The Supreme Court today delivered a major victory for broadcasters by ruling 6-3 that Aereo violated their copyright. Aereo uses thousands of TV antennas to stream content that's freely broadcast over the airwaves to users, who can also choose to record shows to watch later. The ruling may effectively destroy the company—top investor Barry Diller has previously said there was "no plan B" if it lost, CNN Money points out.
Conservatives Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito, and Clarence Thomas cast the dissenting votes. During oral arguments the court had worried that ruling against Aereo would harm the fledgling cloud computing industry, but in his majority opinion, Stephen Breyer said the court did not intend to question cloud computing as a whole, the AP reports. You can read more about the case and its specifics here. In other high court news:
- The court ruled that police must get a search warrant before looking through the phones of people they arrest, overriding an earlier ruling that police could examine anything found in a suspect's pockets. John Roberts said phones deserve a special exception. "Modern cellphones are not just another technological convenience," he wrote. "With all they contain and all they may reveal, they hold for many Americans the privacies of life."
- The court unanimously ruled that Fifth Third Bancorp could be sued for irresponsibly investing its employees' retirement funds in its own falling stock.
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