The FCC Thursday adopted by a 5-0 vote rules designed to streamline the commission’s experimental licensing program, including rules for new medical devices that will allow the industry to set up testbeds and share their results. One of the most contentious issues was whether the FCC would require licensees to provide more than 10 days notice before making changes in an experiment (CD Jan 25 p4). The agency did not change the notification period, in response to complaints from carriers, led by Verizon Wireless, officials said.

The FCC Media Bureau granted a partial waiver of the agency’s online public file rules that will let some stations avoid uploading older program and issues lists to the FCC’s online clearinghouse for such files. KTBS-TV Shreveport, La., had asked for a partial waiver of FCC requirements that it upload by Monday its issues/programs lists for a still-pending license renewal period. The station is still maintaining in paper form the files for its deferred license renewal. The lists cover June 1997 through May 2005.

Mobile privacy stakeholders debated language of a voluntary code of conduct for app developers at a Thursday meeting facilitated by the NTIA. The draft -- written by representatives from the Application Developers Alliance, ACLU, Consumer Action and World Privacy Forum -- was the same version as the one discussed at the NTIA meeting last month. “The absence of another draft should not be seen by other people as the absence of progress,” said one of the draft’s authors, Tim Sparapani, vice president of law, policy and government relations for the Application Developers Alliance.

Vringo subsidiary I/P Engine filed a patent suit against Microsoft, claiming Microsoft violated two patents on search relevance filtering technology -- the patents I/P Engine used to successfully sue Google and others last year. The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in New York, alleges repeated violations of U.S. Patent Nos. 6,314,420 and 6,775,664. Vringo acquired the patents when it merged with I/P Engine; Lycos previously owned them (http://xrl.us/bodwup). A Microsoft spokeswoman said the company is “unable to ... comment at this time."

Sports programming is expensive for pay-TV distributors, even when the distributor owns the regional sports network (RSN) carrying the most popular games. That’s a lesson Time Warner Cable (TWC) executives say they're learning in Los Angeles, where the company has recently secured the long-term rights for both basketball’s Lakers and baseball’s Dodgers games through expensive contracts with the teams. “In both cases these rights were up for auction in a sense and they were going to be expensive no matter what,” CEO Glenn Britt told analysts Thursday during the company’s Q4 earnings teleconference. “We do not pretend these deals are inexpensive or cheap,” he said. “We think we've done the best of the alternatives,” he said.

FCC members and Media Bureau staff are considering seeking comment on waivers of media ownership rules for foreign investments in broadcast companies and for those who've overcome economic and other types of non-racial or gender disadvantages, agency and industry officials told us this week. They expressed varying degrees of hope whether incorporating such proposals into separate rulemaking proceedings might be part of a wider-ranging compromise among commissioners to resolve a deadlock. The officials said it will be hard to end a split (CD Jan 28 p7) between the two Republicans who support broadcast/daily newspaper cross ownership and the two regular Democratic members who don’t generally support such deregulation without first studying barriers to entry faced by minorities and women.

The Wyoming Legislature may limit state regulation of Internet Protocol-enabled services. About half of U.S. states have passed laws limiting state regulators from overseeing IP, most notably California, which adopted its law last fall (CD Oct 2 p7). Months of tense debate last year generated the Wyoming bill, stakeholders told us. House Bill 18 was introduced to the Wyoming House of Representatives Jan. 8, unanimously passed the nine-member Corporations, Elections and Political Subdivisions Committee Jan. 24 and passed out of the House after three readings Thursday, moving to the Senate.

Samsung violated Apple’s design and utility patents, but its intent was “not willful,” U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh ruled late Tuesday, denying Apple’s request for additional damages on top of an existing damage award. A jury for the San Jose, Calif., federal court decided in late August that Apple should receive more than $1 billion in damages after it ruled Samsung had infringed multiple Apple patents on its mobile products (CD Aug 28/12 p6).

The chief architect of the National Broadband Plan wants the FCC to grant AT&T’s deregulatory test bed proposal as soon as possible. “If a picture is worth a thousand words, an experiment is worth a thousand pleadings,” said Blair Levin, Gig. U executive director and former director of the broadband plan at the FCC. The FCC is considering AT&T’s controversial proposal to run deregulatory “experiments” in various wire centers to gauge the effects of eliminating ILEC obligations (CD Jan 30 p2). AT&T Senior Vice President Jim Cicconi said it’s “vital that the FCC, for its own future relevance, tackle this -- tackle it today -- and reassess the basis on which it regulates."

Cisco views last week’s NTIA report on the 5 GHz band as mostly a positive development for industry, hungry for more bandwidth for Wi-Fi, said Mary Brown, director-government affairs, in an interview Wednesday. Cisco also released a report by Plum Consulting, which predicts Europe could reap more than €16.3 billion ($22.1 billion) in future economic benefit if 5 GHz spectrum there is made available for Wi-Fi. The FCC announced Wednesday the 5 GHz notice of proposed rulemaking on Wi-Fi in the band is tentatively on the agenda for the commission’s Feb. 20 meeting. The only other item is a cell signal booster report and order.