Locast's Free TV Service Ordered To Shut Down Permanently After Copyright Loss (arstechnica.com) 39
Locast has been ordered to shut down its online TV service forever in a permanent injunction issued yesterday by a federal judge. From a report: The order came two weeks after the judge gave major broadcast networks a big victory in their copyright case against Locast, a nonprofit organization that provided online access to broadcast TV stations. Locast will have to win on appeal in order to stream broadcast channels again. Locast already suspended operations after the September 1 ruling that said it does not qualify for a copyright-law exemption available to nonprofits, so the permanent injunction doesn't change the status quo. US District Judge Louis Stanton cited a December 2019 agreement between Locast and the networks that limited the scope of the litigation and said a permanent injunction should be entered if the court determines that Locast does not qualify for the copyright-law exemption.
The deal did not prohibit Locast "from applying for a stay of the permanent injunction pending appeal, nor to bar the broadcasters from opposing any such stay," the agreement said. ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC motioned for a permanent injunction after the September 1 ruling. The judge's order yesterday said the defendants "are permanently restrained and enjoined from operating Locast" but that "entry of an injunction will provide opportunity for appeal contemplated by the agreement." Further reading: Locast, a Free App Streaming Network TV, Would Love To Get Sued (January 2019).
The deal did not prohibit Locast "from applying for a stay of the permanent injunction pending appeal, nor to bar the broadcasters from opposing any such stay," the agreement said. ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC motioned for a permanent injunction after the September 1 ruling. The judge's order yesterday said the defendants "are permanently restrained and enjoined from operating Locast" but that "entry of an injunction will provide opportunity for appeal contemplated by the agreement." Further reading: Locast, a Free App Streaming Network TV, Would Love To Get Sued (January 2019).
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Maybe if the NFL weren't so greedy/stupid/insane with their broadcasting rights we wouldn't have issues like this. If the team you follow is out of your market, good luck. You need a combination of a broadcast receiver (in-market games), NFL Sunday Ticket (broadcast black-out games), ESPN (Monday games), and Prime Video/NFL Network (Thursday games). It's a ****ing joke.
This year, I've switched from NFL Sunday Ticket at $300 to NFL Game Pass at $100. NFL Sunday Ticket is only on DirecTV and is live. NFL Game Pass is available on Roku and other streaming platforms, but isn't available until just after a game is finished playing. We never watched live football anyway; we'd start watching no sooner than an hour after the game had started and by fast-forwarding though commercials and other downtime, we'd skip an hour of non-game.
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We never watched live football anyway; we'd start watching no sooner than an hour after the game had started and by fast-forwarding though commercials and other downtime, we'd skip an hour of non-game.
To each their own, of course. I, personally, get nothing from watching it after it's over. I'd rather just know the result and watch the highlights. I'd happily pay a reasonable amount to watch it live, but that's literally not an option. I can't fathom why there isn't a "team package" where I can buy the rights to stream every game from a specific team. If it's on broadcast I'll watch it. If it's blacked out, I'll find some other way to stream it. I refuse to buy a $200/month TV/Internet package jus
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All "Broadcast TV stations" are shit, (Score:2)
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Broadcast TV is one of the few ways to watch TV without any subscription costs at all It's why it's considered one of the few ways a message can get out to the public - it requires no fees at all - just an antenna and a TV set. Same as radio.
All other methods may be better, including the cell phone alerts, but they involve monthly fees and thus may exclude a certain set of the population
So yeah, it's not any good, but then again, it reaches practically everyone and no one needs to pay any money to get it.
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Who saw it coming? (Score:2)
Further reading: Locast, a Free App Streaming Network TV, Would Love To Get Sued (January 2019).
Well... that aged like milk.
I would suggest that today's story belongs in the "be-careful-what-you-wish-for" department, rather than the "end-of-the-road" department.
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At the time, they wanted to establish precedent that their model (again, at the time) was legit.
Unfortunately, they started overlaying/interrupting ads to request donations/subscriptions from the account holders. That's where they went wrong. Five bucks a month was a friggin' steal, but it didn't matter if it was $2 or $20. Once they started charging, the networks could swoop in.
