Articles Posted in Must-Carry/Retransmission Consent

In a 6-3 decision released this morning, the Supreme Court didn’t just rain on Aereo’s parade, but drenched it. For a case involving fairly convoluted points of law, the Supreme Court’s decision is surprisingly straightforward: if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, no amount of technology will change the fact that it is a duck.

At this early stage of the case–keep in mind this was just about whether an injunction against Aereo should have been issued by the lower courts for one specific type of copyright infringement–the question before the Court was whether Aereo’s system “performs” broadcasters’ copyrighted works, and whether that is a “public” performance. If so, Aereo’s operations infringe on broadcasters’ copyrights in that programming. Aereo’s argument in response was that since its system does nothing until activated by a subscriber, and even then only transmits a single private copy to that subscriber, Aereo was not involved in generating public performances.

The Court strongly disagreed, finding that an essential purpose of Congress’s passage of the Copyright Act of 1976 was to make clear that transmissions of broadcast programming by third-parties to the public (e.g., cable systems) create public performances that implicate copyright law. Specifically, the Court noted “the [Copyright] Act is unmistakable: An entity that engages in activities like Aereo’s performs,” and “the fact that Aereo’s subscribers may receive the same programs at different times and locations is of no consequence. Aereo transmits a performance of petitioners’ works ‘to the public.'”

Aereo’s argument that it is just a renter of receiving equipment fared no better, with the Court stating: “We conclude that Aereo is not just an equipment supplier and that Aereo ‘performs.'” Of note for those concerned about whether an Aereo decision for broadcasters might affect the public’s ability to store other data in the cloud, the Court agreed with the brief filed by the Department of Justice that there is an important distinction between members of the public storing their own content in the cloud and those using the Internet to access the content of others, finding that a transmission to “the public” for purposes of implicating the Copyright Act “does not extend to those who act as owners or possessors of the relevant product.”

However, the most interesting aspect of the decision is that the Court is far more hostile to Aereo than even the 6-3 vote would indicate. Some of the strongest arguments against Aereo are actually found in Justice Scalia’s dissent, which was joined by Justices Thomas and Alito. While criticizing the majority for its “looks like a cable system” premise, in making his best case for finding in favor of Aereo, Justice Scalia makes two telling statements. The first, after he argues that Aereo is just a passive conduit for subscribers’ content reception and therefore does not “perform” broadcasters’ copyrighted content, is his statement noting

“[t]hat conclusion does not mean that Aereo’s service complies with the Copyright Act. Quite the contrary. The Networks’ complaint that Aereo is directly and secondarily liable for infringing their public-performance rights (Section 106(4)) and also their reproduction rights (Section 106(1)). Their request for a preliminary injunction–the only issue before this Court–is based exclusively on the direct-liability portion of the public performance claim…. Affirming the judgment below would merely return this case to the lower courts for consideration of the Networks’ remaining claims.”

Justice Scalia then goes much further, stating:

“I share the Court’s evident feeling that what Aereo is doing (or enabling to be done) to the Networks’ copyrighted programming ought not to be allowed. But perhaps we need not distort the Copyright Act to forbid it.”

He then proceeds to note again that there are other copyright infringement claims before the lower court that should be considered on remand, and that Congress is always free to modify the law to eliminate any perceived “loophole” if necessary.

As a result, while today’s ruling is a 6-3 decision in favor of granting an injunction against Aereo, it ultimately reads like a 9-0 rebuke of Aereo’s business plan. One of the most interesting legal analogies is also found in Justice Scalia’s dissent, where he likens Aereo to a copy shop where the shop owner plays no part in the content copied:

“A copy shop rents out photocopiers on a per-use basis. One customer might copy his 10-year-old’s drawings–a perfectly lawful thing to do–while another might duplicate a famous artist’s copyrighted photographs–a use clearly prohibited by Section 106(1).”

The reason this analogy is (perhaps unintentionally) revealing is that in the Aereo scenario, the subscriber can’t use the system to display his ten-year-old’s drawings; he can only display the content that Aereo puts on the shelf in its copy shop for the subscriber to access–all of which is copyrighted. Even if a particular program has entered the public domain, the broadcast signal–including its combination of program selections, current advertising, and station interstitials–is not in the public domain. In any event, Aereo has never attempted to limit its relay of content to subscribers to public domain materials (which admittedly would be the worst business plan ever).

