US District Judge Dale Kimball on Wednesday had approved a preliminary injunction against the Internet streaming service of Aereo. This, said The Hollywood Reporter, had delighted Fox Broadcasting and local stations, who earlier claimed that the online television streaming services company had managed to irreparably hurt their businesses via copyright violations.
Moreover, said Kimball also ruled a stay of the proceedings as a Supreme Court decision over the legality of Aereo's digital service is set beginning April 22 this year.
In a statement, Fox said, "This is a significant win for both broadcasters and content owners. We are very pleased that the U.S. District Court in Utah has granted our request for a preliminary injunction. This injunction will prohibit Aereo from stealing our broadcast signal in Utah, New Mexico, Colorado, Oklahoma, Wyoming and Montana."
THR said the development had marked the first significant loss of Aereo. The digital service company had been staving off injunction requests from New York and Boston courts and prevailed in a case filed with the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals after launching in March 2012. The online news site said that the core controversy of Aereo's service in the legal battles is whether the company's transmission of of broadcasters' content is privately or publicly done. Earlier, Aereo argued that its service is deemed private under the reasoning that each one of their growing list of customers is assigned a unique copy of the creative content and that the individual Aereo subscriber would be the only one who could receive the transmission of such copy. THR said that Aereo's reasoning was largely based on Cablevision's remote-storage DVR service, which was deemed by a 2nd Circuit ruling as a private service.
Kimball reportedly rejected this reasoning and said, "The court focused on discerning who is 'capable of receiving' the performance to determine whether a performance is transmitted to the public. However, such a focus is not supported by the language of the statute. The clause states clearly that it applies to any performance made available to the public. Paying subscribers would certainly fall within the ambit of 'a substantial number of persons outside of a normal circle of a family and its social acquaintances' and within a general understanding of the term 'public.'"
