Expansion of the “covered business method patent program” in place under the America Invents Act would harm U.S. innovators, said more than a hundred companies, including Qualcomm, Procter & Gamble, Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson, Adobe and BSA/The Software Alliance. The warning was in a Thursday letter to the four leaders of the House and Senate Judiciary committees, that was shared with us. Such an expansion, which is included in several recent legislative proposals aimed at curbing patent assertion efforts, would “unnecessarily undermine the rights of patent holders,” they said. It would give infringers a new procedural loophole to delay enforcement and buy them time to gain market share on innovative, patent-holding competitors, they said. Expanding the provision could also negatively impact the relationship of the U.S. with its trading partners, they said.

The Department of Energy awarded $30 million in contracts for the development of cybersecurity technology, DOE said in a Thursday release (http://1.usa.gov/159ctSr). It gave contracts for 11 projects including power system engineering, energy delivery control systems, remote configuration of system devices, and a more secure “last mile” wireless communications delivery infrastructure, it said.

The Rural Telecommunications Group is renaming itself the Rural Wireless Association “to better reflect the association’s mission and focus,” the group said Thursday. The announcement highlights that unlike the Competitive Carriers Association, which includes Sprint and T-Mobile, RWA represents only small carriers. “The association has been dedicated to serving the rural wireless community for many years,” said RWA Executive Director Tanya Sullivan. “The RWA name will better communicate our mission and distinguish us as the voice of rural wireless through our advocacy efforts on the Hill and at the FCC.”

TV was the source of information for 55 percent of all conversations about the news of the day, said an “American Conversation study” from TVB (http://bit.ly/18D6sn0). The study was done by the Keller Fay Group, which surveyed 2,011 American adults about the details of more than 9,000 online and offline conversations in April, said TVB in a press release on the study. “Young people still rely on local broadcast news to fuel their daily conversations,” said Stacey Lynn Schulman, TVB chief research officer, in the release. “Young adults claim that Local Broadcast News content drives a higher percentage of their daily conversations than most other television genres.” Some 82 percent of people surveyed talked daily about weather, 75 percent about national or international news, 63 percent about local news, 49 percent about sports and 42 percent about traffic, the release said. Advertising seen on local broadcast news is 30 percent more likely to “spark” conversations than ads seen on cable news, said TVB.

An Aereo subpoena for information about competing company Syncbak was quashed in U.S. District Court in Sioux City, Iowa, according to a Tuesday court order. Aereo had sought information about technology used by Syncbak that lets the streaming service know where its viewers are, and information about CBS’s investment in the company. Aereo submitted the subpoena as part of its court proceeding against CBS in U.S. District Court in New York, where it has asked the court to rule that its own streaming service doesn’t violate copyright, according to court filings. Syncbak owner Herb Skoog compared giving the technology to Aereo to “Coca-cola giving its secret formula to Pepsi,” said the court filing. “The Court concludes that Aereo’s ‘need’ for the requested information to defend the underlying action is slight, while the injury to Syncbak in disclosing its highly confidential commercial information to a competitor may be substantial,” said the court opinion.

Level 3 Communications is working with Blue Jeans Network to provide a next-generation videoconferencing service available across any video platform, said Level 3 in a news release Thursday (http://bit.ly/1gE00eC). Level 3’s cloud-based solution eliminates the increasing need for more bandwidth with no hardware investment necessary and enabling on-demand video communication regardless of the platform, said the company.

U.S. District Judge Laura Swain in Manhattan denied ABC’s motion for a preliminary injunction to bar Dish Network’s PrimeTime Anytime and AutoHop features. PrimeTime Anytime allows Dish subscribers to record prime-time shows and save them for up to eight days, while AutoHop allows them to play back those recordings commercial-free. Swain denied the motion Wednesday in an opinion and order that was sealed because many of the documents submitted for and against the injunction were marked confidential, her order said. She gave both sides until next Wednesday to request which portions of those submissions should be redacted in her final opinion and order. The denial is the third time a federal court has denied an injunction motion by one of the major broadcast networks against PrimeTime Anytime and AutoHop, Dish said. It declared the latest denial, as it had the earlier ones, a victory for consumers. ABC downplayed the ruling as “only a preliminary decision and the first step in the judicial process.” ABC still believes AutoHop and PrimeTime Anytime “breach our retransmission consent agreement” with Dish, the network said in a written statement. Those features also “infringe upon ABC’s copyrights, and unfairly compete with the authorized on-demand and commercial-free options currently offered by ABC and its licensees,” it said.

The city of Shaker Heights, Ohio, is collaborating with OneCommunity and LaunchHouse to bring gigabit broadband to the Lee/Chagrin corridor to create the “first Fiberhood in Northeast Ohio,” said the groups in a news release Wednesday (http://bit.ly/16IGXOC). The city of Shaker Heights repurposed a car dealership on Lee Road for LaunchHouse, a capital investment firm, “to spur the revitalization of the commercial district,” said the groups. LaunchHouse and OneCommunity, a nonprofit that owns and operates a fiber network in northeast Ohio, partnered to bring gigabit fiber to the former dealership where more than 100 northeast Ohio entrepreneurs work, and the addition of OneCommunity fiber to “entrepreneurial houses” sparked the idea of creating a fiberhood, said the groups. LaunchHouse and OneCommunity are looking to “build on the success” of Google Fiber in Kansas City, where the Kansas City Startup Village was “organically formed as a result of access to high-speed fiber Internet,” said the groups.

XRS Corp. requested a 60-day special temporary authority, beginning Sept. 30, to continue operation of its currently authorized mobile earth terminals in the upper L-band, it said in its application to the FCC International Bureau (http://bit.ly/14mLZiX). Brigham Young University applied for a C-band transmit/receive earth station in Rexburg, Idaho, its application said (http://bit.ly/19jHmon).

SES and CETel signed a new multi-transponder capacity deal to provide very small aperture services in the Middle East. CETel plans to lease 80 MHz of capacity on SES’ NSS-12 satellite, SES said in a press release (http://bit.ly/1drwoRN). CETel, based in Germany, offers “dedicated VSAT services for corporate and governmental networks and GSM backhaul services, as well as hub hosting and managed solutions,” SES said.