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The staggered deadlines for filing Biennial Ownership Reports by noncommercial educational radio and television stations remain in effect and are tied to their respective anniversary renewal filing deadlines.

Noncommercial educational radio stations licensed to communities in Michigan and Ohio, and noncommercial educational television stations licensed to communities in Arizona, the District of Columbia, Idaho, Maryland, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming, must file their Biennial Ownership Reports by June 1, 2010.
Last year, the FCC issued a Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking seeking comments on, among other things, whether the Commission should adopt a single national filing deadline for all noncommercial educational radio and television broadcast stations like the one that the FCC has established for all commercial radio and television stations. That proceeding remains pending without decision. As a result, noncommercial educational radio and television stations continue to be required to file their biennial ownership reports every two years by the anniversary date of the station’s license renewal filing.

Should there be any questions concerning this matter, please contact any of the attorneys in the Communications Practice.

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When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned various restrictions on political spending by corporations in the Citizens United decision, it set off a flurry of activity in Washington. Many, including famously the President in his State of the Union address, derided the decision as opening the political process to the corrupting influence of corporate cash. Many in Congress promised a swift legislative response to minimize the impact of the Court’s ruling. Regardless of where you stand on the Court’s decision, I have to say I was disturbed by a number of statements coming out of Capitol Hill afterwards which made clear that the speakers had no understanding of the laws already on the books relating to political advertising on electronic media. Some promised to change the law to what it actually already is (although they apparently didn’t know it), and others pointed out “problems” that would result from the Citizens United ruling that current law already prohibits from occurring.

Grandstanding without basis is, however, a well-established Washington tradition, and I presumed that when legislative staffers got together to draft the legislation, they would quickly figure out that these criticisms and unneeded solutions had been off-base. I apparently was too optimistic. Today, Senator Schumer of New York unveiled the Senate version of the legislation (Senate link not yet available) at a news conference on the steps of the Supreme Court. The President publicly applauded the legislation, and the House has promised hearings within a week on its version of the bill in hopes of enacting it quickly enough to govern this Fall’s elections. The DISCLOSE Act (the acronym for “Democracy Is Strengthened by Casting Light On Spending in Elections”), as its name indicates, requires ample disclosure when corporations or unions spend money on ads relating to a federal political campaign. Unfortunately, it does not stop there, and attempts to then rewrite political advertising laws contained in the Communications Act of 1934 that were not impacted by the Citizens United ruling. These changes appear to be an effort to require broadcasters, as well as cable and satellite operators, to subsidize the ads of not just candidates, but of their national political parties as well, in an effort to make their ad dollars go farther than those of a corporation exercising its rights under Citizens United.

Setting aside the wisdom or constitutionality of that approach, the rub is that the legislation was apparently drafted in such a rush that aspects of it quite literally make no sense. For example, the relevant section of the bill is entitled “TELEVISION MEDIA RATES”, but it then amends the political advertising provisions of the Communications Act that affect both television and radio. Even if the impact on radio was unintended, the matter is further confused by a requirement that the FCC perform random political audits during elections of at least 15 DMAs of various sizes, and that each DMA audit include “each of the 3 largest television broadcast networks, 1 independent television network, 1 cable network, 1 provider of satellite services, and 1 radio network.”

Similarly, the statutory exceptions to the requirement for providing equal time to a candidate’s opponents when the candidate appears on-air would be amended to exclude certain appearances by a candidate’s representative as a triggering event. However, since only the appearance of a candidate can trigger equal time in the first place, creating an exception for appearances by a candidate’s representative serves no purpose.

Further indicating that the bill is premised on a misunderstanding of the current law, the Reasonable Access provisions of the Communications Act would be amended so that instead of FCC licensees being required to provide federal candidates with “reasonable amounts of time,” they would be required to provide “reasonable amounts of time, including reasonable amounts of time purchased at the lowest unit charge ….” The premise of this change appears to be a lack of understanding that all time sold to a candidate in the 45 days before a primary and the 60 days before a general election must be sold at the lowest unit charge for that class of time. The broadcaster has no discretion to charge anything but the lowest unit charge during that time, making this change pointless as well.

