By Lauren Lynch Flick and Lauren A. Birzon Certain stations must also file proxy paperwork and additional fee to avoid usage reporting for the year. As January comes to a close, don’t forget that annual minimum copyright royalty fees for webcasting and internet simulcasting of radio programming, along with the…
One of the curiosities of communications law is that while there are thousands of applicable rules and statutory provisions, there are a handful that the FCC likes to enforce with particular gusto. One of these is the rule regarding how on-air contests must be conducted. Over the years, many broadcasters…
As we all know, unsolicited spam email can be annoying and intrusive. In 2003, Congress enacted the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act to curb spam. As required by the Act, the FTC and FCC adopted rules that prohibit sending unwanted commercial messages without prior permission.…
4/12/2011 The board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has scheduled a June 20th meeting to approve the process for proposing new generic top-level domains (gTLDs). If this date holds, the application process will begin in late October, with new gTLDs being approved and added to…
4/7/2011 On March 28, 2011, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California held in Facebook, Inc. v. MaxBounty, Inc.< sup>1 that messages sent by Facebook users to their Facebook friends’ walls, news feeds or home pages are “electronic mail messages” under the CAN-SPAM Act. The court, in…
Ever since Time Warner Cable released an app that allows users to watch two or three dozen cable channels on iPads we’ve been barraged by press reports of litigation and plans of other multichannel providers to launch similar services. Cablevision has announced it’s launching a similar app that lets subscribers…
3/10/2011 Beginning later this year, ICANN is expected to accept applications for new generic domain suffixes for industries, interests and communities, such as “.bank,” “.movie” or “.music.” In addition to the generic terms, this round also includes the potential for various geographic tags that are not country codes (e.g., “.nyc”…
On February 22, 2011, US District Court Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald of the Southern District of New York issued a 59-page decision enjoining ivi TV, Inc. from streaming the programming of various network-affiliated television stations on the Internet without their permission. The judge’s opinion articulates a basic principle of copyright…
While we await release of the text of today’s Net Neutrality order from the FCC, it strikes me as useful to take a step back and apply a broader perspective to what can be learned from the debate that led to it. While lawyers get a rush when they think…
In October of 1996 my boss, the chairman of a $3 billion television production and distribution empire (and one of the smartest television dealmakers I ever met) scoffed when I said that television could be delivered over the Internet. I told him to wait ten years. Well, in 2006 we…