PHILADELPHIA -- “You can bring the horse to water, but you can’t make it drink,” said U.S. District Court of Delaware Judge Eduardo Robreno at oral argument here Monday after a T-Mobile lawyer turned down a Wilmington offer for mediation in a wireless siting dispute. The company sought summary judgment that the city’s zoning board didn’t cite enough evidence to block a T-Mobile rooftop installation in 2016 and violated the FCC’s effective prohibition standard.
America’s Public Television Stations CEO Patrick Butler isn’t concerned about public TV being level funded in the next federal budget, but in an interview Monday conceded that APTS plans to ask for a funding increase might face difficulties. “I want to manage expectations,” he told the 2020 APTS Public Media Summit.
NAB members readied Monday for Capitol Hill meetings on the industry group’s 2020 legislative priorities, including their position on the FCC’s plans for auctioning spectrum on the 3.7-4.2 GHz C band and restoring the minority tax certificate program. NAB CEO Gordon Smith and others lauded the group’s recent legislative victories, including Congress scaling back the distant-signal compulsory license during the Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act reauthorization last year (see 1912190068). Matthew Berry, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s chief of staff, continued to tease a potential commission appeal to the Supreme Court of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals' Prometheus IV decision.
The potential anticompetitive impact of trademarking domain names created by adding a generic top-level domain (gTLD) such as .com to an otherwise generic terms like "booking" is at issue in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court. The Patent and Trademark Office, backed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, seeks a per se rule barring such domain names from being protected. Intellectual property scholars and lawyers and online companies disagree, although some also note anti-competition concerns. Case documents in PTO v. Booking.com (No. 19-46), which is set for argument March 23 (see 2001310027) are here.
Platforms should take on more civil liability for terror- and murder-related content, advocates said in interviews two days after Attorney General Bill Barr said Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act potentially blocks victims from seeking civil recovery (see 2002190056). The topic is gaining steam on Capitol Hill (see 2001280059).
Washington state’s privacy bill continues to face sharp criticism from the state attorney general and consumer advocates on enforcement language and its handling of facial recognition technology used by the private sector. Senators nearly unanimously voted for SB-6281 (see 2002180024), but communities that feel vulnerable disagreed sharply with Microsoft and other tech industry supporters at a House Innovation, Technology and Economic Development Committee hearing Friday. Without changes, the bill may “severely limit” her office’s ability to enforce the law, said Assistant Attorney General-Consumer Protection Andrea Alegrett.
Broadband industry stakeholders didn't request heavy edits to a draft public notice for docket 20-34 on FCC's proposed procedures for its upcoming Rural Digital Opportunity Fund auction (see 2002060063), but will weigh in during the open comment period if commissioners vote to adopt the item at Friday's meeting, they told us. Enlarging minimum geographic bidding areas could cause concerns, some said. The Oct. 22 auction date was seen as doable.
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai could face dissents on parts of the C-band order set for a vote Friday. Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel is considered the most likely to dissent, but Commissioner Geoffrey Starks also has concerns, industry and FCC officials said. Pai could push the most contentious parts of the order, including aggregation limits, to another order, to get a 5-0 vote on the key parts of the proposal. Approval is less of a question, with Commissioners Mike O’Rielly and Brendan Carr indicating they support the plan.
Google's "verbatim copying” of Oracle computer code into a “competing commercial product” wasn’t fair use, the Trump administration said in a Supreme Court filing Wednesday (see 2002190058). Also siding with Oracle in separate filings were USTelecom, the Motion Picture Association, the RIAA, the National Music Publishers' Association and the Copyright Alliance.
The “time lag” will be shorter on the release of future form 323 ownership data, said FCC Media Bureau Chief Michelle Carey at an FCBA brown-bag lunch discussion Thursday, after being asked about the bureau’s recent release of 2017 ownership data. Carey and other Media Bureau officials at the event also discussed the transition from the consolidated database system (CDBS), upcoming rulemakings and ATSC 3.0. Carey said the bureau is already working on the data collected from the 2019 forms but didn’t say whether the next such report would include the most recent information.