American Broadcasting Cos. v. Aereo, Inc. (573 U.S. 431)
U.S. Supreme Court · decided June 25, 2014 · Supreme Court Database (Spaeth)
- Citation
- 573 U.S. 431 · 134 S. Ct. 2498
- Decided
- June 25, 2014
- Term
- October Term 2013
- Vote
- 6–3
- Majority author
- Justice Breyer
- Issue area
- Economic Activity
- Disposition
- Reversed and remanded
- Outcome
- Petitioning party won
- Ideological direction
- Conservative
Opinion excerpt
Justice BREYER delivered the opinion of the Court. The Copyright Act of 1976 gives a copyright owner the "exclusive righ [t]" to "perform the copyrighted work publicly." 17 U.S.C. § 106(4). The Act's Transmit Clause defines that exclusive right as including the right to "transmit 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 capable of receiving the performance ... receive it in the same place or in separate places and at the same time or at different times." § 101. We must decide whether respondent Aereo, Inc., infringes this exclusive right by selling its subscribers a technologically complex service that allows them to watch television programs over the Internet at about the same time as the programs are broadcast over the air. We conclude that it does. I A For a monthly fee, Aereo offers subscribers broadcast television programming over the Internet, virtually as the programming is being broadcast. Much of this programming is made up of copyrighted works. Aereo neither owns the copyright in those works nor holds a license from the copyright owners to perform those works publicly. Aereo's system is made up of servers, transcoders, and thousands of dime-sized antennas housed in a central warehouse. It works roughly as follows: First, when a subscriber wants to…
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