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.
Agencies wary of admitting data security incidents should consider how their secrecy will play in the media, which is bound to learn of even low-risk leaks, agency privacy chiefs said Tuesday. In remarks to the American Society of Access Professionals conference in Washington, they urged involvement by public affairs officials in any response, as a way to set the narrative on an incident. And don’t fear to learn from hackers, a cyber security academic said.
The RIAA ignored another potentially liable person in its drive to win a P2P infringement case against an Oregon woman - one of several reasons the industry group should pay her attorney’s fees, ruled a U.S. magistrate judge in Portland, Ore. The judge’s findings and recommendation will go to a higher judge for review. Parties can file objections until Oct. 9, and if one does, that will give the other two weeks to respond. If upheld, the ruling will be the second known RIAA loss on attorney’s fees, after a nearly $70,000 hit to the group in Oklahoma (WID July 18 p5).
A former P2P infringement defendant seeking class-action status for her lawsuit against the RIAA is plagiarizing her own counterclaims in a suit still pending, the trade group told the U.S. District Court in Portland, Ore., in a hefty motion to dismiss the case. The RIAA asked the court to reject Tanya Andersen’s “gamesmanship,” calling her suit a “blatant effort… to do an end run around the scheduling and discovery deadlines that have expired” in the so-called Atlantic v. Andersen 1 case in the same court.
The Fish and Wildlife Service has issued a final rule, effective September 24, 2007, revising and updating its regulations in 50 CFR Parts 10, 13, 17, and 23 that implement the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). According to a FWS news release, the final rule represents the first major update and compilation of regulations implementing CITES since 1977.
A precedent-setting court order staying the International Trade Commission Qualcomm chip ban for third parties is “very good news” for T-Mobile but a long term “concern” for the ITC and patent holders, officials told Communications Daily Thursday. Late Wednesday, the U.S. Appeals Court for the Federal Circuit ordered a partial stay of the ITC limited exclusion order against Qualcomm chips that infringe Broadcom patents. The ruling could be a “harbinger for a favorable final decision” for Qualcomm, a Stifel Nicolaus analyst said.