by Lee Gesmer | Jul 22, 2014 | Copyright
It’s difficult to read Aereo’s section of Aereo and ABC’s July 9, 2014 joint letter to the U.S. District Court without experiencing a good dose of disbelief.
Until the Supreme Court issued its decision in ABC v. Aereo on June 25, 2014 (earlier blog post on that decision), Aereo insisted that it was not a cable company entitled to a compulsory license under Section 111 of the Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. section 111(c)). Aereo denied it was a cable system in filings with the district court and in its brief to the Supreme Court. At oral argument Justice Sotomayer questioned whether Aereo was a cable company, and Aereo’s attorney responded –
Now, we are not a cable service. The reason we’re not a cable service is because cable takes all signals and pushes them down. There’s a head in. It’s defined by statute. There’s a very particularized regulatory structure that deals with taking a lot of content and pushing it down to consumers. Aereo is an equipment provider.
However, after the Supreme Court decision Aereo tried to change its stripes. In the July 9th letter it states:
The Supreme Court has now ruled that “having considered the details of Aereo’s practices, we find them highly similar to those of the CATV systems in Fortnightly and Teleprompter. And those are activities that the 1976 amendments sought to bring within the scope of the Copyright Act. … Accordingly, Aereo is entitled to a compulsory license under the Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. § 111. And because Aereo is entitled to a license under Section 111, the transmissions Plaintiffs have sought to enjoin do not infringe Plaintiffs’ rights under the Copyright Act.
Aereo has been careful to follow the law, and the Supreme Court has announced a new and different rule governing Aereo’s operations last week. Under the Second Circuit’s precedents, Aereo was a provider of technology and equipment with respect to the near-live transmissions at issue in the preliminary injunction appeal. After the Supreme Court’s decision, Aereo is a cable system with respect to those transmissions. . . .
The Supreme Court’s holding that Aereo is a cable system under the Copyright Act is significant because, as a cable system, Aereo is now entitled to the benefits of the copyright statutory license pursuant to the Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. § 111(c). Aereo is proceeding to file the necessary statements of account and royalty fees. By holding that Aereo is a cable system, the Supreme Court has overruled WPIX, Inc. v. ivi, Inc., 691 F.3d 275, 279 (2d Cir. 2012) to the extent it might apply to Aereo … .
The Supreme Court did not hold that Aereo is a cable system. “Highly similar,” for purposes of applying the public performance provision, yes. A cable system, no. Nor, as Aereo asserted in its letter to the court, did the Supreme Court “overrule” WPIX, Inc. v. ivi, Inc., 691 F.3d 275 (2d Cir. 2012), which held that “Congress did not … intend for § 111’s compulsory license to extend to Internet transmissions.”
It didn’t take long for the Copyright Office to point this out to Aereo. After the Supreme Court decision Aereo submitted royalty and filing fees of approximately $5,000 (about 1% of revenue) to the Copyright Office. In a July 16, 2014 letter the Copyright Office’s General Counsel, citing WPIX v. ivi, advised Aereo that “in the view of the Copyright Office, internet retransmissions of broadcast television fall outside the scope of the Section 111 license.”
To make matters worse (for Aereo), Aereo faces a double hurdle: under the federal Communications Act Aereo must negotiate and obtain “retransmission consent” from broadcasters, a process which, for reasons Jeff John Roberts explains on Gigaom, puts Aereo in an economically hopeless position.
Clearly, the decision-makers at Aereo are not fans of Kenny Rogers, or they would know it’s time to either walk away or to run.
It would be great to receive low-cost Internet access to broadcast television, but despite Aereo’s attempts to reinvent itself following the Supreme Court decision holding it to be a copyright infringer, it is extremely unlikely that service will come from Aereo.
by Lee Gesmer | Jul 11, 2014 | Copyright
[catch-up post] The First Circuit issued an copyright law opinion in March addressing a number of issues related to copyright law. However, the unwritten lesson of this case is that artists need to obtain ownership rights in writing. Failure to do so led to the unfavorable outcome the plaintiffs experienced in this case.
Before attempting to describe this decision (or the most interesting aspects of it), it’s worth pointing out that the First Circuit judge who wrote the opinion not only began his opinion with the famous Mark Twain quote (“only only one thing is impossible for God: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet”), but added the comment that “Twain’s deity would fare little better with the tangled skein of copyright and contractual claims presented by the plaintiffs in this case.”
