re: Aereo: How can anyone argue this is anything other than theft?

The television stations, and networks broadcast their signal for reception by anyone who has the appropriate antenna. In the 1970's people bought satellite dishes to receive the network signals as they bounced off satellites. The networks responded by encrypting their signals to protect their content. To this day it is illegal to access encrypted content without payment.

This is the same type of situation. The local stations continue to broadcast their signal for local reception. Aereo does nothing more than receive those unencrypted signals and then convert the signals to another frequency for redistribution to specific devices with antennae for the redistribution frequency within a household.

If the local stations are concerned about protecting their content, then they should do what the networks did over 30 years ago and encrypt their signals to restrict access.