human history.