Looks like a roadmap for a do-over (Score:3, Interesting)
From the article: ""[U]nder the statute, income made from charges to recipients can only be used to defray the actual and reasonable costs of maintaining and operating the service, not of expanding it into new markets,"
referring to Judge Stanton's ruling.
This sounds like a road map for another like-minded non-profit to "do it legally."
I see at least two ways to do this:
* Either get a huge up-front donation to "get things started" with a nation-wide footprint, making "expansion" moot, or
* Create a grant-making non-profit that provides seed funding for independently-run local or regional services, with the local versions not generating any more revenue than they need to operate.
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From the article: ""[U]nder the statute, income made from charges to recipients can only be used to defray the actual and reasonable costs of maintaining and operating the service, not of expanding it into new markets," referring to Judge Stanton's ruling.
Judge Stanton may be making shit up. All non-profits use extra money to expand if they can. Red Cross buys or leases new buildings in new locations it didn't previously serve when it has the money. So does Salvation Army. Goodwill straight up BUILDS new buildings in locations it wants to serve, because it's valuable to their operations to customize the building. These are all legally nonprofits in the US. Judge Stanton appears to be inventing nonprofit criteria where none exist.
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Or maybe, unlike you, Judge Stanton knows the actual law. COPYRIGHT LAW says the fees must only cover actual expenses:
"Certain Secondary Transmissions Exempted.—The secondary transmission of a performance or display of a work embodied in a primary transmission is not an infringement of copyright if— ...
(5) the secondary transmission is not made by a cable system but is made by a governmental body, or other nonprofit organization, without any purpose of direct or indirect commercial advanta
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Apparently the judge didn't think that "deployment" was covered under "maintaining and operating". It seems that it's OK to spend non-profit income to maintain servers and other equipment ... as long as you don't first spend to deploy them!
This was an overly literal interpretation of what congress wrote and doesn't fit the spirit or intent of the law.
Maybe someone will start a locast 2.0 that uses two different income streams with one stream for deployment and another income stream for operations.
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How is it 'overly literal'? LoCast's own testimony showed they collected approx $4M from subscribers, but spent only about $2M. If they were actually deploying new servers then that would be included in the $2M. They didn't claim they were expanding NOW, they claimed they were keeping that money to expand LATER. In effect, they were charging current subscribers for service they were not getting, now or in the future.
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Note also that the restriction is not on how much money the non-profit can collect, it is on how much they can charge the users for the service. I think the 'spirit or intent' of the law is pretty clear - if you are charging a user for the service, that fee must only be what it costs to provide the service TO HIM (obviously this would be averaged out). You can not charge your current users to be able to provide service to someone else in the future. Otherwise, you are just using someone else's copyrighte
Re: Looks like a roadmap for a do-over (Score:2)
Any chance we could this judgement applied to cable TV providers?
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Cable TV providers are for profit, and they pay to carry the content. Why would a law allowing non-profits to retransmit the content without paying apply to them?
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I still don't get this ruling. By this logic, if PBS expands their market by adding new transmission towers, they're no longer a non-profit?
Locast seriously need to appeal this as far as they can go.
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This is a COPYRIGHT case. The applicable law is copyright law. Copyright law says it is not infringement for a non-profit to retransmit a signal IF any fees charged (not donations) ONLY cover the cost of maintaining and operating the service. The ruling says that the $5/mo was a fee charged to provide uninterrupted service, not a donation. That $5/mo was in excess of what it cost to maintain and operate the service, therefore they were infringing copyright.
If Locast was only accepting donations, and not
Terrestrial OTA is being displaced anyway (Score:1)
In another 20-30 years, what's left of "free OTA TV" will be religious- or other POV-pushing programming, commercial advertising, local programming, "cheap" things like "classic television programming," and some other niches like overseas programming.
Why do I say "what's left"? Because enough people see spectrum as "something to be sold off to the highest bidder". Every few decades part of what remains of the "free TV" spectrum will be sold off by the feds until there is almost nothing left. Or, at the v
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20-30? I give it 10 at the max.
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I think you're grossly underestimating how difficult it will be to kill OTA.
