I think that quote really shows where the organization's priorities are with respect to individual rights.

> Aereo lost 6-3, even though the dissenting justices cited Betamax from 30 years previous.

I remember that dissent (authored by the late Justice Scalia—RIP). Here’s the citation in question:

> We came within one vote of declaring the VCR contraband 30 years ago in Sony [v. Universal]. The dissent in that case was driven in part by the plaintiffs’ prediction that VCR technology would wreak all manner of havoc in the television and movie industries.

> The Networks make similarly dire predictions about Aereo. We are told that nothing less than “the very existence of broadcast television as we know it” is at stake. Aereo and its amici dispute those forecasts and make a few of their own, suggesting that a decision in the Networks’ favor will stifle technological innovation and imperil billions of dollars of investments in cloud-storage services. We are in no position to judge the validity of those self-interested claims or to foresee the path of future technological development.

I wouldn't take Aereo as a guide to how justices would reconsider the Betamax case were it heard de novo. Aereo's business model was to redistribute over-the-air broadcast TV, and it was arguing that its technical implementation was technically not violating any laws. This cast it into the creative reinterpretation of law scenario that tends to lose out in court.

I even have a VHS VCR that does this automatically. It’s fascinating - once the recording is done it rewinds and watches the show at high speed, when it sees something in the signal that indicates that an ad was spliced in it marks the start and end. Then when playing back it fast-forwards over the commercials.

It worked brilliantly, back in the days of analog cable TV.

No it didn’t. You could skip ads with the remote at set intervals (notably, TiVo did not let you auto skip the ad even though they could have, but put 15 or 90 second intervals you could customize on the remote to get past the ads very quickly, but it recorded them). ReplayTV, which did more directly skip ads (via its remote, not via recording IIRC), was sued out of existence.

Dish’s Hopper actually DID do ad-free recordings and it was sued too (but there was eventually a settlement), not just for skipping the ads but for distributing the same copy of a recording to multiple users over a server. Cablevision, likewise, was sued (but settled) over the fact that it had a cloud DVR network that allowed the same copy of a recording to be available to multiple people, rather than storing X-Copies of the recording on their servers.