Legality of redistributing free to air satellite channels over the internet

Question

Is it illegal to redistribute or extend the signals through the internet on otherwise open and free satellite channels?

If not in the US, how is it related to the international scene? The question of it's legality is not clear cut, as the signals are already open.

The internet company would merely be replacing the need for a satellite dish which is otherwise required to receive the analog signal and instead received by an ethernet cable directly from the internet company to your computer or device, and not through the satellite dish to your reciever.

Can someone try to shed some light on this?

Answer 1

See Am. Broad. Cos. v. Aereo, Inc. 573 U.S. ___ (2014). Your hypothetical seems to match the facts of that case:

Aereo, Inc., sells a service that allows its subscribers to watch television programs over the Internet at about the same time as the programs are broadcast over the air. When a subscriber wants to watch a show that is currently airing, he selects the show from a menu on Aereo’s website. Aereo’s system, which consists of thousands of small antennas and other equipment housed in a centralized warehouse, responds roughly as follows: A server tunes an antenna, which is dedicated to the use of one subscriber alone, to the broadcast carrying the selected show. A transcoder translates the signals received by the antenna into data that can be transmitted over the Internet. A server saves the data in a subscriber-specific folder on Aereo’s hard drive and begins streaming the show to the subscriber’s screen once several seconds of programming have been saved. The streaming continues, a few seconds behind the over-the-air broadcast, until the subscriber has received the entire show.

The Supreme Court held that Aereo infringed the copyright owner's exclusive right to transmit or communicate a work to the public.

Here is more background on this case from SCOTUSblog.

Answer 2

By "open and free", I assume you mean a channel that is not scrambled and subscription-only. Satellite channels are legally not distinct from signals sent via the tall stick on the hill: the stuff is protected by the same copyright law. This testimony to Congress, by the Register of Copyrights, restates the relevant law:

Section 106 of the Copyright Act grants certain exclusive rights to the owner of a copyrighted work. 17 U.S.C. §106. Among these exclusive rights are the right to make or authorize the making of copies of the work, to distribute or authorize the distribution of the work and, in the case of television broadcast programming and other audiovisual works, the right to publicly perform or authorize the performance of the copyrighted work. As a result, unless a compulsory license is available, anybody who wishes to retransmit copyrighted broadcast programming--whether over the Internet or by more established means of transmission such as cable or satellite--may do so only by obtaining the consent of the copyright owners.

There is compulsory licensing under the Satellite Home Viewer Act of 1988, which does not encompass internet retransmission of satellite signals (the current law is here and here): this basically allows satellite companies to rebroadcast ground broadcasts under certain conditions. The Register's testimony focuses on this issue, and she states "I believe that the section 111 license does not and should not apply to Internet transmissions". The law has not been changed since the testimony, so... it's doable – with permission of the copyright holder.