Justices rule for broadcasters in fight with Aereo

The broadcasters told the court, and the majority of the justices agreed, that Aereo's "competitors pay for the rights to retransmit 'live TV' to the public — as they must to avoid liability for copyright infringement — while Aereo does not."

Aereo uses thousands of dime-size antennas to capture television signals and transmit them to subscribers who pay as little as $8 a month for the service.

It is available in New York, Boston, Atlanta, Miami, Houston, Dallas, Detroit, Baltimore, Cincinnati, San Antonio and Austin. The company has said it plans to expand to Raleigh-Durham soon.

Some justices worried during arguments in April that a ruling for the broadcasters could also harm the burgeoning world of cloud computing, which gives users access to a vast online computer network that stores and processes information.

But Justice Stephen Breyer in his majority opinion that the court did not intend to call cloud computing into question.

Justices Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented.

Broadcasters including ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC and PBS sued Aereo for copyright infringement, saying Aereo should pay for redistributing the programming the same way cable and satellite systems must or risk high-profile blackouts of channels that anger their subscribers.

The U.S. networks increasingly are reliant on these retransmission fees, estimated at $3.3 billion last year and going up to more than $7 billion by 2018, according to research by SNL Kagan, which analyzes media and communications trends.  

When an Aereo subscriber wants to watch a show live or record it, the company temporarily assigns him an antenna and transmits the program over the Internet to the subscriber's laptop, tablet, smartphone or other device.

The antenna is only used by one subscriber at a time, and Aereo says that's much like the situation at home, where a viewer uses a personal antenna to watch over-the-air broadcasts for free.

"Aereo is in some ways novel, but it is also among a host of technologies that uses the Internet to offer consumers the ability to do what they always have more cheaply and conveniently," the Dish Network and Echostar Technologies said in a supporting legal brief filed in the Supreme Court.

But the broadcasters and their backers argued that Aereo's competitive advantage lies not in its product, but in avoiding paying for it. The Court likened Aereo more closely to a cable provider than to an equipment provider. "Behind-the-scenes technological differences do not distinguish Aereo’s system from cable systems," Breyer wrote.