Aereo, Secrets, and the United States Supreme Court

I'm was having trouble with the logic of why the Supreme Court decision on a case involving a distributor of television services, should have an impact on cloud computing.  It turns out, Aereo is a cloud-based service distributing television programming, in a way that cable companies cannot.  Cable pays for the right to rebroadcast, which is the way Congress intended in 1976.  This curious case is described very simply in an accompanying video in the electronic version of the Wall Street Journal in analysis provided by Villanova law professor Michael Risch.  [http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304049904579517722557177420?mg=reno64-wsj]

Risch seems to think the case will come down to an issue about how Aereo segregates the streams of data, which may amount to an effort to skirt the copyright laws.

But, the odd thing about it was the Supreme Court decided cable companies could do the same thing.  Congress debated whether new technology had overcome the 1909 Act and began discussions in 1955.  It just took them until 1976 to pass something they could all agree to, and it appears to coincide with the decision running against the television industry.  If that seems like a long time, think about how much technology has changed since 1976.  Besides clouds, we didn't have an Internet then.

We all have seen the pronouncement at the beginning of a television show - I notice it on sporting events, where it is very clear- that a person cannot retransmit a show.  But there is another issue, the Wall Street Journal article approaches:

"Because Aereo is a cloud-based service, the justices questioned whether the logic of the broadcasters' arguments would imperil popular and established cloud services like Dropbox and AppleInc's iCloud that give users online access to stored documents, pictures, music and other files."  

I admit to a twinge when reading that part.  I don't want to have to store all my music on my own system.  I do store documents there, but not all of them I have. I watch some events from TV on my iPad, and got to thinking how it was that Apple could store that for me, when I pay Verizon for my service.   What about that iPod music?  

Now we get to the real set of problems this kind of case brings up.  But, the one that sticks with me most is why we let laws stay on the books since 1976, and 1909 before that, without a change to update them for modern technology.  The world of networks is full of these things.  

The Copyright Law is a mess, and trying to solve it one little step at a time, laying on the Court to get a solution to a piece of this large pie, is a travesty of government inefficiency.  It is one of the big secrets of the day.  It affects what can be protected as proprietary information of businesses, our personal information on various electronic devices, and the government to secure information provided to it.  Because it hasn't been fixed, we continue to allow information that should be protected to float around in the ether of clouds, without any possibility of protecting something of mine, even something I own.  [See
http://www.amazon.com/Keeping-Secrets-Military-Business-Threaten/dp/1484131487/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1398274807&sr=1-2