A number of other odd provisions in the Senate version of the bill that would significantly impact media companies (and not just broadcasters) is discussed in an Advisory we issued to our clients earlier today. Two of particularly great concern would drastically reduce the lowest unit charge for political advertising while significantly expanding the pool of entities eligible to receive lowest unit charge. It is worth noting that none of these media-oriented provisions appear to be in the House version of the bill, so hopefully they will be excised from the Senate bill before any harm is done. Regardless, broadcasters, as well as cable and satellite providers, need to be vigilant to ensure that these provisions, if not eliminated outright, are at least heavily modified before any final bill emerges.

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April 2010
Recent FCC enforcement actions reported in this month’s Enforcement Monitor include:

  • FCC Issues $30,000 and $12,000 Fines to Three Co-owned Commercial Television Stations and Three Co-owned Class A Television Stations for Failure to Publicize the Existence and Location of Their Quarterly Children’s Television Programming Reports
  • FCC Fines Nonresponsive Texas Cable Operator $38,000 for Emergency Alert System and Antenna Structure Violations
  • FCC Fines Broadcasters $7,000 for Failure to Timely File License Renewal Applications and for Unauthorized Operation
  • Idaho Station Fined $4,000 for Failure to Fully Disclose All Material Terms of a Contest

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One of the benefits of practicing law in a multifaceted law firm is the opportunity to work with lawyers in every area of law. It is always a good learning experience, as you get to explore the often hazy areas of law that dwell at the nexus of multiple practice areas. For example, many communications facilities, and particularly towers, create both environmental and communications law issues. Over the years, we have worked on numerous matters involving RF radiation and bird strike issues at transmission tower sites. Issues like that involve multiple governmental agencies and protocols, and it is great to have a mix of lawyers with the right experience to address the various aspects of such a problem.

I therefore read with interest an Advisory published today by Pillsbury Intellectual Property lawyers Jim Gatto, Cydney Tune, and Jenna Leavitt. While not directed specifically at communications companies, it discusses an IP matter that is certainly relevant to such companies. Like most businesses, those in the communications sector use a lot of off the shelf software. However, communications companies also license a lot of specialized software (e.g., traffic systems for ad placement), and often have to hire coders to adapt the software to their specific needs or to create entirely new software for highly specialized tasks. Sometimes, such entities have new software created because they are not satisfied with what is commercially available.

As a general rule, when you hire a contractor to produce a “work for hire”, the copyright in that work remains with you rather than the contractor. However, in their Advisory with the catchy title Work Made for Hire Doctrine Does Not Generally Apply to Computer Software, the authors note that software does not fall under the types of works considered work for hire. As a result, the copyright in the software would remain with the contractor (even if the parties had agreed it would be a “work for hire”) unless proper contracts are put in place to alter that result. The Advisory goes into detail on how this works and what the implications are, but suffice it to say that many communications companies may be surprised to learn that they don’t hold the copyright in their own software.

This is not just an issue for large companies with complex computer systems and extensive programming. It applies just as readily to a small market radio station that asks a college student to design its website. Without the proper agreements in place, the copyright would remain with the student rather than the radio station. Now might be a good time to consider what software you have had contractors produce for your operation, and whether you know who actually owns it.

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4/29/2010
Several members of Congress led by Senator Schumer and Congressman Van Hollen introduced today the “Democracy Is Strengthened by Casting Light On Spending in Elections” Act–the DISCLOSE Act. The House and Senate versions differ, with the Senate version vastly expanding eligibility for Lowest Unit Charge, reducing the Lowest Unit Charge, prohibiting preemption of political ads, and requiring the FCC to perform political audits of broadcasters, cable, and satellite operators.

The DISCLOSE Act is primarily aimed at reversing, to a large degree, the recent 5-4 decision of the Supreme Court in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, in which the Court held that corporations, and by implication unions, have a constitutional right to make independent expenditures for advertising supporting or opposing the election of political candidates. As we reported in a Client Alert in January of this year, the decision opened the way for increased political advertising by invalidating limits on corporate political ad spending. The decision allows, among other things, corporations (and unions) to purchase airtime at any time to directly advocate for or against candidates for federal elective office. While the decision invalidated limits on corporate spending on political advertisements, it did retain certain disclosure and disclaimer requirements found in the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act.

