Major League Baseball and the National Football League have jumped into the Aereo Supreme Court fight, telling the justices that sports will vanish from the broadcast networks if the upstart online service prevails.
Multichannel News reported that the leagues told the court in an Amicus Brief that ESPN, TNT, and other pay outlets would be the big winners in such a scenario.
“If copyright holders lose their exclusive retransmission licensing rights and the substantial benefits derived from those rights when they place programming on broadcast stations, those stations will become less attractive mediums for distributing copyrighted content,” they wrote to the court. “The option for copyright holders will be to move that content to paid cable networks (such as ESPN and TNT) where Aereo-like services cannot hijack and exploit their programming without authorization.”
Read More: Multichannel News
Brief Take: By filing a brief with the court, the leagues have given a serious shot in the arm to the broadcasters’ case.
Tags: