“Again sticking with the rebroadcast presumption, its hard to make a case for monetary damages deriving from increasing the size of a broadcast audience, no matter its location.”
The problem for the nets isn’t increasing the size of the broadcast audience — the problem is Aereo is charging that bigger audience for the signal. And the networks are barred by law from doing the same thing.
The premise is the American people own the broadcast airwaves. And you need a license from the People to broadcast over their bandwidth. Broadcasters get exclusive use of a place on the bandwidth — but they can never, ever, EVER charge the American people to access that signal. If they try to charge for it, the FCC will yank their license.
What the nets are sore about is that Aereo is making money doing what they’re not allowed to do: charge for “over the airwaves” broadcasting.
Their “damages” are not getting a cut of the money Aereo is making. Their logic: if we can’t charge for sending something out over the airwaves, then nobody can.
Good example.
Concur, as I stated, but that is a matter of business practice, not the procedure of resending the signal.
But then there is the NFL, that does require you to pay them a fee for a broadcast game, if you allow more than a certain number of people to view it in one venue (doesn't matter if you charge or not).
The networks do charge for access to programming when they put it on the Internet, they just don't have to capture it from a broadcast.