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NEW YORK (AP) — The Supreme Court dealt Internet startup Aereo a major setback on Wednesday in ruling that the television-over-the-Internet service operates much like a cable TV company. As a result, the service violates copyright law unless Aereo pays broadcasters licensing fees for offering TV stations to customers' tablets, phones and other gadgets.

Aereo was still operating Wednesday afternoon without paying such fees, as the U.S. District Court in New York must still implement the Supreme Court's findings. But Aereo's options are limited. The ruling may also affect other Internet services, though the Supreme Court did try to limit the scope of its decision.

Here's a closer look at the ruling and what it means for Aereo and Internet users.

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Q: What does the ruling say?

A: Aereo streams television shows to customers in New York and 10 other markets. It has claimed that the service is legal because each customer is temporarily assigned an individual antenna about the size of a dime, so it's akin to customers putting up their own antennas on rooftops. By contrast, cable systems typically have one antenna serving thousands of customers in an area.

The Supreme Court rejected Aereo's argument, saying that it acts like a cable system. Aereo's use of individual antennas, the court says, "does not make a critical difference." As a cable system, the court says, Aereo must pay the same retransmission fees that broadcasters demand from cable and satellite TV providers.

Q: Why is Aereo still operating?

A: Although the Supreme Court expressed its thinking on the law, it's the lower court that must issue a preliminary injunction stopping the service, as requested by broadcasters. That could take a few weeks. It's not guaranteed that the lower court will halt Aereo's operations, but it's very likely.

Once an injunction is issued, broadcasters must prove copyright infringement during a trial. Because it's now likely that broadcasters will ultimately prevail, Aereo might simply decide to shut down. Even then, broadcasters might still decide to pursue the case and seek damages, possibly as a message to future entrepreneurs contemplating video services that don't involve licenses.

Q: What's the big deal? Couldn't Aereo simply pay the licensing fees and continue to operate?

A: Yes, although broadcasters and Aereo would have to negotiate the amount. Disputes over fees have frequently resulted in channels temporarily disappearing from various cable and satellite lineups. Broadcasters aren't likely to offer Aereo friendly terms, especially if doing so would alienate the cable and satellite providers from which broadcasters already generate much more revenue.

It's also not clear whether Aereo can really afford it. Aereo's service starts at $8 a month, which is much cheaper than cable. The company spends much of that on equipment such as antennas and computers, along with leasing indoor and outdoor space to house all that. If Aereo starts paying fees to broadcasters, monthly subscription rates would likely have to go up significantly— the way cable bills have steadily increased over the years.

Q: What will Aereo do?

A: In a statement, Aereo CEO Chet Kanojia vowed to "continue to fight for our consumers and fight to create innovative technologies." However, he didn't offer specifics. The statement also said nothing about how long Aereo plans to keep operating and whether it will offer refunds if it shuts down.

In a spring interview with The Associated Press, Kanojia insisted the company had no backup plan, but had assets it could sell off, such as the technology powering the service.

Q: What does this mean for other Internet video services?

A: Licensed video services such as Netflix and Hulu won't be affected at all. This case is about content that hasn't been licensed, and it might discourage future entrepreneurs from experimenting with unlicensed services, even if they are ultimately legal under fair use or other aspects of copyright law.

"Anyone who wants some degree of certainty about the legality of the business needs to make sure content holders get paid, not just in broadcasting, but in other areas of the marketplace as well," says Bruce Ewing, an intellectual property lawyer at Dorsey & Whitney.

There might be cases where unlicensed content is legal, he says, but "who's going to invest money in this?"

Q: What about other Internet-based services, such as Dropbox, Google Drive and others that let you store content online?

A. Aereo and its supporters had warned that a ruling against Aereo could kill other Internet-based storage services because, like Aereo, they store digital copies of content and deliver it to customers on request.

The Supreme Court tried to limit the scope of its ruling by saying that context matters. For instance, it isn't necessarily illegal for a service to store content that the customer actually owns, which is the case with many Internet storage services. And if distribution is limited to just relatives and a small social circle, that likely doesn't count as a public performance that violates copyright law.

"Trouble is, any time the Supreme Court acts, its actions have effects and implications that extend well beyond the case," says Harry Cole, a communications regulations lawyer at Fletcher, Heald & Hildreth. "No matter what the justices say, lawyers read these cases and try to figure out what exactly is being said."

In other words, the Supreme Court offered some guidance but left a lot open for future lawsuits.

TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — China has sent its first ever ministerial-level official to Taiwan for four days of meetings to rebuild ties with the self-ruled island that Beijing claims as its own.

Protests in Taipei had set back relations earlier this year — and Zhang Zhijun had to go around scores of anti-China demonstrators to enter a hotel for the talks — but he said he was very happy to be the first Taiwan Affairs Office minister to visit the island.

"To reach Taiwan from Beijing I flew three hours, but to take that step took no less than 65 years," he said in remarks opening the meeting with his counterpart Wang Yu-chi.

