Supreme Court Supports Innovation in Cloud Services

For those who don’t obsessively follow Supreme Court cases (I know there must be a few of you out there), the Supreme Court has been busy this week announcing two decisions we support.

In American Broadcasting Cos. v. Aereo Inc., the Supreme Court reaffirmed the importance of copyright protections while still supporting innovation in cloud technology. For app developers who rely on the cloud to distribute our products and who make very cool copyrighted content, this decision is important.

Aereo sells a service that copies broadcasted TV content and transmits it to customers online. Each program is only streamed to one customer; if another customer wants to view the same program, another antenna is used and another file is created. In its decision, the court held that Aereo infringed on the televisions program owners’ exclusive right to publicly perform their works under the Copyright Act. Basically, this means Aereo has been infringing on the broadcaster’s copyright.

And even though the Court ruled against Aereo, the ruling protects the cloud services on which developers and consumers rely. The Court makes it clear their decision in Aereo is not meant to stifle any of the tremendous innovation in cloud. Cloud services today offer services that are more than just Aereo’s retransmission of content. Those very few cloud services who might run afoul of this ruling by distributing content consumers do not “own or possess” (I’m looking at you, YouTube) are more at risk of indirect copyright liability rather than the direct infringement here.

The Court states that they are not trying to stifle technological innovation, just protect the copyrighted works of others from infringement. A Truth on the Market blog post may have put it best when they said the ruling boils down to “either get a license to provide content not already owned by your subscribers, or provide only that content which your subscribers already own.”