The First Circuit judge’s comment may be an understatement. The confusing facts make the decision difficult to follow. However, in essence the plaintiffs (Massachusetts musicians and producers of “Reggaeton” music) alleged that seven songs which they jointly composed and performed were modified and distributed by the defendants on the “Erre XI” album (image above), infringing the plaintiffs’ copyrights in the compositions in the songs.
The plaintiffs’ problems with this claim appear to stem from the fact that there were multiple contributors to the musical works at issue, but the artists and producers didn’t bother to enter into agreements assigning clear ownership to any one participant (or group of participants). The plaintiffs then got tangled up in the complexities of registration with the Copyright Office, and were unable to extricate themselves in time, leading to dismissal of the case.
The plaintiffs obtained registrations on four of the works (more on that below), but they hit a seemingly insurmountable obstacle when they attempted to register the compositions for three of the songs. Two years after they had filed for registration the Copyright Office still was unable to determine if the deposited recordings of these three songs were acceptable to register the compositions, and refused to issue registration certificates.*
*note: You can obtain a copyright in a composition by registering a notated copy (i.e., sheet music), or a phonorecord containing the composition. (link) In this case the plaintiffs attempted to obtain registrations based on phonorecords containing the compositions.
The reason for this refusal appears to be that that the plaintiffs had attempted to satisfy the copyright deposit requirement for compositions by submitting copies of the defendants’ allegedly infringing recordings rather than the plaintiffs’ original recordings, leading to no end of confusion at the Copyright Office.* Possibly (although the First Circuit opinion is unclear on this) the plaintiffs were unable to obtain the original recordings from the defendants.
*note: The Copyright Office described the snafu as “whether a copy of an unauthorized track, that contains the original composition embedded in the track, can be used as deposit material.” The Copyright Office explained that “in general, an unauthorized copy cannot be used as deposit material.”
The district court granted defendants’ motion for summary judgment, finding that the plaintiffs had not satisfied the registration precondition of the Copyright Act, observing that not only had they not obtained registration certificates on the three compositions, but they have not even “shown that they had submitted all the necessary application materials for registration.”
The First Circuit declined, as it has in the past, to take sides in the “application versus registration” issue. That is, before filing suit for copyright infringement must a plaintiff have completed the registration process, or is it sufficient just to have filed an application for registration? The First Circuit observed that the circuits are split on “whether the registration requirement is satisfied at the time the copyright holder’s application is received by the Copyright Office (the ‘application approach’) or at the time the office acts on the application and issues a certificate of registration (the ‘registration approach’).” However, the court was unwilling to decide the issue in this case, noting that there was insufficient evidence to show that the plaintiffs had even met the requirements for an application. Thus, the plaintiffs lost on three of the songs based on their failure to obtain a registration certificate or file a proper application.
Why did the plaintiffs lose on the four songs on which they did obtain registrations? Because, as the First Circuit explained, a musical composition and a sound recording of that composition are separate works, with their own distinct copyrights. Under the arcane registration requirements of the Copyright Office, a musical composition and a sound recording may be registered in a single application only if ownership of the copyrights in both is exactly the same, a requirement the plaintiffs admitted they could not satisfy in this case. Accordingly, the four recordings on which the plaintiffs did obtain registration were invalid.
The plaintiffs’ ineffective pleading appears to have contributed to the unfavorable outcome here. When, on appeal, the plaintiffs argued for a copyright on the sound recordings, the First Circuit noted that the allegations of the complaint were limited to the compositions. When the plaintiffs argued that the works were entitled to joint ownership, the First Circuit noted that the complaint failed to adequately allege a claim of joint ownership.
The case, which also addresses breach of contract, Lanham Act and other miscellaneous issues, is linked below.
Alicea v. Machete Music, 744 F.3d 773 (1st Cir. 2014)
by Lee Gesmer | Jun 27, 2014 | Copyright
In the end Aereo’s dime-sized antennas and subscriber-specific copies of television broadcasts – its “Rube Goldberg” attempt to find a loophole that would allow it to stream TV over the Internet – were not enough to win over a majority of the Supreme Court.
