A Supreme Court showdown was inevitable for Aereo, the TV startup that charges a monthly fee to let users stream live broadcast TV to their mobile devices and even DVR over-the-air programming. This morning Aereo lost its legal showdown against major broadcast corporations in a 6-3 decision, which could not only doom the service but have far-reaching consequences on the future of streaming media and cloud services.
The legal issue at hand has been whether what Aereo does—setting up farms of tiny antennas to capture over-the-air TV signals, then transmit those signals to its users—constitutes a public or private performance under copyright law. Essentially, you have the right to consume copyrighted works privately, such as when you listen to an album in your home. But you're not supposed to put on public performances, such as bootlegging a concert and then selling tickets for people to come see it.
Aereo's argument had been that it obtains over-the-air signals—which is legal—and transmitted those signals to individual home, which is hardly a "public" performance. But SCOTUS didn't buy it.
A few choice quotes from the decision:
•"Considered alone, the language of the [Copyright Act of 1976] does not clearly indicate when an entity "perform[s] (or "transmit[s]" and when it merely supplies equipment that allows others to do so. But when read in light of its purpose, the Act is unmistakable: An entity that engages in activities like Aereo's performs."
•"The fact that each transmission is to only one subscriber, in Aereo's view, means that it does not transmit a performance "to the public." In terms of the Act's purposes, these differences do not distinguish Aereo's system from cable systems, which do perform "publicly." Viewed in terms of Congress' regulatory objectives, why should any of these technological differences matter? They concern the behind-the-scenes way in which Aereo delivers television programming to its viewers' screens. They do not render Aereo's commercial objectives any different from that of cable companies."
•"We conclude that when an entity communicates the same contemporaneously perceptible images and sounds to multiple people, it transmits a performance to them regardless of the number of discrete communications it makes. We do not see how the fact that Aereo transmits via personal copies of programs could make a difference."
And from the dissent by Justice Scalia:
•"The Networks sued Aereo for several forms of copyright infringement, but we are here concerned with a single claim: that Aereo violates the Networks' "exclusive righ[t]" to "perform" their programs "publicly." ... That claim fails at the very outset because Aereo does not "perform" at all. The Court manages to reach the opposite conclusion only by disregarding widely accepted rules for service-provider liability and adopting in their place an improvised standard ("looks-like-cable-TV) that will sow confusion for years to come.