The Court ruled that the service provided by Aereo, which allowed subscribers to view live and time-shifted streams of over-the-air television on Internet-connected devices,[1] violated copyright laws.

[6][7] On July 11, Federal Judge Alison Nathan denied this injunction, citing as precedent the 2008 Cablevision case, which established the legality of cloud-based streaming and DVR services.

[14] In response, News Corporation Chief Operating Officer Chase Carey stated that the company is contemplating taking Fox off the air and converting it to a cable-only channel: "We need to be able to be fairly compensated for our content... we can't sit idly by and let an entity steal our signal.

[20] On November 17, 2013, the National Football League and Major League Baseball filed a joint amicus brief to the Supreme Court that warned that sports programming would likely migrate from broadcast to cable television and that Aereo may put the US in violation of several international treaties, which prohibit the retransmission of broadcast signals over the Internet without their copyright holders' consent.

The Court's decision describes Aereo as not being "simply an equipment provider" with an "overwhelming likeness to cable companies" that "performs petitioners' works 'publicly.'"

Writing for the dissenting minority, Scalia quoted from Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc. and noted that the broadcasters had made similar predictions regarding the VCR.

Like the final paragraph in that previous ruling, he stated that the Court should be in no position to make judgements on novel technologies and that Congress indeed has the task of determining if copyright laws should be modified to address those issues.

The Court manages to reach the opposite conclusion only by disregarding widely accepted rules for service-provider liability and adopting in their place an improvised standard ("looks-like-cable-TV") that will sow confusion for years to come.