'Aereo' Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. §§ 101, 106(4) - American Broadcasting Cos., Inc., et al. v. Aereo, Inc., fka Bamboom Labs, Inc

摘要

1. For a monthly fee, Aereo offers subscribers broadcast television programming over the Internet ... 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. It works roughly as follows: First, when a subscriber wants to watch a show that is currently being broadcast, he visits Aereo's website and selects, from a list of the local programming, the show he wishes to see. Second, one of Aereo's servers selects an antenna, which it dedicates to the use of that subscriber (and that subscriber alone) for the duration of the selected show. A server then tunes the antenna to the over-the-air broadcast carrying the show. The antenna begins to receive the broadcast, and an Aereo transcoder translates the signals received into data that can be transmitted over the Internet. Third, rather than directly send the data to the subscriber, a server saves the data in a subscriber-specific folder on Aereo's hard drive. In other words, Aereo's system creates a subscriber-specific copy -that is, a "personal" copy - of the subscriber's program of choice. Fourth, once several seconds of programming have been saved, Aereo's server begins to stream the saved copy of the show to the subscriber over the Internet. ... When two subscribers wish to watch the same program, Aereo's system ... streams the show to the subscribers through two separate transmissions - each from the subscriber's personal copy.