VCR’s Past Is Guiding Television’s Future

[Commentary] Broadcast television as we know it now stands on two legs: advertising and retransmission fees from cable providers. With Hopper skipping ads and Aereo allowing for distribution over the Internet without payment, profits might go dark. But the legal cases also seem to defy a kind of common-sense logic: how can insurgents use programming created by someone else to their own ends without sharing revenue? The answer could get very complicated, very fast, but let’s try to make it simple.