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For those tired of having their dinner conversations interrupted by others’ cell phone calls, or watching movies in a theater by the light coming off the screens of nearby texters, technology has provided a solution. Unfortunately it is illegal.

In a recent decision, the FCC fined a company called Phonejammer.com $25,000 for marketing jamming equipment in the U.S. through its website, www.Phonejammer.com. The FCC discovered the violations when its field agents, responding to complaints from a cellphone service provider in Dallas, and a County’s Sheriff’s office in Florida, traced the interference in each case to a local business, and discovered that the proprietor had purchased and was operating a Phonejammer unit acquired through the website. Unfortunately, the FCC’s decision does not indicate the type of businesses that were using the Phonejammer, so it is not clear if they were restaurants, theaters, or just businesses tired of their employees texting their friends all day.

Under the Communications Act, it is illegal to sell jamming equipment because of the harm done, both intentionally and otherwise, to electronic communications. While putting an end to loud cell phone calls in upscale restaurants, or to students texting in class, might sound appealing to managers of such places, the interference to communications cannot easily be confined to just that location. Of course, the problems with jamming are not limited to just unintentional interference to nearby areas. There are similar issues affecting the business location seeking to jam calls. You can imagine what would happen if a patron had a heart attack on the premises and the emergency response was delayed when other patrons’ cell phone calls to 911 couldn’t get through.

Because of these concerns, the U.S. has always strictly prohibited the marketing of jamming devices, and not even police are permitted to use jammers. To appreciate the extent of the government’s concern with jamming, note that jamming equipment is not permitted even in prisons, where smuggled cellphones have caused unrelenting headaches for prison officials, with some inmates continuing to manage criminal enterprises via cell phone while still in prison.

That may be about to change, however. The Senate last year passed S.251, the Safe Prisons Communications Act of 2009, to permit targeted jamming of cell phone service within prisons. While it has not yet been approved by the House of Representatives, support for the idea has been strong. As with most well-intentioned ideas, however, the question is what unintended consequences will be involved, particularly if the jammers are not carefully monitored and regulated. For example, will a highway that passes a prison inevitably be a cellular dead zone for passing commuters, or will the technology, once permitted, be refined to largely eliminate unintended interference (if that is possible)? Again, it may be a minor annoyance to lose a call when driving by a prison, but a serious traffic accident in that area can make reliable cell phone service a life and death issue.

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Like many other FCC license holders, broadcast stations constantly navigate numerous laws and regulations while filing a multitude of reports and applications by required deadlines. Many of these are required quarterly, but some are annual, biennial, quadrennial, or octennial (once every eight years, and the only time I’ll get to use that word this year). While stations are usually very good about completing their quarterly reports, the less frequent reports require a special level of attention or they can be forgotten in the rush of business.

In the past few months, I have noticed a surge in calls from stations wanting to talk to a lawyer because they have belatedly discovered that they failed to create multiple reports over the past few years. I’ve received these types of calls regularly for more than two decades, but the accelerated pace of these calls definitely caught my attention. When a station calls the lawyer in a panic after making this discovery, the lawyer’s first job is to talk them down off the ledge. In the case of small station groups, you are often talking directly to the owner, who is rightly concerned about the direct financial impact of fines and license renewal challenges. With larger groups, it is often a GM worried about his or her future employment if the problem spins out of control. Fortunately, if addressed promptly, the damage can be greatly limited or avoided.

What is interesting, however, is that the common thread in nearly every one of these calls was the downsizing of the station employee “who did all that” before the problem commenced. While the recent “mega-recession” resulted in downsizing in nearly every industry, the precipitous drop in advertising revenues caused tremendous downsizing in the media industry. As downsizing usually requires that one person do the work formerly handled by multiple people, it is not surprising that a report that is required to be filed once a year, or only during odd-numbered years, gets lost in the mix. Of course, the loss of institutional memory is always a problem when an employee departs. However, the problem is intensified in a downsizing, where the departing employee is not too happy with the soon-to-be-former employer, and is probably not feeling very enthusiastic about training their successor.