On June 25, 2014, the Supreme Court held that Aereo’s streaming service violated the exclusive right of copyright owners to “publicly perform” their works. Aereo had used diabolically clever technology (or so the broadcasters claimed) in its attempt to avoid this outcome, which seems very likely to force Aereo out of business.
As I have described in detail elsewhere, Aereo’s system – which would have been unimaginable and cost-prohibitive only a few years ago – relied on thousands of antennas and massive, low-cost hard disk storage. Advances in antenna technology allowed Aereo to assign a separate micro-antenna to each paid subscriber. The plummeting cost of digital storage allowed Aereo to save a separate copy of each broadcast transmission for each subscriber that wanted to save a copy.
Aereo’s argument was that for any singe subscriber this was no different (legally speaking) than accessing a broadcast using a rooftop TV antenna connected to a DVR in the living room. In effect, Aereo claimed, each subscriber had outsourced the antenna and the remote DVR to Aereo’s central facility, and Aereo was no more than an equipment supplier.
And, Aereo argued, nothing was accessed or copied unless the consumer initiated access and decided to watch or save a show. In other words, Aereo didn’t collect TV shows and provide a ready-to-access “TV jukebox” the consumer could choose shows from, à la Netflix. If none of Aereo’s subscribers initiated a copy of the “Barney and Friends,” broadcast at 3:00 a.m. on WNET in New York (one of the plaintiffs in the case), it would never be accessed, saved or streamed by Aereo. It was the “volitional conduct” (an esoteric copyright law buzz-phrase) of the subscriber that caused a copy to be made and transmitted, just as it is the volitional conduct of a library patron that causes a photocopy of a copyrighted work to be made on a library photocopier. Aereo argued that it should be no more liable for what its subscribers do with the equipment than is a library with a copy machine on its premises (libraries are not legally responsible for illegal copying by their patrons).
Further, Aereo argued, the fact that it may have transmitted 10,000 personal copies of a World Cup soccer match didn’t constitute a public performance under the Copyright Act, since each transmission was viewed by only one subscriber, not the “public.”
These arguments were enough to persuade the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York (a court many lawyers view as the most knowledgeable and influential of the federal courts when it comes to copyright law), but it didn’t pass muster with the Supreme Court (although three justices dissented, agreeing with Aereo). The Court was unimpressed with the technological details that had occupied the lower courts that had ruled in favor of Aereo, observing that it “did not see how the fact that Aereo transmits via personal copies of programs” makes a difference under the copyright statute. Likewise, the Court rejected Aereo’s argument that transmitting a performance means to make a single transmission, holding that Aereo was transmitting a performance through a “multiple, discrete transmissions.”
Drawing heavily on Congress’ 1976 amendment to the copyright statute intended to bring cable TV companies within the definition of “public performance,” the Supreme Court concluded by analogy that Aereo’s “is not simply an equipment provider . . . that Aereo’s activities are substantially similar to those of the CATV companies that Congress amended the Act to reach.” And, because the fit between the 1976 law and Aereo’s technology was so imperfect, the Court was forced to fall back on what it described as the “overwhelming likeness to the cable companies targeted by the 1976 amendments” and conclude that the technological differences between Aereo and the cable companies “does not make a critical difference.”
Fundamentally, the Court focused on Congress’ regulatory objectives, and on this basis considered Aereo’s technological system of dedicated antennas and personal copies as “not adequate to place Aereo’s activities outside the scope of the Act,” a conclusion the dissent described as a “looks-like-cable-TV” (or“ guilt by resemblance”) standard that will “sow confusion for years to come” and is “nothing but th’ ol’ totality-of-the-circumstances test (which is not a test at all but merely assertion of an intent to perform test-free, ad hoc, case-by-case evaluation).”
* * *
There is no question that had Aereo won before the Supreme Court it would have been a huge upset, and the fourth estate would be doing somersaults. As it is, the outcome was largely anticipated by the small group of lawyers, academics and commentators that paid close attention to the legal arguments made by each side. While most of us prefer to see David defeat Goliath, it has always seemed unlikely that the networks’ $3 billion-plus annual licensing revenues would be weakened by Aereo or Aereo clones.
However, questions remain over what the Court’s ruling (and reasoning) will mean for the delivery of television programming, cloud computing or service-provider liability. Is the dissent correct when it warns that it “will take years, perhaps decades, to determine which automated systems now in existence are governed by the traditional volitional-conduct test and which get the Aereo treatment. (And automated systems now in contemplation will have to take their chances)”?
