Unauthorized Television Re-Broadcasting as Infringement of the Public Performance Right; The Supreme Court from Fortnightly to Aereo

摘要

The advent of new technological uses for copyrighted material typically raises questions as to how these developments might affect the copyright social utility status quo. While some advances can be incorporated readily into the existing copyright regime, others require a policy-focused assessment of the potential impact upon the social utility objectives that underlie copyright protection.~(33) The Supreme Court's analysis in Aereo illustrates that while courts can wrestle with digital information uses for copyrighted material, given the paradigm-changing impact of digital information technology, and the rapid pace at which these technologies evolve, judicial assessment of individual advances and applications can be an inefficient, unpredictable, and incomplete approach to delineating and settling the law in this field.~(34) The copyright issues presented by DVR (and many other digital information) technologies likely will continue to challenge judicial capability to parse and interpret the pertinent provisions of the Copyright Act. Now that the Supreme Court has pronounced upon (some of) the issues surrounding DVR use, perhaps its intervention will have the same affect upon Congress as its decisions in Fortnightly and Teleprompter, and prompt Congress to address these and other copyright challenges of the digital information age.