China has described the trip as a chance for Zhang to understand the island better. Analysts say he will likely keep a low profile as he travels around Taiwan through Saturday, avoiding strong political statements during scheduled chats with students, low-income people and a figure in Taiwan's anti-China chief opposition party.

China and Taiwan have been separately ruled since the Chinese civil war of the 1940s. China sees the island as part of its territory that eventually must be reunified — by force if necessary — despite a Taiwanese public largely wary of the notion of Chinese rule.

In 2008, Beijing set aside its military threats to sign agreements binding its economy to that of the investment-hungry island.

Dialogue opened that year as Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou agreed to put off political issues to build trust and improve the island's economy through tie-ups with China's much larger one. The two sides have signed 21 deals, boosting two-way trade to $124.4 billion last year and bringing in about 3 million mainland tourists, who were once all but banned.

The easing in tensions across the Taiwan Strait has been welcomed by Washington, and its top diplomat for East Asia, Daniel Russel, said the U.S. was watching Zhang's visit with interest.

"We welcome all steps forward on cross-Strait relations that are acceptable to the people on both sides," Russel told reporters in Washington.

But in March, hundreds of student-led protesters forcibly occupied parliament in Taipei to try to stop ratification of a two-way service trade liberalization pact between the mainland and Taiwan. The 24-day action dubbed the Sunflower Movement spiraled into the thousands, many of whom demanded an end to Taiwan's engagement with China, which they still see as an enemy.

On Wednesday Zhang compared China-Taiwan relations to taking a boat upstream.

"If it doesn't go forward, it goes backward," he said.

The two men discussed details of establishing first-ever consular-style offices to help to investors and tourists. They also agreed to renegotiate minor clauses of the services trade pact after it takes effect.

Despite the protests, Taiwan's parliament is expected to ratify the deal, although it's not clear when that would happen.

Taiwan says it will make no announcements during the visit, and the main opposition party says it will not organize protests against Zhang, though smaller protest groups are vowing to follow him. More than 100 scuffled with supporters at the airport and clashed with a column of police at the hotel, leaving one activist injured.

"Amid all these tensions this particular visit obviously is important in terms of trying to soothe sentiments and trying to stabilize relations," said Dali Yang, a China expert at the University of Chicago. "Any representative from the mainland, going to Taiwan, I think the best they can do is to try to stabilize relations."

But the lack of big protests doesn't mean that more Taiwanese want closer ties with China, analysts say.

"The best one could say is that a muting of protests would reflect a maturing of attitudes in Taiwan, and a greater willingness to listen and to express concerns in a less confrontational way," said Alan Romberg, East Asia Program director at The Stimson Centre, a Washington-based think tank. "But it would not mean that those concerns have disappeared."

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Associated Press writers Gillian Wong in Beijing and Matthew Pennington in Washington contributed.

WASHINGTON (AP) — When John Maguire was a CIA officer in Beirut in the late 1980s during that country's bloody civil war, he spent weeks living in safe houses far from the U.S. Embassy, dodging militants who wanted to kidnap and kill Americans.

"We moved all over the city, and we would not sleep in the same place two nights in a row," Maguire said.

In Iraq in 2014, by contrast, CIA officers have been largely hunkered down in their heavily fortified Baghdad compound since U.S. troops left the country in 2011, current and former officials say, allowing a once-rich network of intelligence sources to wither. Maguire and other current and former U.S. officials say the intelligence pullback is a big reason the U.S. was caught flat footed by the recent offensive by a Sunni-backed al-Qaida-inspired group that has seized a large swath of Iraq.

Iraq is emblematic, they say, of how a security-conscious CIA is finding it difficult to spy aggressively in dangerous environments without military protection. Intelligence blind spots have left the U.S. behind the curve on fast-moving world events, they say, whether it's disintegration in Iraq, Russia's move into Crimea or the collapse of several governments during the Arab Spring.

"This is a glaring example of the erosion of our street craft and our tradecraft and our capability to operate in a hard place," said Maguire, who helped run CIA operations in Iraq in 2004. "The U.S. taxpayer is not getting their money's worth."

The CIA declined immediate comment, but allies in Congress and some former agency officials strenuously dispute the criticism, saying that the intelligence community provided plenty of warning to the Obama administration that the insurgent Islamic State in Iraq and Levant, known as ISIL, could move on Iraqi cities.

"This was not an intelligence failure — this was a policy failure," said Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., chairman of the House intelligence committee.

However, while U.S. intelligence officials predicted that ISIL would attempt to seize territory in Iraq this year, they did not appear to anticipate ISIL's offensive on June 10 to seize Mosul, which created a momentum that led to other successes. Officials also expressed surprise at how quickly the Iraqi army collapsed. And military leaders contemplating quick airstrikes said there was not enough intelligence to know what to hit.

A senior U.S. intelligence official who briefed reporters this week acknowledged that "a lot of the (intelligence) collection that we were receiving diminished significantly following the U.S. withdrawal in Iraq in 2011, when we lost some of the 'boots on the ground' view of what was going on." Under rules for such briefings, the official spoke on condition that her name not be used.

