WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that a startup Internet company has to pay broadcasters when it takes television programs from the airwaves and allows subscribers to watch them on smartphones and other portable devices.

The justices said by a 6-3 vote that Aereo Inc. is violating the broadcasters’ copyrights by taking the signals for free. The ruling preserves the ability of the television networks to collect huge fees from cable and satellite systems that transmit their programming.

Had services such as Aereo been allowed to operate without paying for the programming, more people might have ditched their cable services, meaning broadcasters would have been able to charge less for the right to transmit their programs.

Aereo looks a lot like a cable system, Justice Stephen Breyer wrote for the court in rejecting the company’s attempts to distinguish itself from cable and satellite TV. “Aereo’s system is, for all practical purposes, identical to a cable system,” he said.

Aereo is available in New York, Boston, Houston and Atlanta among 11 metropolitan areas and uses thousands of dime-size antennas to capture television signals and transmit them to subscribers who pay as little as $8 a month for the service. Because each subscriber is temporarily assigned a dime-sized, individual antenna, Aereo had made the case that it wasn’t like a cable company and wasn’t doing anything customers couldn’t do on their own at home.

Breyer seemed to suggest the company was too-cute-by-half as he announced the opinion. He laid out the company’s argument that its antennae don’t really transmit to the public and then said, “Hmmm,” followed by a long pause. Then he added: “Well, we think that this argument makes too fine a point.”

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Company executives and prominent investor Barry Diller have said their business model would not survive a loss at the Supreme Court.

Aereo chief executive Chet Kanojia called the decision “a massive setback for the American consumer” and said the company would continue to fight, without being specific.

“We’ve said all along that we worked diligently to create a technology that complies with the law, but today’s decision clearly states that how the technology works does not matter. This sends a chilling message to the technology industry,” Kanojia said in a statement.

Some justices worried during arguments in April that a ruling for the broadcasters could also harm the burgeoning world of cloud computing, which gives users access to a vast online computer network that stores and processes information.

But Breyer said the court did not intend to call cloud computing into question.

Justices Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented.


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