Aereo Loses the War Before the Supreme Court

The question presented to the court was whether Aereo’s conduct, in recording and re-broadcasting over-the-air television broadcasts to individual subscribers to Aereo’s services, constituted copyright infringement.  Aereo’s service is a web-based system that permits subscribers to watch broadcast television through a web broadcast.  Subscribers are able to access available television programming by selecting a specific live broadcast from a menu on Aereo’s website.  The system will then direct an Aereo-controlled antenna to tune in to the program and transcode the broadcast for access by the requesting subscriber.  In the process, the Aereo system makes a digital copy of the over-the-air broadcast to permit streaming of the content to the subscriber.  The digital copy is only made available to the individual subscriber that requested the particular broadcast.  Am. Broadcasting Cos. v. Aereo, Inc., 573 U.S. ___ (2014).

The plaintiffs in this case are the broadcasters that transmit over-the-air television programming, along with the producers, marketers, and distributors of this content.  They sought a court’s order to enjoin the conduct of Aereo on the grounds that Aereo’s services infringe on the public performance right provided under section 106 of the Copyright Act.  Section 101 defines “public performance” to mean:

(1) to perform or display it at a place open to the public or at any place where a substantial number of persons outside of a normal circle of a family and its social acquaintances is gathered; or

(2) to transmit or otherwise communicate a performance or display of the work to a place specified by clause (1) or to the public, by means of any device or process, whether the members of the public capable of receiving the performance or display receive it in the same place or in separate places and at the same time or at different times.

17 U.S.C. § 101.

Case law over time has helped to clarify when a performance is to the “public.”  In Columbia Pictures v. Redd Horne, 749 F.2d 154 (3^rd Cir. 1984), the defendant operated a video rental and sales business.  In addition, patrons of the store could rent one of eighty five private viewing booths, permitting up to four people to view a video in the store in the booth.  The plaintiff had alleged that the private viewing booths constituted an unauthorized public performance, in spite of the defendant’s attempt to limit the number of people who could view a tape in the store.  The third circuit agreed, finding that the video store was open to the public and that it was the defendant, not the patrons, that performed the copyrighted works in the private viewing booths.

However, as technology has evolved, a separate line of cases has developed in an attempt to shield technological improvements from claims of copyright infringement.  Starting with Sony in 1984, the Supreme Court held that the VCR could be sold, even though the people purchasing the technology might use it to record copies of copyrighted materials on television, without permission or a license from the copyright holders.  Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417 (1984).[1]  In more recent years the federal courts have sided with the music industry and found infringement with certain file sharing and peer-to-peer sharing technologies, such as Napster, Grokster and Limewire, concluding that these technologies resulted in massive and wholesale infringement.[2]

The Aereo service itself is like a cloud-based VCR, in that the service permits users to request that a particular over-the-air broadcast be recorded and transmitted via the internet to the individual requesting the recording.  Aereo also went to great pains to distinguish its service from peer-to-peer sharing services by emphasizing that a user selects a broadcast he wishes to watch via the internet, and Aereo only records and directs that recording to the individual requestor, not making the copy available to any other Aereo user – even one that requests the same broadcast through the service.  Unfortunately, Aereo could not prevail on these points before the Court.  Instead, the Court found that Aereo’s service was functionally similar to community antenna television systems (“CATV”), and that Congress had specifically amended the Copyright Act to define CATV systems as copyright infringing, overturning legislatively two Supreme Court decisions holding otherwise: Fortnightly Corp.[3] and Teleprompter Corp.[4]

In each of those cases, the defendants operated a system where the defendant would collect over-the-air broadcasts from a region and transmit those broadcasts to subscribers in another broadcast market without the payment of a royalty and without a license from the copyright holders.  The Court held that these activities were outside of the scope of the Copyright Act as it stood prior to the 1976 amendments, because the CATV systems were acting more like “viewers” rather than “broadcasters” of the copyrighted content of others.  This was so, according to the Court, because the CATV system “‘no more than enhances the viewer’s capacity to receive the broadcaster’s signals [by] provid[ing] a well-located antenna with an efficient connection to the viewer’s television set.’”  Aereo, Inc., slip. op. at 6 (quoting from Fortnightly Corp., 392 U.S. at 399).  However, Congress disagreed with the conclusion of the Court and ultimately amended the Copyright Act to reach the conduct of CATV system providers, establishing a compulsory royalty regimen under section 111 of the Act.

Ultimately the Court held that Aereo was providing a service similar to the CATV systems, and, in spite of some differences that the dissent argued were significant, held that if the CATV systems were infringing, so to must the Aereo system.  However, the Court did not declare that Aereo is, in fact, a cable system, which would permit Aereo to take advantage of the compulsory licensing system established by Congress.  In a filing July 9, Aereo has apparently now taken the position that it is a cable system and is seeking a license to operate as such.[5]  Time will tell whether Aereo will be able to operate in this manner or whether Aereo will be unable to become a “legitimate” content distributor, like some other technology innovations that had originally been declared infringing.