India-Born Technocrat Joins Battle With Top U.S. Broadcasters

Wednesday, 23 April 2014, 23:27 IST
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WASHINGTON: In what has been dubbed as a David vs Goliath case, an India-born technocrat has taken America's largest broadcasters, who claim his start-up's television streaming service is a theft, to the Supreme Court.

The apex court Tuesday heard arguments from the attorney of Aereo, an online TV platform founded by Chaitanya 'Chet' Kanojia, in defence of the legality of its television streaming service and explaining the logic underpinning it. The arguments summarised two years of legal tussling between Aereo, which provides streams of local television stations to paying subscribers, and the owners of those stations, according to CNNMoney.

The TV station owners, major media companies like Disney and CBS, say that Aereo is violating copyright by allowing "public performances" of shows. Aereo says it is only enabling private screenings, just like off-the-shelf TV antennas do.

Several of the justices, in their questioning, repeatedly expressed concerns that a broad ruling against Aereo would imperil the nascent cloud computing industry because of how Aereo works, CNNMoney said. They seemed to search for a way to avoid that outcome, it said.

The justices are expected to issue a ruling by early summer. The formal issue before the Supreme Court is "whether a company 'publicly performs' a copyrighted television programme when it retransmits a broadcast of that programme to thousands of paid subscribers over the Internet."
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Source: IANS
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