Less than a week after multiple owners of Washington DC television stations—including Fox, NBC, ABC and Albiritton Communications—filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against digital media entrepreneur Alkiviades “Alki” David’s FilmOn.TV video-on-demand website and his Aereokiller service, the entertainment news website Deadline.com reported on May 28 that David said he was pulling the broadcasters from his streaming service. According to Deadline, David said in an open letter to broadcasters, “To avoid more inane lawsuits and one that is clearly rigged, we have decided to take down the Major Broadcasters in Washington DC and replace them with Independent stations. Something we are considering doing all across the country.”
As the technology website the Verge noted, “Aereokiller is the flippantly-named competitor to Aereo, the company that uses dime-sized antennas to capture over-the-air TV transmissions and then streams them to subscribers by way of the internet.” As Deadline noted, the lawsuit and David’s letter came “after a game of legal ping-pong between the networks and David and Barry Diller’s similar Aereo streaming service over the past few months.” The technology news website TechCrunch reported that Diller defended his company’s plans to build a more open video distribution platform during an appearance at the D11 Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes on May 29, saying that “what Aereo charges for isn’t that different from going to your local Radio Shack and buying an antenna to receive free, over-the-air TV signals.”
“The more you can get video to IP, the better it will be,” Diller said, responding to a question about the potential to break up the cable bundle by saying that he expects the current system to bust on its own. “The idea of you paying thousands of dollars a year for a package of cable channels that you don’t watch, it doesn’t make any sense.”
You can find additional information about intellectual property litigation on our website, and Los Angeles business litigation attorney Robert G. Klein has more than 25 years of experience handling complex copyright issues. If you need legal assistance with a copyright claim, use the form on this page or contact our firm at [number] to have our Los Angeles copyright infringement attorneyreview your case.
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