While there had been some concern among broadcasters (and hope for Aereo supporters) after oral argument in this proceeding that Aereo was gaining traction with its claim that a ruling against Aereo was a ruling against innovation, the Court’s decision states that it sees today’s ruling as narrowly focused on the issue of transmission of broadcast signals, and that parties seeking to expand its principles to issues like cloud computing will have to wait until that issue is actually before the Court. In the meantime, the Court made clear that the only innovation it saw in Aereo was copyright infringement, and that has already been around for a long time.

Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the Aereo case, providing the first indication of how the Justices view the case pitting Aereo against content providers, particularly broadcast networks. For background on Aereo’s technology and the previous lower court cases, Scott Flick of our office has written extensively on the subject, and a variety of his writings on Aereo can be found here. While trying to read the Court’s mind solely through the questions asked by the Justices can be risky, it is fair to say that Aereo encountered some skepticism on its claim to be an innovator and not a copyright infringer.

Given the significant amount of lower court litigation preceding Tuesday’s oral arguments, there wasn’t much in the way of surprises in the arguments made, many of which focused on the question of whether Aereo engages in a “public performance” when it transmits content to paying subscribers requesting that programming. A transcript of the proceeding can be found here. A number of the Justices focused on the question of whether Aereo’s fabled sea of mini-antennas served any purpose beyond seeking to circumvent the Copyright Act of 1976. Chief Justice Roberts noted that Aereo’s system seemed designed specifically “to get around the copyright laws,” and Justice Ginsburg asked Aereo’s counsel if there is any “technical reason” Aereo needed to have 10,000 dime-size antennas to operate, or if it was merely designed that way to “avoid the breach of the Copyright Act.”

What was a bit of a surprise was the extent to which the Justices’ questions focused on Aereo’s strategic effort to cloak itself as just another provider of cloud services. A number of the Justices indicated concern that there might not be an elegant way of ruling against Aereo without risking a ripple effect to cloud-based services, and it was obvious that none were interested in seeing that happen. Justice Kagan sought clarification regarding how Aereo could be distinguished from other cloud service companies, asking:

What if –­­ how about there are lots of companies where many, many thousands or millions of people put things up there, and then they share them, and the company in some ways aggregates and sorts all that content. Does that count?

Counsel for the broadcasters and the Justice Department attempted to respond to this concern, largely reiterating the position taken in the DOJ’s amicus brief:

The proper resolution of this dispute is straightforward. Unlike a purveyor of home antennas, or the lessor of hilltop space on which individual consumers may erect their own antennas . . . [Aereo] does not simply provide access to equipment or other property that facilitates customers’ reception of broadcast signals. Rather, [Aereo] operates an integrated system–i.e., a “device or process”–whose functioning depends on its customers’ shared use of common facilities. The fact that as part of that system [Aereo] uses unique copies and many individual transmissions does not alter the conclusion that it is retransmitting broadcast content “to the public.” Like its competitors, [Aereo] therefore must obtain licenses to perform the copyrighted content on which its business relies. That conclusion, however, should not call into question the legitimacy of businesses that use the Internet to provide new ways for consumers to store, hear, and view their own lawfully acquired copies of copyrighted works.

The catchphrase for this idea in the oral arguments became a “locker” in the cloud, where consumers could safely store their lawfully obtained content, but which would cross the copyright line if stocked for the consumer for a fee with infringing content by a commercial service like Aereo. While a useful analogy, it did not appear to put an end to the Justices’ concern that the line between a fair use and infringement might not always be clear in the cloud. That is certainly true, but it is also true outside the cloud, where copyright questions are notoriously complex and difficult.

Of course, the most interesting aspect of the Court’s diversion into an examination of cloud services is that it is technically irrelevant to the case at hand. It is safe to say that when Congress enacted the Copyright Act of 1976, cloud computing wasn’t even a distant dream. Imputing an intent on the part of Congress to draft the law in 1976 so as to neatly exclude such services from what might have then been considered copyright infringement is an unrealistic expectation. As a result, courts have always been faced with the task of applying existing copyright law to evolving applications of technologies, with the understanding that Congress will need to step in and change the law if the results cease to be satisfactory.

Having said that, it is the policy of the Supreme Court to narrowly rule on questions before it wherever possible, and drafting a decision addressing only Aereo without reaching the broader question of copyright law in the cloud is certainly the judicious approach, and what most expect the Court to do when a decision is released this summer.

I wrote a few weeks ago about Aereo’s Rocky Path Ahead, discussing the legal obstacles Aereo will need to overcome even if the Supreme Court should rule in its favor in the currently pending proceeding. Yesterday, that path became even rockier, when a federal judge in Utah dropped a boulder in Aereo’s path. The resulting sound was that of a thousand tiny antennas splintering against Utah red sandstone, with the judge granting a preliminary injunction prohibiting Aereo from operating in Utah, Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Wyoming.

