Following Its Supreme Court Defeat, Online TV Service Aereo Halts Operations

As
Jesse Walker noted at Hit & Run, the Supreme Court
ruled 6-3 on Wednesday that Aereo, a online TV service that lets
customers watch broadcast stations through the internet, violates
U.S. copyright law. Aereo’s founder and CEO Chet Kanojia announced
today that the company will “pause” its operations “temporarily” as
it figures out its next steps.

Earlier this month, Reason‘s Meredith Bragg looked at Aereo’s
business and the implcations of the SCOTUS decision for the future
of the TV industry.

Here’s the original write up for that story, which was
released on June 1, 2014:

The Supreme Court will soon reach its decision on the
much-publicized
American Broadcasting Companies, Inc. v. Aereo, a case
many believe will have a profound effect on the way we watch
television.

Aereo rents small antennas
and cloud storage to subscribers, allowing them to record and
playback over-the-air broadcasts through digitally enabled
devices. Broadcasters
feel Aereo is retransmitting copyrighted work to paying
customers and, based on current copyright law, should be subject to
the same retransmission fees cable and satellite companies
currently pay.
Aereo argues that it is simply a technology company that
empowers individuals and therefore isn’t engaged in the “public
performance” of copyrighted works subject to these fees.

April’s oral arguments gave little indication of
which way the Supreme Court will rule. The decision is expected
any day now.

But no matter the outcome, this case underlines just how
antiquated and unresponsive our regulatory and copyright framework
has become in an increasingly digital age.

“[This is] just an indication of how complex copyright law has
become,” says University of Maryland Professor of Law James Grimmelmann.
“[Novelist] Douglas
Coupland wonderfully called the computer the ‘every animal’
machine because it is capable of acting like anything. That is how
the Internet works. It can act like a cable system. It can act like
a storage device. It’s TV. It’s radio. It’s telephone. It’s
telegraph.  It’s everything. That means that a
regulatory system that treats these different media differently is
going to throw up its hands in confusion when it hits the
Internet.”

“Whatever happens to Aereo the industry from now on is going to
be forced to move forward and innovate,” says
Aereo CEO Chet Kanojia. “[We] didn’t cause this change. The
change has been brewing since the Internet started moving bits
around.”

Produced by Meredith Bragg. Camera by Bragg and Jim Epstein.

About 6 minutes.