Pandora Media is in the “final stages” of hiring a new chief financial officer and will announce the appointment by February, the company said in an SEC filing. Pandora CEO Joseph Kennedy will handle CFO duties starting Jan. 1, the company said. Pandora began its search for a new CFO in August after Steven Cakebread announced he was leaving the company.
Thirty-nine European countries won’t sign the revised International Telecommunication Regulations, the European Communications Office said Friday in a statement. Those countries are Albania, Andorra, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Moldova, Montenegro, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the U.K. Azerbaijan, the Russian Federation, Ukraine and Turkey will sign the treaty, it said. There’s legal uncertainty about what will happen after the treaty takes effect on Jan, 1, 2015, because of the large number of countries didn’t sign it, it said. The legal analysis is being undertaken at national and international levels, it said.
The chairman and ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee reached an agreement Thursday to discharge the renomination of FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn and nomination of Joshua Wright to become an FTC commissioner. The committee attempted at least three votes on the nominees this week but was unable to reach a quorum. Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., sought unanimous consent to discharge the nominees, a procedural move that is typically reserved for non-controversial nominees, a committee spokesman told us. He said that barring any subsequent objection from lawmakers, the full Senate will vote on Clyburn’s renomination and Wright’s nomination under regular order.
T-Mobile USA plans to expand its 1900 MHz band coverage into 14 additional markets by year’s end. The new markets are: New York City; Newark, N.J.; Boston, Cambridge and Springfield, Mass.; Providence, R.I.; Philadelphia; Detroit and Warren, Mich.; Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, and San Antonio, Texas; and Tampa, Fla., T-Mobile said Thursday. The upgrades will bring the 1900 MHz band coverage into 37 markets that together contain more than 100 million people, T-Mobile said (http://xrl.us/bn7cwy).
The American Cable Association urged the FCC Media Bureau to let Adams Cable Equipment sell refurbished set-top boxes with integrated security and navigation functions. It also urged the bureau to adopt a simple process for certifying devices and to clarify that the bureau would grant similar relief to other vendors who want to sell integrated-security refurbished boxes. “These measures will ensure the maximum benefit possible from the availability of refurbished set-top boxes with integrated security in a quick and cost-effective manner,” it said (http://xrl.us/bn7c3a).
West Kentucky and Tennessee Telecommunications Cooperative (WK&T) asked the FCC for a waiver of the 2011 rate-of-return carrier base period revenue rules (http://xrl.us/bn7crp). A limited waiver would let WK&T include in its FY 2011 base period revenue amounts of transitional intrastate access service that “should have been billed and collected by March 31” but were not “due to a billing omission that occurred during this period,” the telcos said. The USF/intercarrier compensation order envisioned circumstances “similar to the one faced by WK&T,” in which revenues associated with FY 2011 were not collected until after March 31, they said. The fact that the 2011 revenue was collected “without the involvement of a court or regulatory agency should in no way preclude the Company from a waiver request to include that revenue in its eligible recovery Base Period Revenue,” they wrote.
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., sought to standardize Internet data caps and offer consumers more control over their data usage, in a bill he introduced Thursday (http://xrl.us/bn7c28). The goal of the legislation is to ensure that data caps are “designed to manage network congestion rather than monetize data in ways that undermine online innovation,” Wyden told lawmakers Thursday following the bill’s introduction. “Future innovation will undoubtedly require consumers to use more and more data -- data caps should not impede this innovation and the jobs it creates,” Wyden said. Under the Data Cap Integrity Act, the FCC would require ISPs to inform consumers about the cost, capacity and limits of their data services, among other provisions. ISPs would be required under the legislation to detail to consumers their legal and privacy policies for their data contracts. The bill would prompt the FCC, the National Institute of Standards and Technology and private sector experts to develop standards to measure household data usage, within one year of the bill’s passage. ISPs would then be required to meet such standards in order to implement data caps on their services and give evidence that the provider’s data caps are used to “reasonably limit network congestion without unnecessarily restricting Internet use,” the legislation said. Wyden’s bill would forbid ISPs from providing preferential treatment to data based on the source or the content of the data, like online video or audio content. The legislation would require ISPs to provide consumers with tools to manage their data consumption that permit them to monitor the amount of data uploaded or downloaded via wireline or wireless devices. If enacted, ISPs who fail to fulfill the requirements of the legislation would be liable for unspecified civil penalties, according to the text of the legislation. A Verizon spokesman would not comment other than to say his company does not limit its consumers’ bandwidth use on the FiOS network. Comcast, Time Warner Cable, AT&T, Bright House and Cox Communications did not respond to requests for comment.
Public Knowledge said it supports a request by various media companies for a stay of a recent FCC Media Bureau order on how online video distributors (OVDs) can access Comcast-NBCUniversal programming. The bureau’s order clarified the FCC’s order approving Comcast’s takeover of NBCU to say that OVDs exploiting the “Benchmark Condition” of the takeover approval must disclose the contents of their licensing deals with media industry peers. The content companies “are non-parties who are rightly alarmed that one of their competitors, Comcast-NBCU, must be given access to their proprietary commercial information,” Public Knowledge said (http://xrl.us/bn7c2m). The bureau’s order also undermines the purpose of the condition because it could limit companies from working with OVDs and prevent OVDs from licensing Comcast-NBCU programming, it said. “It was designed to promote online video distribution, and if, in the absence of competitors’ confidential information, Comcast-NBCU ends up offering an OVD better terms than it was able to obtain from a peer programmer, that purpose is served,” it said. It also suggested the commission suspend the time limit of any merger condition “while disputes as to its meaning are being heard."
U.S. patent law is a “failed system,” Judge Richard Posner of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Wednesday during a Federalist Society teleforum. The system’s failure lies within both the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the federal court system, he said. The USPTO is not adequately staffed or managed to deal with the volume of patent applications it receives, Posner said. And the courts are failing to address the problem because patent trials routinely allow for expert witnesses paid by the parties in a case, as well as lay juries that do not understand all of the intricacies of a patent case, he said. Posner specifically faulted the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, which handles many of the higher-profile patent cases, because he feels the court has “a tendency to take a promotional view” of the activities it regulates. “I think we have the best patent system on the planet,” said Paul Michel, chief judge on the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals. Michel defended his court’s record on patent cases as being “quite balanced.” He also defended USPTO’s recent record, noting that current office Director David Kappos had instituted reforms that have improved patent examiners’ training and level of experience. Those reforms have resulted in a USPTO that is “much improved” from four years ago, Michel said (http://xrl.us/bn7c2f).
The FCC Media Bureau granted in part a request by WTNH-TV New Haven, Conn., for a waiver of the FCC’s “significantly viewed” rules that limit cable operators from deleting duplicate network programming from nearby stations. The ABC affiliate had asked the bureau to remove WABC-TV New York from the significantly viewed station list for the Connecticut towns of Meriden, Milford, Wallingford and Waterbury. The bureau said WTNH-TV submitted evidence to show WABC-TV is no longer significantly viewed in three of those communities. But the bureau “cannot conclude that WABC-TV is no longer significantly viewed in the community of Milford,” an order released Thursday said (http://xrl.us/bn7cze).