The decision is Aereo’s first major defeat in court, although Aereo look-alike FilmOn X already has two preliminary injunctions against it. The most notable aspect of Judge Kimball’s decision, however, is that he had little difficulty concluding that Aereo’s service was exactly the type of copyright infringement Congress intended to prohibit in enacting the 1976 Copyright Act. Quotable quotes from the decision include “[t]he court … has carefully reviewed each of the prior decisions and has concluded that the California and D.C. district court cases [granting injunctions] as well as Judge Chin’s dissent in the Second Circuit case are the better reasoned and more persuasive decisions ….” and “[t]his court agrees with Judge Chin that ‘[b]y any reasonable construction of the statute, Aereo is engaging in public performances’ when it intercepts and retransmits copyrighted programs to paying strangers.”

As the language above indicates, broadcasters have much to like in Judge Kimball’s decision and really nothing to dislike. In fact, they surely hope that the Supreme Court decision will look a lot like the Utah decision. In that regard, I should mention that TV Technology this week published a pro/con article on how the Supreme Court should rule, and asked me to write the pro-broadcaster analysis. John Bergmayer of Public Knowledge ably handled the pro-Aereo portion of the article which, by coincidence, was published on the same day the Utah decision was released. In reading Judge Kimball’s decision, I was struck by how many of the pro-broadcaster arguments found their way into his decision. For those interested, reprinted below is my contribution to the TV Technology article. If you would like to see the entire article, including John Bergmayer’s pro-Aereo argument, it can be found here.

The Broadcaster Argument Against Aereo

The major argument you hear in support of Aereo is “if a viewer can do it, then the viewer should be allowed to hire Aereo to do it for them.” That logic is flawed for a number of legal reasons too complex to address in this short space, but it is also factually flawed–a truism that isn’t true (i.e., a person can have sex with their spouse, but if they hire someone else to do it, that’s prostitution, and it’s illegal in most places).

More specifically though, Aereo isn’t doing what viewers otherwise do on their own, it is doing what no viewer in their right mind would do–renting a building near the Empire State Building to place their antenna and the equipment necessary to transcode the signal for relay over the Internet, signing up for broadband Internet access at that leased sight so the signal can be transmitted over the Internet, paying for electricity at that site to power the equipment, making regular maintenance visits to keep the equipment operational, and paying higher fees for both the antenna site and home broadband connections because of the broadband speeds and capacity needed to relay nonstop HD broadcast programming.

The reason no consumer has ever done this is obvious–installing a window antenna, buying basic cable service, or just watching Internet video sources like Hulu is both simpler and cheaper. The difference between a home viewer and Aereo is akin to the difference between a recreational fisherman and a commercial fisherman–for good reason, the commercial fisherman is subject to many more regulations, and if the recreational fisherman starts using commercial trawlers and drift nets for fishing, he is no longer a recreational fisherman.

The Supreme Court is not, however, considering Aereo’s general legality at this early stage, but only the narrow question of “whether a company ‘publicly performs’ a copyrighted television program when it retransmits a broadcast of that program to thousands of paid subscribers over the Internet.” The stakes are markedly higher for Aereo than for broadcasters at the Supreme Court, as a ruling against Aereo would pave the way for an injunction against its service while simultaneously making it very difficult for Aereo to demonstrate in various courts around the country that its service does not infringe copyright. In contrast, a ruling in favor of Aereo, while a significant boost, would still leave Aereo with major legal and factual obstacles to overcome at trial (e.g., does each Aereo subscriber actually have their own antenna and DVR as promised?; do the copies of programs made at the request of subscribers qualify as fair use under copyright policy?). In other words, the Supreme Court’s ruling on this one issue could be devastating to Aereo, but a ruling to the opposite effect won’t resolve Aereo’s other legal issues.

