Over-the-Air TV Advertising Receives a Reprieve
The lawsuit, American Broadcasting Companies, Inc. v. Aereo Inc., has been for quite some time heralded the demise of over-the-air advertising. This is the case in which the Brooklyn based company leased individual television antennas to subscribers allowing them to watch and record over-the-air television programming and stream the content to their computers remotely. Aereo neither owned the copyright to the broadcast content, nor held a license from the copyright owners to perform those works publicly. The danger with Aereo's service is that it provided users with a DVR utility that allowed them to skip commercials entirely.
Last week the United States Supreme Court decided the case against Aereo, finding that Aereo's approach to streaming major broadcast networks' content to subscribers violated television networks' copyrights. In a 6-3 decision the Supreme Court explained that Aereo infringed the networks exclusive right to perform copyrighted work by selling its service that allows viewers to simultaneously watch over-the-air TV over the Internet without paying a cent to TV networks and program developers.
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Source
"Over-the-Air TV Advertising Receives a Reprieve." Eric Vaughn-Flam, senior partner, Sanders Ortoli Vaughn-Flam Rosenstadt LLP. The Internationalist. Number 69, 2014.