Aereo's Victory: Is Streaming TV from an Antenna Legal?

Bunny ears on an iPad: Amusing, but probably not the ideal way to watch broadcast TV on your tablet. But the startup Aereo just won a court battle that could help its model of mobile TV take over the country.

In a country where most people get their TV via cable or satellite, it can be easy to forget that the local networks still broadcast their signals the old-fashioned way, from towers that spread the signal around their viewing area, allowing anyone within reach to tap that signal with an antenna. Aereo simply set up a farm of antennas in Brooklyn and charges users a small fee, currently $8 per month, to operate one of those antennas and stream local TV channels from it over the Web. An Aereo user can watch the Oscars, the NFL, or anything else that airs on network TV live on their mobile devices. Users can also record to a DVR.

You might think networks would love this, as Aereo takes signal that's publicly available and uses it to put local channels in front of more eyeballs. But the networks, many of which are developing their own streaming services, aren't happy about somebody redistributing their signals without compensating them for it, the way a cable company must if it wants to include local TV channels in its package. The argument: One person collecting a signal broadcast over the airwaves through their own antenna is fine. A business collecting signals broadcast over the airwaves and reselling them over the Internet is not.

The big media companies are bombarding Aereo with lawsuits, but the little guy is winning the early rounds in this fight. Yesterday, an appeals court in New York upheld a previous ruling that had gone Aereo's way and refused the media giants' request to shut it down; the New York Times says a trial could be up next. Bolstered by the early decisions, Aereo is moving forward with a plan to expand its service, which is currently available only in New York City, to 22 new markets around the country.

Could the courts curtail Aereo? The argument by ABC, NBCUniversal, and others is that Aereo violates their copyright. In one of the actions, they cite the "public performance" part of copyright law, which grants the owner exclusive right to publicly perform their works. The appeals court's decision wades into some murky legal questions about public versus private communications: Is Aereo's service a "public performance," as the courts have deemed cable TV to be? Or is it a private communication, like that between an old-fashioned rooftop antenna and your personal TV set?

"Unanticipated technological developments have created tension between Congress's view that retransmissions of network programs by cable television systems should be deemed public performances and its intent that some transmissions be classified as private," the appeals court writes. In other words: The Copyright Act of 1976 couldn't have foreseen a technology like Aereo's, but, given the way the law has been written and interpreted, the court refused to call Aereo transmissions "public performances" and therefore refused to rule against the startup in this copyright matter.

Still, this isn't over. One judge who dissented in the appeals court ruling called Aereo "a Rube Goldberg-like contrivance" designed to work around the spirit of the law, so the broadcast giants have plenty of points to argue in future cases.

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/how-to/blog/what-you-can-and-cant-do-with-a-broadcast-tv-signal-15297523?src=rss

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