Ivi tv tv#
Congress added "microwave" as yet another exception in 1994, the Second Circuit said, but it has never determined whether the Internet also serves as a cable TV system. Satellite broadcasters were added after the Supreme Court decided in 1991 that a direct-broadcast satellite company was a cable operator. The theory was to spare cable operators the time and expense of negotiating licenses with the myriad owners of content that was being broadcast over the air. After the Supreme Court decided that cable-TV systems could retransmit broadcast signals without violating copyright laws, Congress in 1976 revised the law to require broadcasters to provide compulsory licenses to their cable counterparts.
The court looked to the legislative history and decided that cable TV began in the 1940s to serve rural and isolated communities that had trouble receiving over-the-air TV signals. Among other things, it is certainly unclear whether the Internet itself is a facility, as it is neither a physical nor a tangible entity rather, it is `a global network of millions of interconnected computers.' The definition of "cable TV" under federal law is unclear, the Second Circuit acknowledged:īased on the statutory text alone, it is simply not clear whether a service that retransmits television programming live and over the Internet constitutes a cable system. Ivi tried to argue it was a cable-TV network for the purposes of these retransmission rights, because an exception to the Copyright Act gives cable operators the right to retransmit if they pay fees set by the Copyright Royalty Board, an arm of the Library of Congress. 2010, saying it violated federal copyright laws that give broadcasters the exclusive right to transmit programming. Sky Angel has asked the Federal Communications Commission to declare it a cable-TV system so that it can compel Discovery Network to honor a contract to provide Animal Planet and other popular programs that Discovery cut off after growing uncomfortable with Sky Angel's streaming service.īroadcasters and program owners sued ivi soon almost immediately after the service was launched in Sept. But Sky Angel faces no threat of being hauled into court, because it has negotiated long-term contracts with programming companies. The Second Circuit's decision could undermine e fforts by Sky Angel, another Internet-streaming company, to have itself declared a cable-TV system. Unlike ivi, which distributed grabbed local TV signals in New York, Seattle and other markets and routed them through its servers to subscribers, Aereo at least makes the technological pretense that its subscribers are receiving the signal from a tiny individual antenna equivalent to the rabbit ears that used to sit atop every TV set. The decision comes a little more than a month after a federal judge in New York refused to shut down Barry Diller's Aereo service, which uses tiny television receivers to grab broadcast signals and send them to subscribers over the Internet.
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