Welcome back to Legal Geek. This week, we review the impact of this week's Supreme Court decision that killed one cord cutting option called Aereo.
The Supreme Court always releases a high number of decisions in June at the end of their annual term, and the complex intellectual property cases always seem to be left to this time period. One of the most notable decisions came down this week, as the Aereo service was confirmed to be copyright infringement by the Supreme Court.
For those unfamiliar with Aereo, this was a subscription service that allowed users to watch over-the-air television broadcasts by intercepting the signals with miniature antennae. Basically, a user decided what program he wanted to watch and Aereo opened access to the channel by sending the intercepted antennae signal to the user's device. Effectively, this was a cord-cutting system because it allowed for live and cable programming to be viewed without a cable or satellite TV subscription.
The 6-3 majority opinion held that the transmission of these intercepted programs to user devices was enough to qualify as a public performance of those programs, which is one of the rights that copyright protection includes. Just because the programs were individually transmitted in a passive manner on an individual by individual basis, this was deemed by the court to be analogous to a performance of the program through an individual conduit to many users (which would more clearly be improper under copyright precedents). On this point, I think that common sense won the day.
Thus, Aereo will be shut down, which all 9 justices agreed should happen, even though the dissent disagreed on the grounds for shutting this down. The Court explicitly stated that this case does not decide whether copyright infringement occurs with cloud computing or remote storage DVR's, so this really just shuts down the most illegitimate of the cordcutting services. And of course, this decision has no effect on the more popular services like Netflix and Amazon Prime, which pay royalties to stream the programs delivered to subscribers. Indeed, Aereo could make the same negotiations and stay in business, should it choose to continue on the right side of the law.
Bottom Line: Cordcutting and cloud computing live on, while Aereo will not in its current form. Much like the aftermath of the Napster decisions in the music industry, we still appear to be headed toward a great place for consumers of live and recorded television and films.
Thanks for reading. Please provide feedback and legal-themed questions as segment suggestions to me on Twitter @BuckeyeFitzy or in the comments below.
Thus, Aereo will be shut down, which all 9 justices agreed should happen, even though the dissent disagreed on the grounds for shutting this down. The Court explicitly stated that this case does not decide whether copyright infringement occurs with cloud computing or remote storage DVR's, so this really just shuts down the most illegitimate of the cordcutting services. And of course, this decision has no effect on the more popular services like Netflix and Amazon Prime, which pay royalties to stream the programs delivered to subscribers. Indeed, Aereo could make the same negotiations and stay in business, should it choose to continue on the right side of the law.
Bottom Line: Cordcutting and cloud computing live on, while Aereo will not in its current form. Much like the aftermath of the Napster decisions in the music industry, we still appear to be headed toward a great place for consumers of live and recorded television and films.
Thanks for reading. Please provide feedback and legal-themed questions as segment suggestions to me on Twitter @BuckeyeFitzy or in the comments below.
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