Verizon won a major reversal Fri. in its suit against the RIAA, as the U.S. Appeals Court, D.C., agreed with the ISP that it needn’t comply with subpoenas on information on suspected peer-to-peer file sharers.
The Mont. Supreme Court ruled that utilities and other businesses don’t enjoy a blanket right to privacy under the state constitution. The court rejected NorthWestern Energy’s contention that material it filed at state PSC’s behest was automatically entitled to privacy protection. The court said the state constitution’s framers never intended to give privacy rights to “nonhuman entities.” Although involving an energy utility, the court’s ruling also applies to telecom companies and other entities regulated by the PSC. The court said utilities can keep sensitive information secret by seeking specific confidentiality protection, but they have no blanket right to have filings shielded. The case arose when several Mont. newspapers requested details of certain of power purchase contracts. The PSC in 2001 denied access, citing privacy. The court ruled that the PSC can’t presume utilities have a right to confidentiality. The presumption is that utilities’ filings are open unless the utility can show a particular filing involved trade secrets or property rights that required protection, the court said.
State regulators remain tangled with vexing procedural questions that must be settled before they can come to grips with the market impairment analysis cases required by the FCC’s Triennial Review Order (TRO), officials said. In actions in the last week, states were considering whether they had enough evidence to conduct cases, deciding on splitting cases into phases and ruling on discovery issues.
In its ongoing pursuit of blank CD patent infringement before the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC), Philips said it will ask the ITC to review and reverse a Nov. 5 decision by an administrative law judge that challenged the company’s right to sue as agent for a patent-pool of CD-R developers. Last year, Philips filed patent infringement charges with the ITC against 17 blank CD vendors from Hong Kong and Taiwan that it alleged were not licensed by the Philips/Sony/Taiyo Yuden patent pool, and which had not been paying royalties to the group. Philips called the judge’s ruling “erroneous” and said “there are valid and persuasive legal arguments” to reverse it. “Numerous patent license programs of the type in this ITC case, in which one or more companies offer a license under a collection of patents that are complimentary and necessarily used in the manufacture of a product, have been previously reviewed and approved by the Anti-Trust Division of the U.S. Justice Department as being pro-competitive,” Philips said. The ITC is scheduled to resolve the case in Feb.
Among the issues with which federal spectrum users are grappling as part of an interagency task force is whether there should be some form of Executive Branch oversight when differences arise on thorny policy issues, acting NTIA Dir. Michael Gallagher said Wed. President Bush in June created a task force to recommend how to stimulate more efficient spectrum use by federal customers. The next step the Bush directive set, which involves private sector input, will begin shortly and use the FCC’s Spectrum Policy Task Force report as a starting point, Gallagher told us.
The lack of patent licenses and failure to pay royalties on DVD players earned expulsions for 6 Chinese manufacturers from the country’s largest trade fair last week.
Acclaim Entertainment said in an SEC filing late last week that its 2nd-quarter revenue dropped to $41.3 million from $54.1 million a year ago but it narrowed its loss to $4 million (-4? per diluted share) from $28.2 million (-31?). Details weren’t disclosed.
First round of legal squabble between game publishers Electronic Arts (EA) and Ubisoft was won by latter but there appeared to be long battle ahead. Quebec Court of Appeal upheld injunction preventing former Ubisoft employees at Montreal studio that developed hit game Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell from working at EA’s new studio in same city. Ubisoft argued that 4 employees who worked on game had noncompetition clauses in their contracts that required them to wait one year before working for N. American competitor. Ubisoft spokeswoman said “the first hearing on the case happened last week” and “it looks like the case will go to court in February.”
The SEC settled with 4 people, including a former Univision employee and Hispanic Bcstg. Corp. dir., in an insider trading case involving the companies’ stock. The SEC had filed a civil fraud suit in U.S. Dist. Court, Dallas, against Stephen White, William White III, Ernest Bieling and Robert Hughes, who used to be a board member of HBC. The SEC charged that the defendants had purchased or advised others to purchase shares of HBC common stock based on material nonpublic information that Univision would acquire HBC in an all-stock transaction. Simultaneously, the SEC accepted offers of settlement from the defendants in which they agreed, without admitting or denying the allegations, to the entry of an order enjoining them from further violations of the securities laws, to collectively pay civil money penalties of $224,078 and to collectively disgorge $218,683 in illegal profits, plus $13,192 in prejudgment interest.
Media watchdog Commercial Alert filed complaints this week with the FCC and FTC, arguing that broadcasters were violating federal law by failing to prominently identify product placement techniques as advertising. “Advertisers can puff and tout and use all the many tricks of their trade, but they must not pretend that their ads are something else,” Gary Ruskin, exec. dir of Commercial Alert, wrote in the complaint to the FCC. Commercial Alert said networks, by failing to prominently identify product placements as advertising, “broadly and systematically” violate the Communications Act.