SAN FRANCISCO -- The Sony Betamax case is out and copyright-infringement filtering requirements are in for image-search engines and other Web sites that host third- party content, a leading attorney for Hollywood rights holders said Monday said Monday at a Practising Law Institute seminar on technology and entertainment convergence. That’s the message of rulings since spring by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, said the attorney, Russell Frackman. A defense lawyer who is one of his most prominent adversaries conceded that the cases make the outlook bleak for his side.

The Universal Postal Union, which in 2004 won approval for new sponsored top-level domain (sTLD) .post, last week took the unusual step of seeking public input on potentially ground-breaking changes to ICANN’s standard sponsorship agreement before finalizing its contract. The agreement emerging from ICANN and the UPU, a U.N. specialized agency, could be a model for other intergovernmental bodies’ sTLD proposals, said Paul Donohoe, director of e-services, in a Sept. 5 letter to ICANN. Early dialogue could head off some problems plaguing other sponsored domains, he told us.

The Chairmen and two othermembers (members)¹ of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and House Homeland Security Committees sent a letter to the Secretary of Homeland Security asking DHS to hold off on a $1.2 billion acquisition of nuclear radiation monitors until questions about their reliability, performance, and effectiveness have been addressed.

An FCC notice on cable and broadcast bundling of channels in carriage deals probably gives Chairman Kevin Martin another platform to raise the issue of a la carte, agency and industry officials said. Martin circulated the notice two weeks ago with an eye toward a quick vote on it and a related program access order (CD Aug 24 p2). The notice doesn’t specifically require cable operators, satellite providers and other pay-TV companies to sell channels individually, FCC and industry officials said. But they said that point is indirectly raised because the notice asks whether TV stations and some cable channels can require pay TV providers to carry them with affiliated channels.

Wireless carriers may take their case to Congress if the FCC mandates that within a year they must meet E-911 location accuracy standards at the public safety answering point (PSAP) level, carrier sources said. But the order is a work in progress. Some commissioners fear no carriers can meet that deadline and that the order would be challenged in court. Carriers are in a holding pattern on a Hill strategy until the FCC acts, most likely at its Sept. 11 meeting.

It’s not proper for the FCC to solicit last minute data about four carriers’ broadband forbearance petitions when there’s almost no time for other parties to review the new information, CompTel said in a letter to the commission filed Monday. CompTel said it “objects strenuously” to the Wireline Bureau’s letter to carriers late last week seeking “market data” that could be used to analyze carriers’ market share in various communities. The petitions filed by Qwest, AT&T, Embarq and Frontier seek forbearance from regulation of their enterprise broadband services, similar to that won by Verizon last year. Deadlines for action on the petitions vary. But the FCC reportedly is considering combining them into one order, which means a vote would have to be taken by Sept. 11, the deadline for the Qwest petition, which was filed first. The letter sent Thursday by Wireline Bureau Chief Thomas Navin asked carriers to provide the new data by Aug. 31. The terse letter gave no explanation of why the commission needed to do a “local market analysis,” except to make a passing reference to the FCC’s order last week approving a forbearance petition filed by ACS, an Anchorage telecom company (CD Aug 22 p1). Navin said the commission sought additional information “in light of the issue raised by the Commission’s recent ACS order concerning the proper geographic scope of analysis for the enterprise broadband market.” The ACS order raised questions about the proper ways to analyze market power -- for example whether the analysis should be on a local rather than national basis, especially for the isolated Alaskan market. Seeking data at the last minute, when the 15-month review period is almost over, will deny the public “a meaningful opportunity to be heard,” CompTel said. The agency should adopt a rule, as it did when it was considering the Bells’ “Sec. 271” applications, that petitions have to be considered “complete when filed,” CompTel told the commission. The Section 271 rule meant parties couldn’t make late additions to their petitions because the FCC based its decisions only on the information in the original applications. “The bureau’s invitation to submit additional evidence on the eve of a decision gives petitioners an advantage not contemplated” by the Telecom Act when it created forbearance power, CompTel said.

The cable and consumer electronics industries gave little new ground on two-way plug-and-play in comments filed in a new FCC rulemaking aimed at breaking their impasse. Talks aimed at a compromise have been deadlocked for years, sometimes bitterly, and now the DTV deadline is approaching.

The cable and CE industries gave little new ground two- way plug-and-play in comments filed in a new FCC rulemaking aimed at breaking their impasse. Talks aimed at a compromise have been deadlocked for years, sometimes bitterly, and now the DTV deadline is approaching.

P2P search engine TorrentSpy.com lost a motion for review of a late May order by a U.S. District Court, Los Angeles, magistrate judge, concerning its obligation to turn over user data in an MPAA copyright infringement case (WID March 29/06 p10). The BitTorrent tracker, owned by Caribbean-based Valence Media, had asked Judge Florence-Marie Cooper to review an order by Magistrate Judge Jacqueline Chooljian finding random-access memory subject to electronic- discovery rules. Cooper poured cold water on the argument of TorrentSpy and friend-of-the-court filers that RAM is too “ephemeral” to qualify as discoverable.

During the August 16, 2007 meeting of the Departmental Advisory Committee on Commercial Operations of U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Related Homeland Security Functions (COAC), CBP officials and COAC members discussed various issues.