Dish Network said it reached a retransmission consent agreement with Morgan Murphy Media soon after the DBS company’s customers temporarily lost access to the broadcaster’s stations. Dish said its customers lost access Saturday morning. The retrans deal, also reached Saturday, applies to Washington-state ABC affiliates KVEW Spokane and KXLY Yakima and Wisconsin CBS affiliates WKBT La Crosse and WISC Madison, said Dish. Andrew LeCuyer, Dish vice president-programming, thanked Morgan Murphy Media “for its willingness to remain at the negotiating table and help reconnect DISH customers to those local channels with all their excellent programming.” The Morgan stations also said they're glad to reach a deal and that they “know any time our station is not available, it’s frustrating for viewers, which is regrettable.” Terms weren’t released.
The FCC canceled a $25,000 fine against KUSI-TV San Diego because a court granted the station’s motion to dismiss a U.S. complaint to recover the penalty, said an Enforcement Bureau order released Monday (http://xrl.us/bmyr7w). KUSI got a bureau forfeiture order in 2008, saying the station didn’t make emergency information about a 2003 wildfire in San Diego accessible to people with hearing problems (http://xrl.us/bmyr74).
The U.S. District Court in Los Angeles granted Broadcom’s request for a permanent injunction against some Emulex products that it claimed infringe two Broadcom patents. The enjoined products include Emulex’s BladeEngine 2 (BE2), BladeEngine 3 (BE3) and Lancer (XE201) chips and some of Emulex’s Fibre Channel switch products. The BE2 and BE3 are 10 Gigabit ethernet controllers, which are sold as stand-alone chips and used in Emulex’s OneConnect Converged Network Adapters. Lancer (XE201) is currently used in some of Emulex’s Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapter products. The injunction will prohibit Emulex, a provider of network convergence solutions, from importing, manufacturing, using and selling the enjoined products in the U.S. However, the injunction is subject to a sunset period ending in 2013, during which Emulex can continue with sales to customers who had already placed orders by a certain date, the companies said. During this period, Emulex will pay Broadcom a royalty of 9 percent on those sales, according to Broadcom.
Verizon said it will cut its CO2 intensity by half by 2020, as part of the company’s sustainability effort. Carbon intensity is the amount of energy needed to move data across Verizon’s network. It’s improved by reducing the absolute amount of energy and by moving more data with the same unit of energy. Verizon is using its 2009 carbon intensity level as the benchmark for the company’s 50 percent reduction by 2020, the company said. “This is the era of big data,” said Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam. “We're committed to innovating our way to growing responsibly by becoming more energy efficient, even as our business expands."
The U.S. is seeing increasing utilization of phone numbers, Neustar said in an FCC filing. In 2000, by its count, there were 440.4 million assigned phone numbers and 545.5 million non-available numbers. Last year, those figures were at 720.7 million for assigned and 813.9 million for non-available numbers. “During this time period, the average annual growth rate for assigned and non-available telephone numbers was 4.6 percent and 3.7 percent, respectively,” Neustar said. “This rate of increase far outpaced the average annual growth rate for the U.S. population, which was .9 percent during the same period.” The trend continued the last two years, the company said (http://xrl.us/bmyr9s).
Paging company USA Mobility decided not to participate in the federal Commercial Mobile Alert System, the company said in a filing at the FCC (http://xrl.us/bmysb4). The voluntary program allows carriers to transmit emergency messages to subscribers. Carriers that don’t take part have to notify their customers.
Intellectual property theft is not a victimless activity, as asserted by opponents of increased enforcement against so-called rogue websites, the Phoenix Center said in a study (http://xrl.us/bmyrxm). Though opponents are correct that IP theft is “non-rivalrous” in that “a stolen copy of a movie does not diminish the ability of others to view it,” that illicit transfer actually reduces “social welfare” by acting as a “distortionary tax on sellers,” said the study released Monday. Using a “very conventional dynamic general equilibrium framework in which a representative consumer (or, equivalently, a continuum of consumers) optimizes their consumption and investment plan over time,” the study shows that “the existence of theft, even when it is costless and perfectly ‘efficient,’ has much the same effect as causing consumers to behave as if the future were of less importance. When the future is seen as less important, less is invested since investment, by definition, is costly now but provides its benefits only in the future.” The study observes “lower equilibrium levels of capital investment and output” resulting from IP theft: “Wages are reduced. These harms occur because theft deprives producers of sales, reducing the apparent returns to capital investments.” The study was written by center President Lawrence Spiwak, Chief Economist George Ford and senior fellows Randolph Beard and Michael Stern, who are also Auburn University economics professors.
The government needs a warrant to access 60 days of cellphone location data, as required by a Texas federal judge, groups told the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in a friend-of-the-court brief (http://xrl.us/bmyrv4). The ACLU Foundation, ACLU Foundation of Texas, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Center for Democracy and Technology and National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers quoted from the recent Supreme Court decision in the GPS-tracking case Jones that a “person who knows all of another’s travels can deduce whether he is a weekly churchgoer, a heavy drinker, a regular at the gym, an unfaithful husband ... and not just one such fact about a person, but all such facts.” The 5th Circuit should join the 3rd Circuit in finding that courts have the discretion under the Stored Communications Act (SCA) to require a warrant based on probable cause to access “historical” location data, they said. It can avoid constitutional questions about the SCA by extrapolating from the Jones ruling that the high court’s logic applies to cellphone data as well, the brief said. “If tracking a vehicle over 28 days violates a reasonable expectation of privacy” under the Fourth Amendment, as was found in Jones, “then tracking a cellphone for more than twice that period surely violates such an expectation as well.” The groups asked the court for oral argument to address the “novel issues” in the appeal.
Dish Network paid NDS $18.9 million, ending a nearly 10-year legal battle capped by the Supreme Court rejecting Dish’s petition for review earlier this year. The Supreme Court upheld an appeals court decision awarding NDS $17.9 million in attorney’s fees. The fees were granted by U.S. District Judge David Carter in Los Angeles, following a month-long trial in 2008 in which a jury awarded Dish $1,500, not the $1.6 billion it sought from NDS for allegedly hiring hackers to crack its encryption system. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2010 upheld Carter’s decision, awarding NDS $17.9 million for fees and releasing $4.3 million in NDS funds held in escrow. Dish filed the petition with the Supreme Court in October. The payment ends a “long drawn-out process” in which NDS “vehemently denied” the piracy claims given that the company is a “global leader in the fight against pay-TV piracy,” NDS Executive Chairman Abe Peled said in a statement. A Dish spokesman declined to comment on the settlement.
The FCC’s proposal to vacate LightSquared’s conditional waiver of mobile satellite service rules is “appropriate and necessary to protect the integrity of the United States GPS system,” Deere said in comments on the FCC’s proposal in docket 11-109 (http://xrl.us/bmyr5o). The agency has proposed blocking LightSquared from offering terrestrial services due to interference concerns with GPS. The requirements of the waiver for interference resolution haven’t been met, extensive testing has shown, said Deere. The proposal to suspend LightSquared’s ancillary terrestrial component authority is also necessary given that the testing has led to the “inescapable conclusion that operation of a high power terrestrial network in the L-band that is capable of such widespread interference to U.S. infrastructure is not viable,” it said. Lockheed Martin also said it supports both commission proposals (http://xrl.us/bmyr5b). “Given the uncertainty that exists with respect to what LightSquared may or may not be authorized to provide in the way of ATC following vacatur” of the waiver, “the Commission’s proposal to suspend indefinitely ATC authority is a welcome proactive step,” said Lockheed.