Copyright law can be arcane in the extreme, but to oversimplify the transmission issue a bit, it boils down to this: if Aereo transmits the same content to a thousand subscribers, there is no dispute that each subscriber counts as a public performance of the content and infringes the rights of the copyright holder. Aereo argues however that it is not transmitting the same content to a thousand subscribers, but is transmitting unique content to each of those subscribers, leading to a thousand private performances that do not trigger copyright infringement. Stated in this way, the key question becomes “what is the ‘content’, and how can it be unique for each subscriber?” Aereo’s argument is that since each subscriber is assigned (at least temporarily) its own antenna and hard drive, a transmission of program content from that particular hard drive is unique. This conclusion is counterintuitive at best, since every hard drive copy and transmission of this week’s episode of The Big Bang Theory will be bit-for-bit identical with every other one, undercutting the notion that these transmissions are in any way unique private performances. As Judge Chin pointed out in his Second Circuit dissents in this proceeding, the relevant “content” has to be the program itself, not the bits on a particular hard drive, and since the same program is being distributed to those thousand subscribers, Aereo is transmitting a public performance that infringes copyright. Asserting that “this string of bits is different than that string of bits because they come from different hard drives, even though they are bit-for-bit identical” is just one more reason people make fun of lawyers.

While Aereo asserts that this illogical result is a loophole left by Congress in copyright law, it is not. Instead, it is a loophole created out of whole cloth by overenthusiastic extension of the sometimes tortured logic found in the Second Circuit’s earlier decision in the Cablevision case. Cablevision, however, is a good example of that maxim we learned in law school that “good facts make bad law.” In that case, the subscriber had paid for the content, and the cable operator had paid for the right to retransmit that content. Setting aside its legal reasoning to get there, it was not difficult for the Second Circuit to conclude, in effect, that if everyone in the process has been compensated anyway, and the proposed use isn’t undercutting the market for that content, then what’s the harm of letting a subscriber have their DVR located at the cable headend rather than at their house? However, whenever the law is contorted to achieve a factually attractive outcome, the inevitable result is other parties seeking to apply that same tortured logic to situations with far less attractive facts. Aereo is that case, and the Supreme Court hopefully will be the solution.

Where the law aims to draw a bright line between what is permissible and what is not, advances in technology often blur that line, creating factual scenarios that couldn’t have existed when the law was drafted. In the case of Aereo’s technology, the mistake many are making is to assume that technology doesn’t just blur the line, but erases it entirely. Courts, however, are remarkably astute at locating that faded line and darkening it rather than just throwing up their hands and saying “Congress didn’t specifically address this technology, so you’re free to do whatever you want with it.” As Napster discovered years ago, just because a technology wasn’t envisioned by Congress when the copyright laws were drafted doesn’t exempt it from their application.

In the proceeding now pending before the Supreme Court, the Court is looking only at the narrow issue of whether the Second Circuit erred in declining to issue an injunction against Aereo’s service on the grounds that Aereo’s transmissions are not “public performances” of broadcast programs. While the details of this debate are quite nuanced, a ruling that Aereo is engaged in transmitting public performances would be the judicial equivalent of a torpedo amidships; Aereo might not sink immediately, but it would start taking on water fast. Aereo’s argument against such a finding is that its system of thousands of antennas paired with thousands of hard drives allows it to engage in thousands of private transmissions, but no transmissions to “the public” triggering copyright liability.

From a policy standpoint, there is little doubt that Congress never intended to bless such an arbitrary distinction, or the use of technological workarounds that serve no purpose but to try to circumvent copyright laws. To some extent, Aereo doesn’t seem to deny this, but argues that Congress left a tiny opening in the law that the Second Circuit then stretched into a man-size opening in the Cablevision case, and Aereo is just stepping through that doorway.

Tellingly, however, the relevant aspects of copyright law have not changed much in recent years, and it was only the Second Circuit’s actions that created a “loophole” where none existed before. As Judge Chin made clear in his Second Circuit dissents, creating the Aereo loophole requires such a tortured reading of the law that “pinhole” is a more accurate description than “loophole”. Because the Supreme Court is not bound by Second Circuit decisions, however, it could well resolve the issue in favor of broadcasters without breaking a sweat.

Lost in the furor over what the Supreme Court will do though, is the fact that Aereo has a lot more at stake at this stage than broadcasters. While a sufficiently adverse ruling by the Supreme Court could be fatal to Aereo, a ruling favorable to Aereo would still leave a rocky path ahead, with many other obstacles to be traversed. As just one example, what if trial discovery reveals that the Aereo architecture doesn’t quite live up to the “one subscriber, one antenna” approach upon which Aereo has staked its legal survival?

