The good, the bad and the Aereo

[Commentary] Some initial thoughts on the Aereo decision:

1. It seems pretty remarkable, given how Aereo came to be in the first place, that the only mention of the Cablevision remote-DVR case in the court’s 6-3 ruling comes in the dissent.
2. Legal scholar James Grimmelmann told the website Vox “the reasoning of Cablevision is dead.” How long before the broadcasters’ decide to test that proposition by going after cloud DVRs?
3. Bad cases make bad law, and Aereo is a case in point. Notwithstanding its self-conscious pose as a champion of (now martyr to) innovation, there was nothing particularly innovative about what Aereo did or how it did it, apart from the legally innovative workaround to copyright law on which it based its business model.

[Sweeting is Principal, Concurrent Media]