Supreme Court bats 2 for 3 on tech cases

The United States Supreme Court batted 2 for 3 in June on cases involving technology, and even the one they got wrong seems unlikely to pose a serious risk to innovation in the tech industry.

The first one the Court got right was Riley vs. California, in which petitioner Riley was convicted based in part from a warrantless search of information on a cellphone he was carrying when arrested. The ruling stated, “The police generally may not, without a warrant, search digital information on a cellphone seized from an individual who has been arrested.” The Justices didn’t need electrical engineering or computer science degrees to determine that a cellphone differs substantially from a cigarette pack (which police may search). Digital data, they write, cannot be used to harm an arresting officer, and they also dismissed concerns about destruction of data (via remote wiping). “Cellphones differ in both a quantitative and qualitative sense from other objects that might be carried on an arrestee’s person,” the Court ruled.

The Court also scored a hit with Alice vs. CLS Bank, which dealt with claims of patent-assertion entity Alice Corp. against CLS Bank, which has implemented an escrow system on which Alice claims to hold patent protection.

Justice Clarence Thomas delivered the opinion of the Court, finding against Alice. He stated, “We hold that the claims at issue are drawn to the abstract ides of intermediated settlement, and that merely requiring generic computer implementation fails to transform that abstract idea into a patent-eligible invention.”

The case on which the Court failed to connect is American Broadcasting v. Aereo, in which the Court ruled against the service that claimed to offer a cloud-like individual TV antenna to each of its subscribers, allowing them to stream over-the-air television broadcasts to their computers or mobile devices. Aereo claimed it should be exempt from retransmission fees that cable companies pay to carry over-the-air broadcast channels. The Court disagreed, even though Aereo didn’t permit consumers to receive any programming they weren’t free to receive using their own antennas.

The Court held that Aereo’s activities are substantially similar to CATV companies. Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito, in dissent, said the majority reached its conclusion only by devising “…an improvised standard (‘looks-like-cable-TV’) that will sow confusion for years to come.”

In light of the Court’s ruling, Aereo suspended operations on June 28, with Chet Kanojia, Aereo’s founder and chief executive, saying in a letter to subscribers that the company was pausing to figure out its next steps. He added, “The spectrum that the broadcasters use to transmit over-the-air programming belongs to the American public, and we believe you should have a right to access that live programming whether your antenna sits on the roof of your home, on top of your television, or in the cloud.” Aereo also urged its customers to ask their elected officials to take action to protect their right to use an antenna—including a cloud-based antenna—to access over-the-air broadcasts.

Whatever the fate of Aereo, its rivals including Simple.TV, Roku, Sling Media, TiVo, and Mohu are already stepping up with streaming over-the-air TV offerings that they expect will pass legal muster, according to a June 29 report in the New York Times. The Times quotes Leslie Moonves, the chief executive of CBS, as saying, “We are not against people moving forward and offering our content online and all sorts of places, as long as it is appropriately licensed. Innovation is still alive and well and thriving.”