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"  A Supreme Court showdown was inevitable for Aereo, the TV startup that charges a monthly fee to let users stream live broadcast TV to their mobile devices and even DVR over-the-air programming. This morning Aereo lost its legal showdown against major broadcast corporations in a 6-3 decision, which could not only doom the service but have far-reaching consequences on the future of streaming media and cloud services. The legal issue at hand has been whether what Aereo does\u2014setting up farms of tiny antennas to capture over-the-air TV signals, then transmit those signals to its users\u2014constitutes a public or private performance under copyright law. Essentially, you have the right to consume copyrighted works privately, such as when you listen to an album in your home. But you&amp;#039;re not supposed to put on public performances, such as bootlegging a concert and then selling tickets for people to come see it. Aereo&amp;#039;s argument had been that it obtains over-the-air signals\u2014which is legal\u2014and transmitted those signals to individual home, which is hardly a &amp;quot;public&amp;quot; performance. But SCOTUS didn&amp;#039;t buy it. A few choice quotes from the decision: \u2022&amp;quot;Considered alone, the language of the [Copyright Act of 1976] does not clearly indicate when an entity &amp;quot;perform[s] (or &amp;quot;transmit[s]&amp;quot; and when it merely supplies equipment that allows others to do so. But when read in light of its purpose, the Act is unmistakable: An entity that engages in activities like Aereo&amp;#039;s performs.&amp;quot; \u2022&amp;quot;The fact that each transmission is to only one subscriber, in Aereo&amp;#039;s view, means that it does not transmit a performance &amp;quot;to the public.&amp;quot; In terms of the Act&amp;#039;s purposes, these differences do not distinguish Aereo&amp;#039;s system from cable systems, which do perform &amp;quot;publicly.&amp;quot; Viewed in terms of Congress&amp;#039; regulatory objectives, why should any of these technological differences matter? They concern the behind-the-scenes way in which Aereo delivers television programming to its viewers&amp;#039; screens. They do not render Aereo&amp;#039;s commercial objectives any different from that of cable companies.&amp;quot; \u2022&amp;quot;We conclude that when an entity communicates the same contemporaneously perceptible images and sounds to multiple people, it transmits a performance to them regardless of the number of discrete communications it makes. We do not see how the fact that Aereo transmits via personal copies of programs could make a difference.&amp;quot; And from the dissent by Justice Scalia: \u2022&amp;quot;The Networks sued Aereo for several forms of copyright infringement, but we are here concerned with a single claim: that Aereo violates the Networks&amp;#039; &amp;quot;exclusive righ[t]&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;perform&amp;quot; their programs &amp;quot;publicly.&amp;quot; ... That claim fails at the very outset because Aereo does not &amp;quot;perform&amp;quot; at all. The Court manages to reach the opposite conclusion only by disregarding widely accepted rules for service-provider liability and adopting in their place an improvised standard (&amp;quot;looks-like-cable-TV) that will sow confusion for years to come. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/tv/a11973/aereo-has-lost-its-supreme-court-case-16925333/>