Sky Angel has tapped former FCC Media Bureau Chief Monica Desai to help it keep its case in federal court, where it alleged C-SPAN broke antitrust rules. Sky Angel, which has a still-pending program access complaint against Discovery that prompted the FCC’s Media Bureau last year to ask how it should define the terms “multichannel video programming distributor” (MVPD), sued C-SPAN in U.S. District Court, Washington, D.C., alleging Sherman Act violations over C-SPAN’s refusal to distribute its networks with Sky Angel. C-SPAN subsequently asked the court to dismiss the claim (CD Jan 15 p7), saying the matter ought to be heard first by the FCC.

Congress must decide whether to reauthorize, revise or allow the expiration of the digital signal provisions governing the retransmission of broadcast-TV content by satellite companies, the House Commerce Committee majority said in a memo ahead of Wednesday’s hearing on the Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act (STELA). The Communications Subcommittee will consider how Congress should handle the provisions of STELA, which are set to expire Dec. 31, 2014. The hearing is the first in a series and will focus on the state of the law, the memo said (http://1.usa.gov/WF56kT). Witnesses include as expected executives from NAB and Dish Network (CD Feb 8 p15), and also from the Association of Public Television Stations and MPAA and the FCC.

Several members of Congress said they were concerned about the “unfulfilled promise” of Connect America Fund Phase I -- in which the FCC made available $300 million to fund broadband deployment in unserved areas -- but only $115 million was accepted by ILECs. The legislators encouraged the FCC to move forward with refinements that would expand areas eligible for the funding (CD Nov 21 p9). But CLECs criticized proposals they said would unfairly give ILECs a “second bite” at funding instead of making the money available to all providers through a competitive bidding process.

Spectrum sharing will be necessary to meet the Obama administration’s goal of finding 500 MHz for commercial broadband service, said NTIA Administrator Larry Strickling Monday at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “The old method of clearing spectrum of federal users and then making it available for the exclusive use of commercial providers is not sustainable,” he told the Silicon Flatirons event. “We have moved the systems that are easy to move, and to continue this method of spectrum reallocation simply costs too much and takes too long. And just as important is the fact that the opportunities to find spectrum to which we can move the federal operations are dwindling rapidly."

State and local officials will grapple with many choices and challenges of coordination in preparing to apply for the $121.5 million in grants that NTIA will give as part of its State and Local Implementation Grant Program Federal Funding Opportunity for FirstNet, speakers said during a Monday NATOA discussion. The grants were announced Wednesday (CD Feb 7 p11). The application deadline is March 19.

The FTC should realize its own limitations on regulating new and changing technologies, Commissioner Maureen Ohlhausen said Sunday at the University of Colorado Law School in Boulder. “I realize that I'm not very good at predicting where technology is going.” Ohlhausen remembered a time when she thought she'd have no use for the Internet. “I try to approach things with those limitations in mind,” she said at a Silicon Flatirons event on digital broadband migration.

The cable industry needs to do a better job claiming responsibility for the birth of broadband services in the U.S., said Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt at the University of Colorado in Boulder. And cable operators need to get through to emergency management personnel that they provide critical communications infrastructure during disasters, he said at a Silicon Flatirons event Monday. Britt joins other executives over the years including then-NCTA President Kyle McSlarrow, now at Comcast, in saying the industry must do more to fight misconceptions it’s anti-consumer (CD Sept 8/08 p8).

Policymakers need to ensure the U.S. maintains its “preeminent position” as the driver of telecom technology innovation by maintaining it as a friendly environment for capital investment, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said Sunday during an event at the University of Colorado in Boulder. “What keeps me awake at night is, five years from now, is that still the case?” he said at the Silicon Flatirons event. “Five years from now, are Chinese companies going to be driving the standards, are top Chinese companies going to be driving the technological innovation in this industry? … I think we as a country do not want that."

Mass digitization projects should not be exempted from the need to search diligently for the owners of so-called orphan works, groups representing copyright holders said in response to a notice of inquiry from the U.S. Copyright Office (http://xrl.us/bofo9o). Microsoft, on the other hand, said mass digitization projects should not be required to search for copyright holders of all the works they seek to digitize, while Google suggested that the Copyright Office specifically define the requirements of a diligent search and limit liability for those users that have met those requirements. Comments responded to the office’s questions about orphan works and mass digitization.

The Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division and the FTC support the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s (PTO) efforts to “provide more complete information regarding patent ownership to the public,” the agencies said in a joint filing that PTO released last week (http://xrl.us/bofojr). The filing was one of several submitted in response to PTO’s request for input on its proposal to change its rules on collecting and publishing real-party-in-interest (RPI) patent ownership information. PTO held a roundtable discussion on the proposal last month, at which Google, Hewlett-Packard and IBM expressed support for improved RPI collection (CD Jan 14 p8). PTO had proposed two versions of the rules -- “Broad” and “Limited” -- that would define RPI in different ways. Justice and the FTC said they support “an RPI definition that, at a minimum, includes the [ultimate parent entities] either by including all UPE in the ‘Broad’ definition, or by adopting the ‘Limited’ definition."