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Supreme Court Grants <i>Cert</i> in <i>Aereo</i> Case

By J. Alexander Lawrence, David S. Brown
February 28, 2014

On Jan. 10, 2014, the Supreme Court granted the petition for a writ of certiorari filed by the major broadcast networks, as well as other copyright holders, requesting that it overturn a Second Circuit decision regarding whether Aereo Inc., which “streams” broadcast television over the internet to subscribers without paying any retransmission fees, infringes those broadcasters' copyrights. ABC v. Aereo, Inc., 187 L. Ed. 2d 702 (U.S. 2014). [Editor's Note: The SCOTUS blog has a page with the latest developments on the case, at http://bit.ly/1k7h2bo.] Along with the Supreme Court's decisions in Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417 (1984) and MGM Studios Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd., 545 U.S. 913 (2005), Aereo may turn out to be one of the most important copyright decisions since enactment of the Copyright Act of 1976, with potential wide-ranging ramifications for the television industry and the fast-growing cloud computing industry.

What Aereo Does

Aereo provides a cloud-based service that enables its subscribers to watch or record, via broadband Internet access, television broadcast programming that would otherwise be available over-the-air using an antenna. For example, Aereo offers New York City residents access to the more than two dozen digital broadcast channels available in New York City with an antenna, including each of the major networks, and various independent networks.

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