The Broadcast Treaty and Its Implications for Signal Piracy in North America

Marlee Miller,is a native of Lafayette, LA. She received her bachelor's degree from Loyola University New Orleans in 2005. Currently, she is a third year law student at American University Washington College of Law. While in law school, she interned in the Policy Division of Media Bureau and in the Office of Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein, both at the Federal Communications Commission. After graduation, Marlee will be working in communications law at Leventhal, Senter & Lerman in Washington, DC.

I. Introduction

Copyright laws grant authors the right to control specific uses of their work and the right be compensated for those uses. However, not all creative works receive copyright protection. In the United States, to the extent that broadcasters create their own original programming, they receive copyright protection.1 Nonetheless, the broadcasters do not have the right to control all uses of the content sent through their signals.2 To remedy this problem, the U.S. established a compulsory licensing scheme, requiring cable and satellite operators who transmit a broadcaster's content through their cable systems to pay that broadcaster the statutory fee.3

The advent of digital technologies has increased the quantity and the variety of information available to the public, as well as the speed the public can access that information. Such increases in digital technology have made it possible for pirates to steal broadcasters' signals and to make the information encoded in those signals available on the Internet, either simultaneously to the broadcast of the signal (referred to as "simulcasting") or at anytime upon the user's request (referred to as "on-demand transmissions", "webcast...

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