Fox Loses Yet Again Against Dish Autohopper; Appeals Court Ignores Silly Aereo Argument
from the innovation-allowed dept
Some good news on the innovation front. Following on Fox's big initial loss in trying to stop Dish's Autohopper DVR feature, an appeals court has upheld the ruling. The main issue? Fox completely failed to show how an injunction is necessary to stop "irreparable harm." The court is pretty sure that any "harm" would be quite "reparable." There isn't much analysis -- the court just clearly is not convinced. Beyond saying that the district court didn't make any legal errors in issuing the original ruling, the appeals court notes that the service has been available for a while already, kinda disproving the whole "irreparable harm" argument.Here, the district court found that Fox’s lack of evidence that the complained-of technology, available for several years, had yet caused Fox’s business any harm weighed against Fox’s argument that it would be irreparably harmed absent a preliminary injunction. In so finding, the district court did not hold Fox’s evidence to a more rigorous standard than our law requires and so did not abuse its discretion.Perhaps more importantly, the court totally and completely ignored Fox's ridiculous attempt to argue that the Aereo ruling supports its position. That was a crazy argument from the very beginning, and clearly attempted to stretch the whole "looks like a duck" test beyond the breaking point. As Dish had pointed out in its response, Aereo lost because it didn't have licenses. Dish has licenses, so it's not even close to being relevant. The court appears to have treated it with the amount of respect Fox's argument deserved: none.
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Filed Under: autohopper, dvr, networks, place shifting, primetime any time
Companies: aereo, dish, fox
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FOX misread the Supreme Court opinion
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Again.
Bad dog, er Fox!
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Mike,
It's hard to imagine how your analysis could be any more sophomoric. Are you seriously arguing that the appellate court didn't touch the Aereo argument because they were giving it "the amount of respect" it deserved? Do you really think that's how these things work?
The actual reason the appellate court didn't touch the Aereo argument was because Fox was challenging the district court's standard for irreparable harm. Fox's likelihood of success on the merits of its Aereo argument wasn't the issue on appeal. So it's not like the appellate court ignored it because it just didn't think much of the argument. It ignored the argument because it was irrelevant to the actual issue before the court.
Care to offer a substantive response?
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No real basis in law reasoning given yet widely available in it's vagueness to be applied nearly anywhere that the incumbents want to argue or attempt to stop anything they don't give their economic blessing to.
Yet another landmark screw up decision ranking right in there with Citizens United decision.
Increasingly the government and it's branches are showing just how out of touch it is with its citizens it's supposed to support.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Does_the_Fox_Say
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I apologize if my comment was unclear. Mike is arguing that the Ninth Circuit simply ignored Fox's argument on the merits about how Dish is infringing under the holding in Aereo. This is silly because it wasn't just Fox that argued Aereo helped; Dish argued that Aereo supported its arguments on the merits as well. The Ninth Circuit didn't mention the Aereo arguments from either side because it limited its review to the primary question on appeal, which was whether the district court used the correct standard for the irreparable harm analysis. So it's not just that the Ninth Circuit ignored Fox's arguments about Aereo, it ignored Dish's arguments about Aereo as well. And it ignored them all because the issue squarely on appeal was irreparable harm, not the merits.
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What a bunch of morons.
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Railed to pass the "looks like a Fox" test.
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proof positive
Perhaps now all the chicken littles screaming that sky was falling can sit back, relax, have a coffee and chill.
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