A divided Supreme Court has sided with the broadcasters in their lawsuit against streaming video startup Aereo. A 6-3 decision reverses an earlier ruling by a federal appeals court that Aereo did not violate broadcasters’ copyright. This end result is that Aereo is effectively illegal in the eyes of SCOTUS.
Here is the PDF of the court’s opinion.
The majority of the court agreed with CBS, FOX, ABC, and NBC that Aereo — which takes freely available over-the-air signals and transmits them over the Internet to paying users is indeed publicly performing the networks’ copyrighted content.
“[B]ehind-the-scenes technological differences do not distinguish Aereo’s system from cable systems, which do perform publicly,” reads the majority opinion.
The ruling remands the broadcasters’ lawsuits back to the lower courts, but the decision by the Supremes means the company can no longer successfully argue that the service they provide is no different than putting an antenna on the roof of your building.
Justices Breyer, Roberts, Kennedy, Ginsburg, Sotomayor and Kagan were in the majority on this opinion, while Justices Scalia, Thomas and Alito dissented.
Writing for the dissenters, Scalia states that the broadcasters failed to prove that Aereo does any public performing of the copyrighted content.
“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,” writes Scalia.
We’ve reached out to Aereo for comment and will update if we hear anything in response.
More to come.
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