On behalf of DirecTV, DirecTV Now or U-Verse, AT&T has filed a complaint against nine TV station owners who it says have collectively “pulled” 20 stations from those services on May 30 and June 10, blackouts it says continued at press time “with no end in sight.” AT&T said all the stations have shared services agreements with Sinclair, which it says appears to “manage and control” the stations, but it did not target that broadcaster in the complaint.
On Wednesday, a songwriting team filed a lawsuit in Manhattan federal court against singer Carrie Underwood, the NFL and NBC, saying they stole a song and used it to introduce Sunday Night Football during the 2018-19 season.
Less than two months after a California judge eviscerated the unprecedented $179 million award that Bones executive producers and stars won in their long-running profits participation legal clash with 21st Century Fox, Barry Josephson today added fraud to his claims against the now Disney-owned entity.
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has signaled the FCC will vote at its July 10 meeting on an item revamping its KidVid rules, providing broadcasters more flexibility in meeting their children’s educational and informational [E/I] programming requirements under the Children’s TV Act.
Exclusives
A California jury Monday ordered the Provo-based VidAngel to pay $62.4 million to four Hollywood studios, for violating the studios’ copyrights by streaming filtered versions of their movies into customers’ homes.
The Association of National Advertisers has joined with three pharmaceutical companies in a challenge to a new federal rule requiring that television ads for prescription drugs include their list price.
The agreement with CBS, Cox, Scripps, Fox and Tegna requires them to “terminate and refrain from sharing revenue pacing information and other competitively sensitive information.”
An Updated Political Broadcasting Guide
2020 will no doubt be a very active year for political advertising. To help broadcasters sort out the confusing rules they need to follow in connection with such advertising, Broadcast Law Blog has updated its Political Broadcasting Guide for Broadcasters. The revised guide is much the same as the one that we published two years ago, formatted as Questions and Answers to cover many of the issues that come up for broadcasters in a political season. This guide is only that – a guide to the issues and not a definitive answer to any of the very fact-dependent legal issues that arise in election season. But we hope that it at least provides a starting point for the analysis of issues, so that station employees have a background to discuss these matters with ad buyers and their own attorneys.
The FCC should not levy the same user fee on satellite stations that it does on their mother ships. That is according to station group owners Nexstar and Gray Television in comments filed at the FCC on the commission’s proposed revise of its user fees per a congressional mandate to revisit them. They said to “obliterate” that distinction would boost satellite TV user fees “drastically.”
The rule, set to take effect July 9, is one of the most visible efforts by the Trump administration to try to address high drug prices.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders will leave the job at the end of the month, President Donald Trump said Thursday. In a pair of tweets, the president said Sanders will return to her home state of Arkansas. He thanked her for what he called a “job well done.” “I hope she decides to run for Governor of Arkansas — she would be fantastic!” Trump tweeted. He did not immediately announce who would replace her.
Facebook has agreed to settle a class-action complaint accusing the company of inflating video metrics by up to 900%.
FCC Votes to Approve La Plata Market Mod
The FCC commissioners signaled Wednesday (June 12) that they have voted in favor of a proposal to modify the satellite markets of KDVR, KCNC, KMGH and KUSA, all Denver, to include a so-called orphan county in Colorado that had been receiving out-of-state TV station signals from Dish Network and DirecTV due to the way the Nielsen market was drawn up.
FCC media ownership deregulation took its latest trip to Philadelphia Tuesday (June 11) as the FCC defended its most recent rule changes against a challenge by Prometheus Radio Project in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. The FCC defended its efforts, or in Prometheus’ view, its lack of them, on diversity.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. Justice Department’s antitrust chief suggested Tuesday he’ll take a broad view of how competition is harmed when assessing whether big tech firms should be broken […]
At a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust panel, news media associations accused the tech companies of jeopardizing the industry’s economic survival by putting news content on their platforms without fairly compensating them.
A pair of media researchers/academics have provided input on how the media content ratings could, and should, be improved, including standardizing them across platforms and taking ratings calls out of the hands of industry.
FCC attorneys are probably hoping the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit won’t issue its decision on Mozilla’s challenge to the commission’s Restoring Internet Freedom ISP deregulation order Tuesday (June 11). (The court releases opinions Tuesdays and Thursdays and case watchers are looking for a decision anytime now.) That’s because a number of those FCC attorneys, including General Counsel Tom Johnson, will be on their way to Philadelphia for oral argument in the challenge to the FCC’s media ownership deregulation, according to an FCC source.
On Monday, the justices of the high court announced that they had accepted for review a case claiming discrimination in contracting against Comcast in alleged violation of section 1981 of the Civil Rights Act. The $20 billion lawsuit comes from Byron Allen’s Entertainment Studios Network, an African American owned programmer upset over the way that cable TV distributors refused to make good offers to license his channels.
Jessell | Do Broadcasters Deserve A Bit Of C-Band Gold?
As owners of earth stations, broadcasters may be able to cut themselves in for a portion of the billions that satellite operators hope to get from the sale of some of their C-band spectrum to 5G wireless carriers. But I’d rather see the taxpayers get the excess proceeds.
Charles Cooper has been named associate administrator of the Office of Spectrum Management at the National Telecommunications & Information Administration, where he will help develop the National Spectrum Strategy mandated by President Trump. Cooper, who comes aboard July 1, was most recently at the FCC, where he was involved in radio frequency enforcement.
The precipitating event for Silicon Valley’s regulatory reckoning? A change in our political beliefs.
Bring Back The Golden Age Of Regulation
April Glaser: “The current public interest requirements of broadcasters are nearly unrecognizable compared to the form they took before Reagan-era deregulation — much of the license-renewal process has been reduced to answering a few questions on an online form. Regulating social-media platforms in the exact same way broadcasters were decades ago doesn’t make sense. But the old debates over broadcast could help guide lawmakers grappling with how to rein in the new communications giants of today.”
FCC Revises Repack Reimbursement Procedure
The FCC on June 4 released streamlined financial information instructions for full-power/Class A TV stations receiving repack reimbursement that have changed their banking information or have sold or acquired an eligible station and need to transfer the banking information to the new owner.
A Los Angeles Superior Court judge rejects Netflix’s view that Fox’s employment contracts are tainted with illegality.
