American Broadcasting Companies, Inc. v. Aereo, Inc. Case Brief Summary | Law Case Explained

American Broadcasting Companies, Inc. v. Aereo, Inc. | 573 U.S. 431 (2014)

The owner of a copyright has the exclusive right to perform the copyrighted work publicly. In American Broadcasting Companies versus Aereo, the United States Supreme Court considered whether Internet streaming transmissions counted as performances.

Aereo offered a streaming service that could show television programs over the Internet. Aereo’s setup consisted of servers, transcoders, and thousands of tiny antennas housed in a central warehouse. A subscriber would choose a program to watch from Aereo’s website. Aereo would assign that subscriber an antenna. The antenna would receive the broadcast and copy it into a folder on Aereo’s hard drive. Aereo would then stream the saved copy of the show to whichever device the subscriber was watching. Because of this copying process, Aereo’s broadcast arrived a few seconds after the program was broadcast on television. If more than one subscriber wished to watch the show at the same time, Aereo would assign each of them an individual antenna and make individual copies of the program.

American Broadcasting Companies, or ABC, and several other television networks and broadcasters sued Aereo for copyright infringement. They argued that Aereo was infringing their right to perform their works publicly. The court denied ABC’s request for a preliminary injunction. The court of appeals affirmed, holding that Aereo wasn’t performing shows publicly because it didn’t transmit programs to the public. In the court’s view, each transmission was a private showing, available only to an individual subscriber. The United States Supreme Court granted cert.



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