As a result, while it is always wise to vigilantly monitor regulatory due dates and keep them on a multi-year calendar, it is equally important to ensure after a downsizing that there remains one employee who is clearly charged with ensuring that the required reports/filings are timely completed. You also need to ensure that employee has not just the responsibility of getting the job done, but the training and resources to make it happen. A top-notch conscientious employee who has no idea what an EEO Midterm Report is, and when that particular station’s report is due, is of little use.

Focusing a little bit of attention on that issue now will save you loads of distraction later when you try to undo the damage. Keep in mind that where a missed report may result in a fine, a missed license renewal application (the “once in eight years” filing for broadcasters) has caused the FCC to delete the station from its database and charge the licensee with illegal operation for the time it operated the station after its license expired. It’s best not to find that out firsthand.

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This week saw generally positive news for television broadcasters on the broadband front. First, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled that the FCC does not currently have authority to regulate the network management policies of Internet providers. Aside from the fact that the Court’s ruling challenged the FCC’s ability to require Internet providers to treat all network traffic equally, i.e., to apply “net neutrality,” the decision also calls into question key aspects of the FCC’s ambitious National Broadband Plan, many of which assumed the FCC had broad authority to regulate the Internet. Because the Court struck at the very heart of the National Broadband Plan, the Court’s decision may undermine other aspects of the plan, including its controversial proposal to reclaim 120 MHz of spectrum from television broadcasters that we discussed in a previous post.

Another shifting wind came in the form of Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg, who publicly stated he does not believe there is going to be as great a spectrum shortage as the FCC predicts, and that “confiscating [TV] spectrum and repurposing it for other things, I’m not sure I buy into the idea that that’s a good thing to do,” and adding “I think the market’s going to settle this. So in the long term, if we can’t show that we have applications and services to utilize that spectrum better than the broadcasters, then the broadcasters will keep the spectrum.”

It is unclear whether the Commission will appeal the Court’s decision, and broadcasters still have a long way to go before they can breathe easier about their spectrum being repurposed for auction to wireless companies. Still, after being forced headfirst into a gale force national debate over the “best use” of their spectrum, any calming of those winds is certainly welcome.

While all this is good news for broadcasters, the FCC certainly isn’t giving up and going home. Just today, the FCC released its “Broadband Action Agenda” setting the timing for more than 60 rulemakings and other notice-and-comment proceedings, including a rulemaking involving broadcast spectrum reclamation scheduled for the Third Quarter of 2010. While the FCC’s authority over the Internet may be up in the air, it continues to exercise vast authority over broadcasters. One dark scenario (for everyone) is that the FCC rushes forward and reclaims broadcast spectrum, only to have its National Broadband Plan collapse before being implemented. In that situation, the damage to the public’s broadcast service would be done, the spectrum would still be auctioned, but likely with reduced demand (and excessive supply) driving down auction revenues for the government, and the public ending up no closer to the broadband nirvana envisioned by the FCC’s proposal.

Stay tuned, as this is a story that will be unfolding for quite a while.

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Death, taxes, and ownership reports: all three are unavoidable, but broadcasters had a brief respite from the last one. That respite has now come to an end.

One of the joys of being a broadcast licensee is filing biennial ownership reports detailing the extended ownership structure of each station. These reports used to be called Annual Ownership Reports and were filed, appropriately enough, annually. In an effort to reduce the amount of paperwork flowing between licensees and the FCC, the requirement changed in 1999 from an annual to a biennial one. That created endless confusion, as any particular station’s filing deadline was generally dictated by where it was located. Radio stations in one state would file by April 1 of odd-numbered years, while radio stations in a different state would be required to file by June 1 of even-numbered years. In fact, even TV and radio stations in the same state were required to file in different years.

Because of exceptions to the general rule on filing deadlines (too boring to discuss here), even the FCC had difficulty determining whether a station had been properly filing its ownership reports on time. As a result, the FCC adopted new filing rules in May 2009 establishing November 1 of odd-numbered years as the national ownership report filing date for all commercial broadcast stations. It also introduced a new form requiring more detailed information than in the past, required formerly exempt entities to file reports, and required that the information be entered electronically and repeatedly into the FCC’s filing system for each attributable owner in the ownership chain.