The answer to these questions is, of course, that it’s far too early to tell. For better or worse, the Supreme Court was careful to emphasize that its decision was limited to the “technologically complex” system engineered by Aereo: “we cannot now answer more precisely how the Transmit Clause or other provisions of the Copyright Act will apply to technologies not before us.” Even so, the Court was careful to note that its decision didn’t reach remote storage (“cloud locker”) services where consumers are able to store digital copies they “have already lawfully acquired.”
Nevertheless, start-ups involved in the delivery of television programming will have to ask whether they cross the line set by Aereo: are they merely an equipment provider (and not liable for direct infringement) or a cable TV look-alike that falls on the wrong side of the line between legality and illegality?
The Supreme Court did little to help companies answer this question, and there may be real concern that Aereo will discourage investment in alternatives to traditional television programming. One thing that seems certain is that any almost every investor in a television technology company will have to ask whether the business plan passes the “Aereo test,” i.e., is copyright compliant. Remote service DVR (“RS-DVR”) services, in particular, may need to reexamine the legality of their services following this decision. Commentators have already questioned whether Aereo has implications for the legality of in-line streaming and in-line linking of images, and noted that regardless of whether the answer is yes or no, the case is likely to raise litigation costs, and thus indirectly chill innovation.
With respect to non-broadcast TV content — for example, the “cloud computing industry” and “cloud lockers” that were the subject of concern expressed by some Justices during oral argument before the Court — it seems unlikely that there will be any implications, at least in the short term, for the reasons described in my post titled Aereo and the Cloud Before the Supreme Court, written just before the Supreme Court decision was issued. Most cloud services provide access to content they own or license, or store files that consumers have already lawfully acquired, a practice the Supreme Court noted was not impacted by its decision. And, cloud services that host third-party content are largely protected (although not entirely) by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
However, copyright law inevitably lags technological development, creating a seemingly never-ending state of uncertainty over how the law will be applied to new technologies. Indeed, Aereo itself illustrates this – the Supreme Court was called on to apply a statute enacted in 1976 to a technology that could not have been envisioned by Congress until decades later. What unintended consequences Aereo might have for innovation and investment in content-delivery and content-storage technologies yet to be invented or imagined is anyone’s guess.
American Broadcasting v. Aereo, Inc. (June 25, 2014)
by Lee Gesmer | Jun 21, 2014 | Copyright
This is a catch-up post on oral argument in ABC v. Aereo, which was held on April 22, 2014.
The Supreme Court’s 2013-2014 term is almost over, and we can expect to receive the Court’s decision in Aereo on June 23rd or 30th.
A great deal has been written about whether Aereo’s TV -to-Internet service violates the TV networks’ public performance right under the transmit clause of the Copyright Act. By comparison, less has been written about the implications of the case for “cloud computing” and “cloud lockers.”*
*note: the “cloud” is simply a metaphor for data and computing power accessed via the Internet.
When the Aereo case was argued before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in November 2012 the “cloud” was not mentioned once. (transcript) However, by the time the case reached oral argument before the Supreme Court in April 2014 cloud computing — or the implications of a Supreme Court decision in Aereo on cloud computing — seemed to have become the focus of the case. Amicus briefs supporting Aereo predicted dire consequence for cloud computing if the Court ruled in favor of the networks,* and the “cloud” is mentioned more than 30 times in the argument transcript,
*note: For example, one amicus brief supporting Aereo warned of “unintended consequences” and argued that the tests proposed by the networks, their amici and the United States “are unworkable and will endanger the thriving cloud computing industry just as it starts to mature.” (link)
What was the Court’s concern about cloud computing, and how did the attorneys for the parties handle the issue?
While the Supreme Court judges didn’t identify their specific concerns about how a decision for the networks might impact cloud computing, they repeatedly referenced it. For example, at the very outset of oral argument Justice Breyer was so concerned about this issue that he questioned whether it would be easier to remand the case to determine whether Aereo is a cable company subject to a compulsory license in order to avoid addressing “serious problems . . . like the cloud.”
