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Abstract
The Supreme Court's decision in American Broadcasting Companies, Inc. v. Aereo, Inc. overturned the Second Circuit's rule that separate copies create separate performances without clarifying the scope of a performance. The decision creates significant ambiguity surrounding the public performance right and potentially massive liability for cloud-computing companies. Since cloud computing allows customers to run programs remotely from a company's servers, two independent customers watching different copies of the same movie from the same cloud results in the cloud conducting a public performance. This Note examines this problem, concludes that the current public performance regime has become obsolete, and proposes a new bright-line safe harbor for cloud-computing companies based on the fair use doctrine, dubbed the "Fair Performance Doctrine."
Recommended Citation
Patrick C. Tricker,
The Internet after Aereo: How to Save Innovation from the Public Performance Right,
17 Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law
815
(2020)
Available at: https://scholarship.law.vanderbilt.edu/jetlaw/vol17/iss3/6