Aereo has filed a complaint against CBS seeking to head off
threatened suits in markets where Aereo plans to expand its streamed TV station
signal service.
In a request for declaratory ruling filed Monday with the
U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, Aereo said that
given CBS' threat to file individual suits in the markets where it plans to expand
beyond New York -- it has recently announced expansion to a second market,
Boston, and plans other launches -- it wants the court to declare that Aereo
technology does not infringe any CBS copyrights.
Aereo says that in response to that Boston announcement, CBS
threatened to file suits in that and other markets, citing news reports of CBS
and copies of tweets from a CBS executive.
The same district court earlier denied CBS' request for a
preliminary injunction against Aereo while it hears the actual broadcaster
challenge, but the court denied that injunction and the Second Circuit Court of
Appeals upheld that decision.
"Such threatened follow-on suits would be an attempt to avoid or evade the District Court's rulings and the Second Circuit's affirmance of the denial of the preliminary injunction motion by seeking Do-overs in other courts," Aereo told the court. "The fact that CBS did not prevail in their efforts to enjoin Aereo in their existing federal lawsuit does not entitle them to a do-over in another jurisdiction," said Aereo in a statement accompanying the latest legal filing. "We are hopeful that any such efforts to commence duplicative lawsuits to try to seek a different outcome will be rejected by the courts."
"These public relations and legal maneuvers
do not change the fundamentally illegal nature of Aereo's supposed
business," CBS said in a statement. "The issue of unauthorized
streaming of copyrighted television programming is now being contested in the
2nd Circuit and the 9th Circuit, and wherever Aereo attempts to operate there
will be vigorous challenges to its illegal business model."
