States and therefore was not subject to the strictures of the Copyright Act. It also argued that the uplink transmission was not a public performance because it was a transmission to a single satellite. See id. at 12.
The NFL court did not question the first assumption, but it flatly rejected the second on a specific and germane ground:
We believe the most logical interpretation of the Copyright Act is to hold that a public performance or display includes each step in the process by which a protected work wends its way to its audience. Under that analysis, it is clear that PrimeTime's uplink transmission of signals captured in the United States is a step in the process by which NFL's protected work wends its way to a public audience.
Id. at 13 (emphasis added) (internal quotation and citation omitted). Thus, while the uplink transmission that took place in the United States was not, in itself, "to the public," the NFL court deemed it so because it ultimately resulted in an undisputed public performance. Notably, the NFL court did not base its decision on the fact that an upstream transmission by another party (the NFL) might have been to the public. Nor did the court base its decision on the fact that Primetime simultaneously transmitted a performance of the work to the public in the United States. Because NFL directs us to look downstream, rather than upstream or laterally, to determine whether any link in a chain of transmissions made by a party constitutes a public performance, we reject plaintiffs' contention that we examine the potential recipients of the content provider's initial transmission to determine who is
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