In the same briefing, the official disclosed that U.S. intelligence did not know who controlled Iraq's largest oil refinery. And she suggested that one of the biggest sources of intelligence for American analysts is Facebook and Twitter postings.

The U.S. spent nearly $72 billion on intelligence gathering in 2013, and the CIA station in Baghdad remains one of the world's largest. But the agency has been unwilling to risk sending Americans out regularly to recruit and meet informants.

It was telling that President Barack Obama sent 300 special operations troops "to help us gain more intelligence and more information about what ISIL is doing and how they're doing it," Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said — an implicit admission that American intelligence-gathering about ISIL has been insufficient.

No one suggests that the CIA carries all the blame. After American troops left Iraq, the State Department abandoned plans for a huge diplomatic staff at a network of facilities.

Kevin Carroll, a former CIA operations officer with Middle East experience, said it's unreasonable to expect the agency to collect "from a fortified war zone embassy the breadth and depth of information collected when U.S. military bases and troops throughout Iraq helped support CIA operations."

But for Maguire and other former intelligence officials, it's clear the CIA has allowed its espionage muscles to atrophy.

CIA officers lived in well-guarded bases all over Iraq during the U.S. occupation, and met frequently with Iraqis. But even then, it wasn't traditional spying. Often, agency operatives would travel to meet sources in highly visible armed convoys. They knew that the U.S. military was somewhere over the horizon if things went wrong. And security concerns often left case officers confined to their bases, several former CIA officers said.

The agency operates the same way in Afghanistan, where it is also closing a series of remote bases as the U.S. troop presence there draws down. Intelligence collection there is expected to suffer as well.

The CIA's approach is designed, current and former officials say, to prevent the sort of thing that happened in 1984, when Beirut station chief William Buckley was kidnapped from his apartment by Hezbollah and tortured to death. But bases can also be attacked, as in 2012 in Benghazi, Libya, when two CIA contractors were among four dead Americans.

Other intelligence services accept more risk. In Israel's Mossad intelligence agency, most case officers operate outside of embassies, posing as civilians under what the U.S. calls "non official cover," said Ronen Bergman, who covers intelligence affairs for Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth and is working on a history of the Mossad.

In countries such as Iran where Israel does not have an embassy, the Mossad sends deep cover operatives to live and gather intelligence, knowing they could be executed if discovered, Bergman said.

But Israel can call upon a large population of native Arabic speakers whose appearance allows them to blend in. U.S. intelligence leaders have been talking for years about the need to recruit non-white case officers and train them in difficult languages, but current and former officials say it just hasn't happened at the level anticipated after 9/11.

The intelligence budget document leaked last year by Edward Snowden shows that after 11 years of war in Afghanistan, just 88 people in civilian U.S. intelligence agencies got bonuses for speaking Pashto, the language of the Taliban and its allies.

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

Hachette Book Group has agreed to buy the Perseus Books Group, continuing a wave of consolidation in the publishing world that includes HarperCollins' acquisition of Harlequin earlier this year and the Penguin-Random House merger last year. Perseus' client services arm (that is, its distribution services for smaller presses) will be sold off to the distributor Ingram Content Group. Hachette's big sellers tend to be blockbuster fiction – recent hits include Robert Galbraith's The Silkworm and various James Patterson thrillers. Perseus, on the other hand, is a trade publisher with a strong nonfiction backlist and imprints including Basic Books, DaCapo and PublicAffairs. The New York Times reports that the sale will strengthen Hachette in its fight with Amazon, citing the publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin, who said it would make the company less dependent on those fiction best-sellers. Shatzkin notes: "The business they are best at is the highest-risk business, and this would give them a more stable and diverse base. In one fell swoop this broadens them enormously."

In Zoetrope, Lena Dunham writes about discovering Alice Munro: "I came to Alice Munro after her Nobel Prize win, like a girl discovering Maroon 5 circa 2014 and deciding they are an indie band. Because, new as I am to her, and sure as we all are that she is the queen of her form, I still feel that Alice Munro is mine."

"[T]he field of Yiddish linguistics is filled with an intensity that often leaves the tourist astonished." That's from Tablet, which reports on the "character assassinations, pseudonymous academic hits, accusations of lunacy, and denials of the existence of the Jewish people" that have come to populate the field.

Lambda Literary reports that Nancy Garden, trailblazing lesbian children's book author and free speech advocate, has died at the age of 76. Although she wrote dozens of books, Garden is best known for her lesbian coming-of-age novel Annie on My Mind, copies of which were burned by angry parents in a Kansas City school district. The book also was the subject of a First Amendment lawsuit after it was taken off school shelves. In an interview, Garden said she wrote it because "when I was in my teens and beginning to realize that I was gay, I hunted in vain for books that would help me understand who and what I was. The little I found was almost entirely negative. Encyclopedia articles said I was sick, evil, doomed to a lonely miserable life. There were no books for kids, and the few I found for adults were gloomy or tragic — lesbian characters committed suicide, were sent to mental institutions, died in car crashes, or turned straight."