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As an end user you are allowed certain rights like fair use, viewing OTA broadcasts for free, time shifting content, etc. Your rights extend to cover the property you own.

The concept of property ownership is potent in legal reasoning. If you do things with an antenna and DVR that you own, then you are the legal entity doing those things.

If you pay a fee to a company to do those things, then both you and the company are doing those things. The legal status of the company is a service provider, which is different from an individual end user. Aereo was a service provider, but tried to assert that they were merely an extension of each subscriber's personal property. The Supreme Court said no to that interpretation.

As for society, a legal system that provides revenue opportunities for creative works encourages the flow of capital to invest in those creative works. LOST or Breaking Bad would not be possible if the companies producing them did not have some way of making money to pay back their investors.



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