By putting YouTube in the same league as file-sharing services, Viacom and other plaintiffs in a long-running copyright infringement case would endanger the safe-harbor protections of federal law that protect all websites, the Consumer Electronics Association said in a friend-of-the-court brief. The group told the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals -- which had heard from a broad swath of copyright owners and Microsoft in favor of Viacom (CED Dec 14 p4) -- that the copyright industries will be proven wrong again on the danger from new technology. “For example, when Britain’s Monty Python learned that fans were posting poor quality video clips of its films on YouTube, the Pythons posted better quality versions along with an amusing video asking viewers to buy their DVDs,” raising DVD sales “23,000 percent,” CEA said. YouTube is one in a long line of technology developments that copyright owners opposed at first, from the gramophone to cable TV and, most famously, the VCR, the brief said. It included what may the first legal citation of CEA President Gary Shapiro’s book on innovation, The Comeback, published this year. The feared technologies had one thing in common, CEA said: “substantial noninfringing uses.” The association encouraged the 2nd Circuit to follow the Supreme Court’s holding in the Grokster case that proof of “mere knowledge of infringing potential or of actual infringing uses” isn’t enough to show inducement to infringe. YouTube doesn’t fit the high court’s restriction of liability to “one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement,” CEA said. The group included a chart in its filing contrasting YouTube with P2P services: YouTube doesn’t let users download content, the streaming quality is often poor, the service has time and file-size limits, it promptly responds to takedown requests, and “almost none” of the content available infringes copyrights. The MPAA’s own figures demonstrate unprecedented box-office growth since YouTube’s founding, CEA said. “The music business continued to prosper,” as well, the brief said, citing a Nielsen SoundScan estimate of 1.5 billion digital music sales in 2008. Most of those were single track downloads, though, and record industry revenue remains in severe decline. “This case will set precedent that will determine the future of the Internet for decades,” CEA said. If Viacom succeeds on its theory that YouTube doesn’t qualify for a safe harbor under Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, “most if not all [user-generated content] sites, Internet links, and perhaps even the Internet generally would simply have to shut down” in the face of massive potential damages. Estimating that YouTube users upload 110 million videos a year, CEA said, “If only 1 percent of them infringe someone’s copyright, YouTube could be liable for 1,100,000 works per year. Assuming $10,000 in statutory damages for each of these would cost YouTube $11.1 billion per year.” A 1 percent infringement rate would put Facebook on the hook for $36 trillion a year, the brief said. “Almost all sites are at least partly” UGC sites, from Google search and newspaper sites to Amazon product reviews and Flickr photos, and all would be threatened. Holding YouTube liable for “general knowledge” of infringement on its site, as Advance Publications suggested in its brief in the case, “could result from a newspaper article, a random email, employee gossip, and the like,” CEA said. It would violate Section 512 requirements of specificity in takedown notices and could spur abuse by encouraging an online service to “entice” a content owner to send a general-knowledge takedown notice to a competitor of the instigator. Among the many problems with requiring websites to use content filtering would be “endless litigation over what is ‘commercially reasonable’ filtering” as proposed by Viacom, the brief said. “Courts would be required to perform technical and economic analyses of myriad protection technologies, including various forms of encryption, watermarking, fingerprinting, digital rights management, and others not yet invented,” for every copyright owner that complained its preferred filtering system wasn’t adopted, it said. Viacom’s interpretation of Section 512’s safe harbor as applying only to a “passive provider of storage space” would leave the entire cloud-computing industry at risk of litigation, CEA said. It said Amazon’s Simple Storage Service, known as S3, alone could be liable for $2 trillion in damages.

Small cable operators are making a novel attempt to place conditions on approval of the sale of a TV station, over concerns its new owner could jointly strike retransmission consent deals with pay-TV providers. It’s the latest salvo in a battle over retrans policies. The American Cable Association asked the FCC last month to impose conditions rarely sought in previous sales of TV stations (CD March 18 p10). The association wants the commission to either block a proposed purchase of the ABC affiliate in Topeka, Kan., or forbid new owner PBC Communications from signing a retrans deal with anyone in the market including New Vision TV, with which PBC has similar arrangements in other markets.

The FCC can reach its goal of an Internet protocol-based telecom network fastest and easiest by adopting a “bill-and-keep” approach to intercarrier compensation reform for VoIP, said Vonage and the Voice on the Net Coalition in comments. Bill-and-keep is an “economically efficient, forward-looking solution that will send appropriate price signals to consumers and the industry,” Vonage said in its comments, filed to dockets 10-90, 09-51, 07-135, 05-337, 01-92, 96-45 and 03-109. VON said “the identical nature of all IP traffic, and the relative burden such traffic imposes on the carrier networks, demands an intercarrier compensation regime that treats all traffic equally.”

A decision is expected in the next couple of months on whether the amount of damages awarded in the Sony v. Tenenbaum P2P case is constitutional, said lawyers familiar with the case. The 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston heard statements Monday from lawyers representing Tenenbaum and the RIAA. Tenenbaum, a Harvard University student represented by Harvard law professor Charles Nesson and his students, was sued by Sony in 2007 for illegally downloading music, the complaint said. Tenenbaum was originally ordered to pay $675,000 in damages but that amount was reduced to $67,500 by a district court judge in July 2010 (WID July 13 p3). RIAA and the Department of Justice appealed the decision last year.

Capitol Hill is taking notice of GPS interference issues potentially raised by the LightSquared network. House Communications Ranking Member Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., told us Friday that concerns raised by the GPS community “are serious and need to be addressed before any build-out of the proposed network by LightSquared.” At an FCC budget hearing last week in the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government (CD March 31 p1), Ranking Member Jose Serrano, D-N.Y., and Reps. Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Fla., and Kevin Yoder, R-Kan., also flagged potential interference to GPS. LightSquared is reviewing the interference potential through an FCC-required working group that includes wireless, GPS and federal interests. That group is supposed to present a final report to the agency by June 15.

The International Trade Commission announces that a section 337 patent-based complaint has been filed regarding certain electronic devices, including mobile phones, mobile tablets, portable music players, and computers, and components thereof.

The International Trade Commission announces that a section 337 patent-based complaint has been filed regarding certain video game systems and wireless controller and components thereof.

The International Trade Commission announces that a section 337 patent-based complaint has been filed regarding certain handheld electronic computing devices, related software, and components thereof (e-readers and tablet devices).

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Working Group on Bribery has issued a report stating that although Canada has recently made progress in investigating the bribery of foreign public officials by Canadian businesses, its legislative and institutional framework for enforcing the "Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions" remains problematic.

Republicans want to cut FCC spending below the agency’s FY 2012 request of $354.2 million, they said at a hearing Wednesday of the House Appropriations subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government. It’s still important to find cost savings at the FCC, even if the agency offsets its costs by releasing new spectrum, said Subcommittee Chairman Jo Ann Emerson, R-Mo. Committee members also needled FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski on many specific issues, including data roaming, potential interference to GPS by LightSquared, and alleged privacy violations by Google.