On April 22, 2014, the Supreme Court of the United States heard oral arguments in American Broadcasting Companies, Inc. v. Aereo, Inc., a case that is being watched closely for its potential to upend the economics of television program distribution and, more broadly, its impact on how copyright law is applied to new technologies.

The key issue in the case is whether Aereo's video streaming service:

Aereo designed its service to make only one-to-one transmissions, which it asserts are private performances that do not infringe the copyright owners' public performance rights. The service's architecture employs thousands of tiny antennae, with each antenna assigned to only one subscriber at any given time. Aereo's antenna captures a broadcast signal only if the subscriber requests that particular broadcast, and the service stores the captured programming on its servers in a directory accessible only to that subscriber.

The plaintiff broadcasters and programmers contend that the relevant performance for the Court's copyright analysis is the initial broadcast signal, not Aereo's one-to-one retransmissions, and that Congress intended to prohibit these, as well as other, unauthorized retransmissions of broadcast signals in its enactment of the transmit clause (17 U.S.C. § 101). This argument hinges on the legislative history of the Copyright Act of 1976 and the view that Congress introduced the transmit clause in the Copyright Act as a corrective to Supreme Court rulings, under the predecessor copyright law, that cable system operators did not publicly perform television programming when they captured over-the-air signals and retransmitted them over cable networks to individual subscribers (see Fortnightly Corp. v. United Artists Television, Inc., 392 U.S. 390 (1968) and Teleprompter Corp. v. Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc., 415 U.S. 394 (1974)).

For more information about the case, including its potential implications, see Article, Expert Q&A on ABC v. Aereo and Copyright Public Performance Rights.