What else is available for free? The fact that it's free has granted it special protections in various laws because it's one of the few services available to people in poverty or who can't otherwise afford a subscription service.
What else has a service rate that's within a rounding error of 100% of the population in a service area from the moment it goes live? The fact that it reaches everyone, rather than getting 90% of the way the
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Every few decades part of what remains of the "free TV" spectrum will be sold off by the feds until there is almost nothing left.
Back in the old days, OTA broadcasters would have helped people set up community antenna systems. So they could reach more viewers living in dead spots. But once Congress passed legislation to require payments from cable companies to broadcasters, it turned the economics of the viewer market upside down. Much to the delight of the cellular network companies who want to bid on that bandwidth anyway. So if the broadcasters are demanding payments, they are just shooting themselves in the foot. OTA deserves to
nobody cares (Score:2)
streaming services are eating the traditional broadcasters lunch. All you get now on the old stuff is infomercials and born-again religious programming.
Now if we could break up the viacoms, the disneys and other content monopolies we may actually see some lower priced content, but "free" content is an outdated concept.
Also, if I'm paying for content there shouldn't be damn commercials, infomercials or anything else but the content I'm paying for.
OTA (Score:2)
Some posters above argue that OTA is becoming irrelevant.
Not quite. It's just that most of the content put out by these local stations ... isn't actually received OTA. OTA broadcasters charge cable companies and other providers two arms and two legs to carry their content. A lot of people still want to see their local stations. Partly for the local "news". Partly for sports (broadcast rights for college and pro sports are often hogtied in interesting ways to a small number of content sellers). So
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Some posters above argue that OTA is becoming irrelevant.
Not quite. It's just that most of the content put out by these local stations ... isn't actually received OTA. OTA broadcasters charge cable companies and other providers two arms and two legs to carry their content. A lot of people still want to see their local stations. Partly for the local "news". Partly for sports (broadcast rights for college and pro sports are often hogtied in interesting ways to a small number of content sellers). So, there's plenty of money in the CBS, NBC, ABC, whatever broadcasting stations. And, they'll use local news or sports or whatever they can latch onto to maintain an income stream.
In the days before cable, there was social, political, and financial pressure to make sure as many people as possible could receive the nearest OTA broadcasts. Today, the local stations can put the minimum power required by regulations into their OTA transmissions and depend on there being more than enough cable subscribers to drive income via the re-broadcast fees. Supposedly, people are finding they can't get OTA in places they could have a few decades ago.
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The FCC regulates what power the stations operate at. They can't just decide to lower their power.
Some stations are operating at a temporarily lower power (with authorization) because the FCC changed their broadcast frequency. This requires the station to do things like change the broadcast antenna. Since that is a very specific job, there aren't many people available to do it, which leads to delays in getting it done (sometimes quite lengthy delays). When they are using the wrong antenna, they must ope
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The FCC regulates what power the stations operate at. They can't just decide to lower their power.
Some stations are operating at a temporarily lower power (with authorization) because the FCC changed their broadcast frequency. This requires the station to do things like change the broadcast antenna. Since that is a very specific job, there aren't many people available to do it, which leads to delays in getting it done (sometimes quite lengthy delays). When they are using the wrong antenna, they must operate at lower power.
Stations can also have technical issues which require them to lower their power (again, only with authorization). A station I worked at in the 70s had an issue, and we reduced power to the point that basically the only antenna that could receive us was the local cable company. This was not good, as the cable company did not have to pay us at that time.
Also, the conversion to digital made it so some people could no longer receive the signal. You may be able to tolerate a snowy analog signal, digital can't. Again, no great conspiracy to force people to get cable.
Yes, I'd forgotten that the digital conversion was one of the reasons some people could no longer get a signal.
I read somewhere that stations used to often broadcast a higher than their minimum allowed level, but rarely do that anymore. I can't find any reference for or against that though.
And nothing of value was lost (Score:2)
OTA TV is pure push content. We don't need it any more.
What needs to change to allow Locast? (Score:1)
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What 'archaic law' and 'OTA mandates' are you talking about? Do you know what the case is about?
They were retransmitting signals online for FREE (Score:1)