“There’s no time pressure” on the FCC to address an International Telecommunications Satellite Organization (ITSO) request to change Intelsat’s original licenses to reflect its obligations to maintain lifeline connectivity to developing countries, said David Gross, U.S. State Department coordinator for international communications and information policy. Gross and Richard Russell, the head of the U.S. delegation to the coming World Radiocommunication Conference in Geneva, spoke Thursday at a meeting of the State Department’s Advisory Committee on International Communications and Information Policy. Russell briefed the committee on the conference; Gross reported on State’s discussions with Vietnam and Mexico.
The U.S. Council for International Business has issued a press release announcing that Pakistan joined the ATA Carnet system as of October 1, 2007. ATA Carnets, which permit the temporary duty-free and tax-free import of goods, are an increasingly important tool for businesses engaged in international commerce. (USCIB, dated 10/02/07, available at http://www.uscib.org/index.asp?documentID=3747)
NCTA slammed the FCC for treating Bells differently from cable operators in a March order giving new video entrants a streamlined franchise approval process and capping some fees cities charge them. The trade group’s comments came in a petition to 6th U.S. Appeals Court in Cincinnati in Alliance for Community Media v. FCC. Five municipal groups and a dozen-plus cities also filed petitions, saying the FCC has no standing to intervene in local decision-making. The NCTA likewise said Thursday that the Communications Act limits FCC oversight of franchising. The Act names courts the sole arbiter of whether a city unreasonably refused to let a company sell TV, said NCTA. The briefs responded to Sept. comments to the court by the FCC, USTA and other franchise rule backers (CD Sept 19 p10).
NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker used a form of peer pressure to encourage unspecified hold-out companies to adopt existing technology to protect network content from unauthorized viewing and distribution on the Internet and through home networks. Speaking Wednesday at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Anti-Counterfeiting and Piracy Summit, Zucker’s remarks clearly were aimed mostly at Google’s YouTube. Unlike Microsoft and MySpace, it hasn’t adopted long-promised antipiracy technology to block unauthorized videos. But he said he hopes that in the next few months the largest Internet service providers and home networking and device makers will adopt filtering technology, which AT&T has said it’s working on.
Viacom was “reluctantly drawn” to sue Google’s YouTube, but won’t shirk regulatory and legislative battles involving copyright, including net neutrality, CEO Philippe Dauman made clear Monday. In a keynote to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Anti-Counterfeiting and Piracy Summit, Dauman said Viacom’s rising revenue from digital content, pegged at $500 million this year, was besieged by free online alternatives that made its licensed partners reconsider whether to keep paying.
Viacom was “reluctantly drawn” to sue Google’s YouTube, but won’t shirk regulatory and legislative battles involving copyright, including net neutrality, CEO Philippe Dauman made clear Monday. In a keynote to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Anti-Counterfeiting and Piracy Summit, Dauman said Viacom’s rising revenue from digital content, pegged at $500 million this year, was besieged by free online alternatives that made its licensed partners reconsider whether to keep paying.
The International Trade Administration and the International Trade Commission have each issued notices initiating automatic five-year Sunset Reviews on the above-listed antidumping and countervailing duty orders.
Intelsat users want the FCC to act on its request that the original Intelsat licenses be changed to reflect its obligations to maintain lifeline connectivity to developing countries. The FCC said the request by the International Telecommunications Satellite Organization remains pending.
NAB left election year financial data out of a report to the FCC supporting its case for looser TV station ownership limits, because even-year sales figures are too inconsistent, its lawyers said in a filing to the commission. NAB defended its TV Financial Report against attacks by Consumers Union and Prometheus Radio Project. The report shows broadcasting to be so much less profitable for lower-rated stations in smaller markets that some suffer “negative profitability,” NAB said. Prometheus and Consumers Union criticized the report’s lack of even-year financial data as skewing the analysis and misrepresenting the state of the industry by ignoring revenue from political and Olympics-related ad sales. NAB disagreed. Campaign spending on TV ads wavers significantly year-to-year for reasons such as how contested a congressional seat is and whether a station broadcasts in a presidential battleground state, NAB said. “Thus, while the mere fact that elections and the Summer Olympics may occur in even-numbered years is not ‘random,’ the actual benefit that a given station earns in any particular year is dependent on external unpredictable factors,” NAB said. “Including the years in which these events occur in a financial analysis that includes a large number of stations would distort the ‘average’ revenues of stations within a given market range.” That would paint a rosier picture for some stations that would have “not relations to reality,” NAB said. The trade group also defended a previous decision to omit from its financial analysis 1999 financial data ultimately included in an update. “As can be seen by the revised study, the inclusion of 1999 makes no significant difference in the analysis,” NAB said.
The MPAA sued additional Web sites over streaming unauthorized movies and TV shows to bring in revenue through advertising. The group filed in the U.S. District Court, Los Angeles. CinemaTube.net and SSupload.com don’t appear to host infringing content themselves but rather provide indexing and an easy interface for streaming material hosted elsewhere. We found Good Luck Chuck, still in theaters, deep-linked at SSupload.com and streaming from its host at Google Video, and an episode of Friends with Japanese subtitles deep-linked at CinemaTube streamed from its host at Tudou.com. CinemaTube averages 24,000 users a day viewing 85,000 pages of content, and SSupload averages 55,000 users and 190,000 pages visited a day, MPAA said. “No matter how you slice it, the sole purpose of these sites is to disseminate and profit from creative content that has been illegally reproduced and distributed,” said John Malcolm, MPAA director of worldwide antipiracy operations. The industry group also has lawsuits against three similar sites, Peekvid.com, YouTVpc.com and Showstash.com (WID July 16 p5). An MPAA spokeswoman told us the trade group recently identified the operator behind Showstash, Timur Azaev, but said there may be more than one operator. The Peekvid case is in early discovery so the MPAA doesn’t know who’s behind the site yet. The YouTVpc principals haven’t responded, so MPAA will seek a default judgment, she said.