Is it OK to re-distribute free-to-air television?

I was wondering does anyone have any good links on the topic of downloading and re-distributing free-to-air broadcasts of tv shows? As a technologist when I look at the problem I want to say that as long as the following conditions were met that it could be alright, those conditions being:

1. The content in question is available free-to-air like the content on local ATSC broadcasts (e.g. stuff on local ABC, NBC, WB, CBS affiliates).

2. The content was not tagged with the broadcast flag.

3. The content was not stripped of the advertising that was in with the content at broadcast time.

I am not a lawyer, and personal experience has taught me that just because something is rational does not mean its legall (this is an unfortunate truth) so there is a good chance I am wrong; but with that being said lets review why I think the above conditions would make sense:

1. Anyone within the range of the broadcast could have received that content free of change, if they happened to be within range of the broadcast.

2. The content owner did not label/tag the content as having special constraints;  one common example today is major league sports, broadcasters license the rights to broadcast these events on a specific medium from the content owners, the content owners license different mediums to different folks so when its sent over these different mediums the content is tagged telling the relying party on the content it has more restrictive rights than normal.

3. Broadcasters pay for content based on their promises to advertisers, that promise being exposure to N or more potential customers by leaving the advertisements in that promise is kept.

I suppose things get a bit harry when you look at the whole global nature of the internet, for example content owners will license the content to re-broadcast content in different countries. If one was to re-broadcast content outside of the country of its original airing one would potentially be removing a opportunity for the content owners (bad, we need content).

Again, I am not a lawyer (you can tell from my posts can't you) but in principal it seems that this would be OK; I should pop a mail/comment over to Wendy Seltzers blog and she tell me how wrong I am .

Print | posted on Tuesday, October 09, 2007 7:08 PM