Shapiro on Aereo Decision: David Lost to Goliath ‘PR Machine’
CEA President Gary Shapiro views the just-completed Supreme Court battle between Aereo and the TV networks as an epic David vs. Goliath fight that David lost amid a big public relations onslaught from the content and broadcast industries, he told us Thursday in an email.
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That the three justices who sided with Aereo in the 6-3 decision handed down Wednesday (CD June 26 p1) happened to be the most conservative on the bench played little factor in the final outcome, Shapiro said. As Justice Antonin Scalia noted in his dissent, Shapiro said, “the majority had to use rather tortured statutory interpretation so they could get the result they wanted.” Scalia was joined in his dissent by Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas. “They wanted Aereo to be shut down as they viewed its service as morally unacceptable,” Shapiro said.
Shapiro credits the “mammoth PR, lobbying and legal world of broadcast and content creators” for doing a “marvelous job of making Aereo out to sound evil.” Their “stealing property premise via legal loophole became the starting point,” he said. “Aereo’s mistake was not challenging this and instead relying exclusively on legal arguments.”
Shapiro thinks Aereo “would have picked up votes if the Court had viewed Aereo’s service as consistent with the grant to broadcasters of eight-year licenses to use broadcast spectrum,” Shapiro said. “The deal for the spectrum is providing free over-the-air service,” he said. Americans have “quickly and radically” changed how they consume video content, he said. “It used to be only on TVs. Now we watch video on laptops, smartphones and tablets.”
Aereo “served” these second-screen consumers, “giving them what they are entitled to get for free” in the form of over-the-air local broadcasts, “unbundled from cable,” Shapiro said. The content and broadcasting industries “won the legal battle because they won the PR battle,” he said. “The status quo beat the upstart as the status quo PR machine overwhelmed this tiny company.” Aereo representatives didn’t immediately comment. As for NAB, “we're pleased the Supreme Court rejected Gary Shapiro’s supposition that companies should be allowed to build a business on the theft of someone else’s content,” spokesman Dennis Wharton said in an email.