Previously, licensees with complex ownership structures would create a single exhibit describing the complete ownership structure and other media ownership interests, which was then attached to the ownership report for every entity in the chain of ownership. Because the new electronic ownership report form would not allow such attachments, stations (well, let’s be honest; station’s lawyers) were required to reenter the data for each and every ownership report. The reports for even midsize station groups could take months to complete. Initially, the FCC postponed the filing deadline (twice!) to give licensees time to fill out the voluminous reports, but as the FCC’s electronic filing system started to whimper from the volume of data being entered, the FCC postponed the deadline until the form could be reworked to solve the worst of the problems. For those interested, you can read our advisories and alerts from the time here, here, here, here, here, and here (you begin to appreciate the scope of the problem!).

A few hours ago, the FCC announced that a revamped ownership report form is now available which resolves the repetitive data entry issue by incorporating a spreadsheet that, once filled out, can be copied into multiple ownership reports. With the availability of the new form, the FCC also announced that all commercial broadcast stations, including Class A and LPTV stations, must file their reports on the new form by July 8, 2010. For those interested in the details of the new Form 323 and spreadsheet, you can read our Client Alert on the new form, and ponder whether a similar eight month postponement of death or taxes might also be possible.

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4/8/2010
The FCC’s Media Bureau has announced that a new version of the Biennial Ownership Report Form for commercial broadcast stations, FCC Form 323, will be available on its website as of April 9, 2010. All commercial broadcast station owners must file their biennial ownership reports using the new form by July 8, 2010. However, the data used to complete the form must be accurate as of November 1, 2009.

The FCC originally announced its intent to implement a new version of the Form 323 in an Order released in May 2009 as part of its Promoting Diversification in the Broadcasting Services proceeding. The revision required, among other things, that each holder of a direct or indirect attributable interest in a licensee secure an FCC-issued Federal Registration Number (“FRN”). The revision also mandated that information regarding attributable interest holders and their other broadcast interests be reported repeatedly and in a precisely structured manner. As a result, the number of reports and the time to complete each report increased dramatically for many broadcasters with the ultimate result that the FCC’s electronic filing system ground to a near halt and did not reliably save information entered into it. Based on these technical difficulties, the FCC stayed the filing obligation until it could improve the functioning of the form to account for these difficulties.

The FCC sent its revisions to the form to the Office of Management and Budget (“OMB”) for approval on March 25, and OMB approved the modified form on March 26. The revised form uses a new XML Spreadsheet template that will allow information to be entered into the spreadsheet and then uploaded to the form, thereby reducing the time and effort needed to enter the data. The spreadsheet must be downloaded from the FCC form and comes with detailed instructions regarding the proper use of the XML Spreadsheet. Of particular note are the following:

  • The XML Spreadsheet comes with 25 empty rows for data entry that contain embedded validation codes necessary for the proper functioning of the form. Any licensee needing more than 25 lines must copy and paste the original 25 lines as many times as necessary and not create new lines.
  • The XML Spreadsheet must be saved with an .xml extension, not the .xls or .xlsx extensions that the Excel program will assign by default.
  • Licensees must not change or delete any data in Cell B1.
  • Information must be entered in all capital letters.

The new version of the form also retains the requirement that each attributable interest holder secure an FRN. The instructions state that where, after a good faith effort, a licensee is unable to secure an interest holder’s social security number, which is needed to complete the FRN registration process, a button on the form will allow the licensee to secure a Special Use FRN. The instructions to the form state that the Special Use FRN can only be used for the Biennial Ownership Report filing, and not for any other filing, such as a post-consummation Ownership Report filing.

The Commission’s May 2009 Order also adopted November 1 as a new uniform reporting date for all commercial stations nationwide, regardless of the station’s license renewal filing anniversary (the deadline previously used by the FCC). Because the original November 1, 2009 filing requirement was stayed while the form was revised, the reports filed by the new July 8, 2010 deadline must still reflect the ownership data as it existed November 1, 2009.

The substantial difference in time between the new filing deadline and the time for which ownership information is being reported leads to some interesting questions. For example, where a station has been sold since November 2009, should the report be filed under the name of the new licensee or the prior licensee. If it is to be filed by the new licensee, how will the FCC deal with the fact that the new licensee may not have any personal knowledge of the prior licensee’s November 2009 ownership structure? These questions may be answered by a follow up public notice from the FCC, but if not, we will be pursuing them with the FCC’s staff.

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