This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, July 8th, 2014. I'm Caleb Brown.

As the Supreme Court term ended, some cases didn't receive that much attention.

Ario is a technology that allows people to watch broadcast television

over the internet. It was effectively shut down by the High Court.

Julian Sanchez, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, comments.

Erie was a innovative and quite unusual company, effectively designed to take advantage of what they thought was a loophole

in copyright law and the law governing television retransmitters.

The idea was that Aereo would basically combine two kinds of services.

First, they would rent to their subscribers an individualized tiny antenna.

There were thousands of these tiny antennas on Arios Rooftop.

And at the same time, they would rent a cloud storage and streaming space in the same way that services like Google Play or Apple's I-Cloud do do and the idea was that users could tune their personal antenna

to broadcast television stations to watch their televisions from their tablet or their home computer, a little

bit like the technology called Sling Box that basically lets you do this with your own antenna in

your home and transmit the signal to your own

computing devices. And then save that signal to your online storage so you

could stream it as it was as it was playing or download it for later viewing.

And the idea here was that while Congress had changed copyright law a while back

back to essentially cover under the public performance right of copyright,

cable retransmitters of broadcasts,

simply forcing them to deal with the broadcasters.

That Ario thought that because basically people were just renting antennas from them.

It was like having a sling box with a really long antenna that happened to be hosted somewhere

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