{"id":13524,"date":"2019-07-07T13:07:21","date_gmt":"2019-07-07T07:37:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/one\/sinapse-blog\/?p=13524"},"modified":"2025-06-23T14:57:14","modified_gmt":"2025-06-23T09:27:14","slug":"american-broadcasting-vs-aereo-copyright-infringement-case-analysis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/american-broadcasting-vs-aereo-copyright-infringement-case-analysis\/","title":{"rendered":"American Broadcasting vs. Aereo – Landmark Copyright Infringement case"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post was first published on Jun 27, 2014<\/span><\/p>\n

On June 25th, 2014, the prolonged legal battle between Aereo, Inc. (Defendant) and the American Broadcasting Companies Inc. (Plaintiffs) – ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox, came to a screeching end. The US Supreme Court decided against the legitimacy of Aereo’s service on the grounds of Copyright Infringement. This is a landmark judgment in the Copyrights world since, if decided otherwise, there could have been a drastic impact on the market of television broadcasters.<\/span><\/p>\n

Aereo Inc. was founded in 2012 with\u00a0its Head Office in New York City. They offered\u00a0a service that would allow their\u00a0subscribers to view broadcast television at a menial $10-$12 a\u00a0month. A\u00a0subscriber could watch the broadcast on a cell phone or a computer and even record for viewing later.<\/span><\/p>\n

Aereo provided each subscriber with a small antenna and a server tuned the antenna to the show that the subscriber desired to watch. A\u00a0transcoder translated signals that the antenna received into data that could be transmitted over the internet. Although the streaming would run a few seconds behind the over-the-air-broadcast, it essentially served the purpose of a television broadcaster.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Plaintiffs\u00a0(American Broadcasting), who are major players in the TV Broadcasting stage, initiated the dispute and filed a suit against the Defendant (Aereo) on grounds that re-transmission of over-the-air broadcast was a violation of the copyrights on television content. They sought an injunction which was denied by the District Court and the Defendant\u00a0was given a go-ahead\u00a0to continue broadcasting.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Second Circuit affirmed the decision of the District Court. It was held that the Defendant\u2019s right to perform the Plaintiffs’ work publicly<\/strong> was within the scope of the Transmit Clause of the Copyright Act of 1976,\u00a0which gives a copyright owner the \u201cexclusive right\u201d to \u201cperform the copyrighted work publicly.\u201d The Act\u2019s Transmit Clause defines that exclusive right as inclusive of\u00a0the right to \u201ctransmit or otherwise communicate a performance . . . of the [copyrighted] work . . . to the public, by means of any device or process, whether the members of the public are capable of receiving the performance . . . receive it in the same place or in separate places and at the same time or at different times.\u201d<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

The Defendant\u00a0contended that the work actually fell within the scope of private performance<\/strong> and not public performance<\/strong> and therefore did not infringe any copyright.\u00a0In regard to public performance<\/strong> of such works, it was held by the Second Circuit Court that the Defendant’s re-transmission\u00a0was private performance<\/strong>, since it\u00a0did not just\u00a0give access to the original broadcaster\u2019s signal, but created unique copies for each customer; that the Defendant\u00a0used its own equipment which was\u00a0set up in a centralized warehouse.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Plaintiffs appealed to the Supreme Court against the Second Circuit Court\u2019s decision.\u00a0They continued to contend that the material being streamed through the antennas and watched by the Defendant\u2019s subscribers was well within the definition of public performance<\/strong> and was therefore tantamount to copyright infringement. They further contended that billions of dollars were spent to ensure that these broadcasting companies were\u00a0in line with the copyright regime and a service such as those offered by\u00a0the Defendant, which only re-transmitted the signal for a menial cost was\u00a0desired by many viewers and therefore posed a threat to companies and that online broadcasting took away the platform for advertisements.<\/span><\/p>\n

The\u00a0Defendant\u00a0stuck with its contention that the technology used to re-transmit the signal through their small antennas was built from scratch and was sent through private channels. They\u00a0emphasized that the data their\u00a0system streamed to each subscriber was\u00a0the data from their\u00a0own personal copy, made from the broadcast signals received by the particular antenna allotted to them. Their\u00a0system did not transmit data saved in one subscriber\u2019s folder to any other subscriber.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Judgment:<\/span><\/p>\n

In a 6-3 Ruling, the Supreme Court held that there was an infringement. The two questions that the Court decided to answer were, whether the manner that the Defendant\u00a0is described to operate in is performance<\/strong> at all. Second, whether this performance<\/strong> is public<\/strong>. The Supreme Court answered the questions in the affirmative and therefore held that despite the Defendant’s\u00a0case having a slight difference from the Fortnightly Corp. vs. United Artists Television, Inc.<\/em>, it still falls under the same category as that which was amended by the Congress in 1976, with\u00a0regard to the\u00a0Transmission Clause. It was therefore held that Aereo’s re-transmission amounted to an infringement\u00a0of copyright.<\/span><\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Contributed by Shreya Rajahamsa<\/strong>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The US Supreme Court\u2019s decision in American Broadcasting vs. Aereo clarified the scope of public performance and copyright infringement for television broadcasts. The judgment signals a pivotal shift in how retransmission technologies are regulated under copyright law.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":19,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,6],"tags":[10112,10113,920,31,3772,10115,10114,787],"class_list":["post-13524","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-copyrights","category-intellectual-property","tag-aereo","tag-american-broadcasting","tag-copyright-act","tag-copyright-infringement","tag-public-performance","tag-retransmission","tag-television-broadcasting","tag-us-supreme-court"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13524","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13524"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13524\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":139131,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13524\/revisions\/139131"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}