The networks’ attorney urged the Court “not to decide the cloud computing question once and for all today, because not all cloud computing is created equal.” (An argument at least one Justice found unsatisfying). Aereo’s lawyer capitalized on this line of questioning, beginning his argument with the assertion that the networks’ interpretation of the copyright statute “absolutely threatens cloud computing.” He argued that the cloud computing industry was “freaked out about this case” because it had invested “tens of billions of dollars” in reliance on the legal principles Aereo was defending.
The attorney for the United States (which sided with the networks) made the best attempt to respond to the justices’ concerns, explaining that “if you have a cloud locker service, somebody has bought a digital copy of a song or a movie from some other source, stores it in a locker and asks that it be streamed back, the cloud locker and storage service is not providing the content. It’s providing a mechanism for watching it.” In other words, a cloud locker service that provides a user access to copies of copyrighted content that the user already has legally obtained would not violate the public performance right.
The Justices, for their part, did more to confuse matters than they did to clarify the issue. Justice Kagan described a system in which “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” and asked the networks’ attorney how a decision against Aereo would impact such a (presumably illegal) Megaupload-like service. Justice Sotomayor confused matters with her reference to the non-existent “iDrop in the cloud” and her apparent lack of awareness that Roku is not a content provider, but a piece of hardware that allows subscribes to access programming services such as Netflix. Justice Scalia asked a question that suggested he might think HBO (a cable channel) was delivered free over the airwaves, and therefore would be susceptible to re-broadcast by Aereo.
Setting aside the melange of law, fact and misinformation at oral argument of the Aereo case the question remains: what would a ruling against Aereo mean for cloud lockers or the “cloud industry”?
The answer, it appears, is very little, since the key question in any cloud storage/copyright case is likely to be, “who provides the content that resides in the cloud locker”?
There are several possible scenarios: First, most data in the “cloud” is either created or licensed by the provider. Subscribers to the New York Times, Wired Magazine and Netflix stream or download files from the cloud. In each of these and thousands of similar services, the content is owned or licensed by the site, and access is restricted to paying subscribers. A Supreme Court ruling against Aereo will have no impact on this part of the “cloud industry.” A variant on this model is where the user already possesses a copy of a file, and “scan-and-match”* technology allows the user to access files on a centralized database maintained in the cloud. Popular “music lockers” provided by Google, Apple and Amazon are good examples of this hybrid model. Again, a decision against Aereo will not affect this model of cloud computing.
*note: Using “scan-and-match” technologies the cloud service maintains one licensed copy of each song, and “matches” the subscriber’s collection against each song in the database. This avoids requiring the user to upload her library to the service (an often time-consuming process) and eliminates the requirement that the service maintain a copy of each file the user uploads, greatly reducing storage requirements.
Second, where content is uploaded to the cloud by a user or subscriber in the first instance and is universally accessible, the cloud service is protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s (DMCA) notice and take down provisions.* A popular example of this type of cloud service is YouTube. This model would not be adversely impacted by a decision against Aereo.
note: Although Aereo mentioned the DMCA in passing in its brief to the Supreme Court, it has never argued that it is entitled to immunity under the DMCA safe harbors, seemingly conceding that Aereo is the content provider of the TV shows at issue, not Aereo’s users.
Third, in cases where users upload files that are stored individually (e.g., 10,000 copies of “Stairway to Heaven” uploaded and stored separately), the storage site allows only the person who uploaded the file to access it (so-called user-specific transmissions), avoiding copyright liability under the public performance provision based on a combination of fair use (“space shifting” by the user) and application of the “volitional conduct doctrine” by the cloud service.*
*note: Under the “volitional conduct doctrine” a technology provider is not liable for direct copyright infringement when it provides the means for infringement but that infringement is controlled by the “volitional conduct” of the users. An example would be a copy shop. The difficult question, under this line of cases, is whether the technology provider is sufficiently actively engaged in the process to be liable.
Aereo — which copies over-the-air TV transmissions directly and supplies copyrighted content to its subscribers — fits within none of these models, leaving the Supreme Court plenty of room to conclude that Aereo’s argument that a ruling against it will signal a death knell for cloud computing technologies is little more than a straw man argument. The Court can rule against Aereo while making clear that it has no intent to interfer with cloud-based services that use licensed content or provide storage for content the end-user independently possesses and elects to store in the cloud.
My prediction: the Supreme Court will do exactly that, leaving any “close cases” that may arise in the future for the lower courts to resolve.
by Lee Gesmer | Jun 16, 2014 | Copyright
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