Similarly, while the current debate at the Supreme Court is focused on the legality of Aereo’s transmissions to subscribers, missing from the public debate has been much discussion of the legality of Aereo’s copying of broadcast programs to transmit. Aereo’s fundamental legal argument in that regard has been that if a consumer can legally make a home copy, then they should be able to hire Aereo to do it for them. But consider the following example: as a listener, you can record radio broadcasts, including the music in them, and keep those copies for your personal, noncommercial use. Knowing this, I create a company with the ability to receive all local radio stations using sophisticated signal analysis software and databases that can instantly recognize any song and, upon request, copy that song onto a hard drive. I then solicit subscribers, who send me their requested playlists, and for a fee, my sophisticated equipment and full-time employees can automatically record each requested song onto the hard drive I have assigned to a particular subscriber. The subscriber can then access that music for use on home computers and stereos, or pay me an additional fee to convert all of “their” files into MP3, FLAC, or other useful file formats so that the music can be downloaded to any of the subscriber’s consumer devices, including tablets, smartphones, or home music servers.

In an Aereo world, all I’ve done is accomplish what a radio listener (with very expensive and sophisticated monitoring equipment and software) could have done on their own, so my music service is completely legitimate and copyright compliant. Of course, why stop there? Why not sell subscribers a blank CD and then charge them a fee for recording “their” music on it? We’ve just automated the process for subscribers to create their own “home” mix tapes! It’s Pandora without all those pesky ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, and record company royalties. In the real world, however, does anyone think this “Audio Aereo” service would survive even the most cursory of legal challenges? Video Aereo may fare no better.

While advocates of Aereo will cite the Second Circuit’s Cablevision decision as the guiding legal precedent for Aereo’s operations, the true wellspring of Aereo is the Supreme Court’s 1984 Sony Betamax decision. In a narrow 5 to 4 decision, the Supreme Court found that home recording of television programming constituted a “fair use” under copyright law, launching the age of home video recording. The Second Circuit’s contribution in Cablevision was to state that the location of a viewer’s recording device is unimportant, clearing the way for cable subscribers to “rent” a DVR located at the cable headend from their cable provider while retaining the fair use status of “home” recording.

In developing a Rube Goldberg service whose complexity serves no purpose other than seeking to sidestep copyright law, Aereo has pushed the Second Circuit’s logic past the breaking point. In Cablevision, the subscriber had paid for the content, and the cable operator had paid for the right to retransmit that content. It was therefore not difficult for the Second Circuit to conclude, in effect, “if everyone in the process has been compensated, and it doesn’t undercut the market for the content, then what’s the harm of letting a subscriber locate their DVR at the cable headend rather than in the subscriber’s house? Have we really altered the activity to such an extent that recording program content is no longer the fair use blessed by the Supreme Court in Sony Betamax?”
And this is where a fundamental flaw in Aereo’s legal position emerges. The test is not whether a member of the public can copy a program for their own home viewing and call it fair use; the test is whether Aereo copying a program for that subscriber still qualifies as a fair use under copyright doctrine. Fair use analysis considers four factors: (1) the commercial or nonprofit nature of the activity; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use on the potential market for, or value of, the copyrighted work. The Supreme Court’s decision in Sony Betamax focused on the first and fourth factors, finding that individuals recording programs for time-shifting is a noncommercial activity, and that time-shifting is unlikely to undercut the market for the copyrighted work. The Supreme Court therefore found that home taping qualifies as fair use.

In contrast, Aereo’s copying of broadcast programming (even at a subscriber’s behest) is decidedly not a “noncommercial activity”, and even the Second Circuit decision affirming the denial of an injunction against Aereo did not disagree with the district court’s finding that Aereo would cause irreparable harm to broadcasters. That irreparable harm arises from undercutting the market for the copied programming. In other words, the two factors that principally led the Supreme Court to bless home taping as a fair use in Sony Betamax produce the opposite result when applied to Aereo. Justice Stevens’ majority decision in Sony Betamax is instructive in this regard. He wrote that “If the Betamax were used to make copies for a commercial or profitmaking purpose, such use would presumptively be unfair,” and “every commercial use of copyrighted material is presumptively an unfair exploitation of the monopoly privilege that belongs to the owner of the copyright….” The Aereo service is clearly a “commercial use of copyrighted material” that undercuts the market for that material. By the very decision that allows home recording to exist as a fair use under copyright law, “home” recordings made by Aereo appear to fall outside that protection, and Aereo would not be able to avail itself of the fair use defense in making copies of broadcast programming.

Which means that if the Supreme Court rules against Aereo on the transmission issue, the Aereo story could come to a relatively abrupt end, but if it doesn’t, Aereo still faces serious legal hurdles ahead. In either case, the Supreme Court’s decision on the transmission issue is not likely to be the “one and done” referendum that Aereo might have hoped for. Stated differently, if the Supreme Court decision does turn out to be “one and done,” it will be Aereo that is done.