Aereo Tells The Supremes: 'We're Heirs To Rabbit Ears'

Aereo filed its opening brief in the Supreme Court late Wednesday, responding to broadcaster's, who got the first shot in, while framing its service as the natural inheritor of free TV and home taping rights, according to Broadcasting&Cable.

Aereo's dime-sized antenna

"The evolution of technology from a black-and-white television connected to a rabbit-ear antenna and a Betamax to a high-definition television connected to a digital antenna and DVR has not changed those core principles," which is that "any consumer with an antenna is entitled to receive, watch, and make a personal recording of that content."

Broadcasters told the court that Aereo was using a technological work-around to provide a performance while attempting to avoid copyright payments. But Aereo says copyright is a limited grant, and applies to a public performance, not its one-to-one transmissions to individuals that result in individual private performances controlled by its subscribers, not Aereo.

"Because the performance embodied in each transmission from Aereo’s equipment – the user’s playing of her recording – is available only to the individual user who created that recording, the performance is private, not public," Aereo tells the court. It points out that what users are accessing is their own copy of a broadcast transmission, not the transmission itself.

Broadcasters have branded Aereo a Rube Goldberg contraption, a reference to the cartoonist who depicted elaborate devices performing simple tasks. Aereo defines Rube Goldberg as "a clever way to take advantage of existing laws" and takes ownership of it.

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