Entertainment, Arts, and Sports Law Commons^™

What's In A Name: Cable Systems, Filmon, And Judicial Consideration Of The Applicability Of The Copyright Act's Compulsory License To Online Broadcasters Of Cable Content, Kathryn M. Boyd

Duke Law & Technology Review

The way we consume media today is vastly different from the way media was consumed in 1976, when the Copyright Act created the compulsory license for cable systems. The compulsory license allowed cable systems, as defined by the Copyright Act, to pay a set fee for the right to air television programming rather than working out individual deals with each group that owned the copyright in the programming, and helped make television more widely accessible to the viewing public. FilmOn, a company that uses a mini-antenna system to capture and retransmit broadcast network signals, is now seeking access to the …