The rise and fall of Aeroe: a Supreme Court squashes one possible future of television.

• Author: Root, Damon

"Watch live TV online," the advertisements said. "No apps, no cords, no clutter, no fuss," they said. It sounded too good to be true. It was too good to be true.

The company was called Aereo and its product was "a new species of antenna." "If you have this and you have Netflix, you absolutely have the ability to not have a standard cable subscription," Chet Kanojia, Aereo's founder and chief executive, told The New York Times when the company opened for business in early 2012.

That was the key selling point. In its Brooklyn, New York, facility, Aereo had some 10,000 dime-sized antennas, each one ready to capture over-the-air television broadcasts on behalf of its paying customers. "When you sign up for Aereo, we assign you an antenna so you can watch TV on your mobile devices," the company announced. "Enjoy live programming or record your favorite shows. That's it."

But that wasn't it. What the advertisements didn't say was that Aereo had placed itself on a collision course with federal copyright law. Aereo's opponents in that impending conflict would include not just the federal government but some of the most powerful names in media--ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, and Disney, to name a few of the players who promptly filed suit. As those entities saw it, Aereo was in flagrant violation of the Copyright Act because the company failed to obtain permission (and pay royalties) on the copyrighted materials it transmitted to paying customers. "They're basically taking our content, charging people for it, and not paying us for our content," CBS President Les Moonves told Bloomberg TV. "This is theft."

Is it? According to Aereo, the company was just an "equipment provider." And the equipment it provided--antennas and digital video recorders (DVRs)--were already perfectly legal for home use. The only difference was that the equipment happened to be stored remotely and connected to consumers via the long "cord" (Aereo's word) otherwise known as the Internet. "People make money selling equipment, people lease equipment all day long," Kanojia declared. "Nothing about any of these things is novel or illegal."

It was an attractive product backed by a clever legal argument. But if Aereo's "new species of antenna" was going to stick around long enough to reach adulthood, it faced a daunting challenge: Survive first contact with the nine justices of the United States Supreme Court.

TV Party Tonight

The Supreme Court is not exactly renowned for its technological prowess. The Court not only forbids the press from making any sort of video, audio, or photographic recordings of its proceedings, it limits the reporters in the press gallery from using any tools more technologically sophisticated than pen and paper.

But that doesn't mean the justices are all a bunch of Luddites. In fact, when it comes to the uneasy intersection of copyright law and broadcast television, the justices have often--though not always--revealed a certain appreciation for the cutting edge.

Take the 1968 case of Fortnightly Corp. v. United Artists Television, Inc. That dispute originated in the late 1950s in the West Virginia towns of Clarksburg and Fairmont. Due to the hilly environment, local residents were unable to receive most broadcast television signals, even when they went to the trouble of attaching antennas to the roofs of their houses. Fortnightly solved that problem by placing antennas on the surrounding hillsides, allowing the company to capture the broadcasts of five nearby TV stations and transmit them via coaxial cable to the homes of paying customers. This operation is what's known in the trade as a community antenna television system, or CATV. In effect, it was a local cable company.

Trouble arose when this set-up came to the attention of United Artists Television, which objected to the fact that Fortnightly was paying no royalties on this copyrighted programming. Such transmissions, United Artists said, ran afoul of the Copyright Act of 1909, which granted copyright holders such as United Artists the exclusive right to "perform" their works "publicly."

But the Supreme Court sided with Fortnightly...