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FCC Commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker made the surprise announcement yesterday that she will leave the FCC on June 3 to become Senior Vice President of Government Affairs at NBC-Universal. Baker’s departure will leave Commissioner Robert McDowell as the only Republican Commissioner at the FCC for the time being. It is unlikely that President Obama will be in any hurry to name a replacement, leaving Democrats with a 3-1 political advantage at the FCC once Baker leaves. Her departure comes as a surprise because, although her current term at the FCC is up in June, she was expected to be nominated for another term.

It certainly appears to have caught her colleagues at the Commission by surprise, all of whom quickly released very brief statements of congratulations. Despite the warm wishes from her colleagues, the brevity of those statements makes clear that they didn’t have much time to prepare them.

This being Washington, DC, the Commissioner’s move did not come without controversy. The trade press reported that many found it disconcerting that the Commissioner was joining NBC-Universal just a few months after voting in favor of Comcast’s contested multi-billion dollar purchase of that company. For example, Free Press’s website reports that Free Press President and CEO Craig Aaron has stated that “Less than four months after Commissioner Baker voted to approve Comcast’s takeover of NBC Universal, she’s reportedly departing the FCC to lobby for Comcast-NBC. This is just the latest — though perhaps most blatant — example of a so-called public servant cashing in at a company she is supposed to be regulating.”

Others, including National Association of Broadcasters President and CEO Gordon Smith, publicly supported the Commissioner’s move, stating in a news release that “With a winning combination of integrity, intellect and experience, Meredith Baker will be a key player for NBCUniversal, and I know that her in-depth knowledge of broadcast issues, deep understanding of the D.C. landscape and strong leadership abilities will make her an important resource for the entire broadcast industry.” Indeed, Commissioner Baker’s excellent reputation in Washington, earned at both the NTIA and the FCC, will do much to deflect, although certainly not silence, criticism regarding the timing of the move.

The eventual appointment of the Commissioner’s replacement is likely to be a hotly debated issue, with such big ticket items as net neutrality, spectrum auctions, the potential repacking of broadcast spectrum, and retransmission consent battles on the FCC’s plate. Unlike Commissioner Baker’s surprise announcement yesterday, however, it is a surprise to no one that the political maneuvering in Washington over the future composition of the FCC has already begun in earnest.

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Posted in: FCC Administration
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Earlier today, the FCC wrapped up a seminar on complying with its new ex parte rules, which govern the public disclosures that must be made following a meeting with FCC personnel. The new rules are designed to increase the transparency of the FCC’s decision-making process, and go into effect in a few short weeks (June 1, 2011). Unfortunately, the price of increased transparency is more paperwork and the risk of being assessed fines by the Enforcement Bureau, which has been granted authority to police the new rules and issue fines to those who run afoul of them.

Fortunately, the FCC’s General Counsel, Austin Schlick, indicated at the seminar that while the Enforcement Bureau now has the authority to levy fines for ex parte violations, the FCC will not use its new ex parte rules as an administrative “speed trap” to generate revenue from fines. While his statement is not binding on the FCC, it does provide some comfort to those unfamiliar with the process and requirements for conducting meetings with the FCC that inadvertent errors won’t necessarily be costly ones.

A complete copy of the order establishing the new rules can be found here, but some of the more noteworthy changes include:

  1. Under the new rules, all ex parte notice letters must be filed electronically with the FCC in machine-readable format (e.g., DOC, PPT or searchable-PDF files). There are a number of exceptions to this rule, including for hardship and documents containing confidential information.
  2. All presentations will require ex parte filings, even those in which parties merely reiterate arguments or data already in the record. Such ex parte filings must provide details regarding the facts that were discussed, the arguments made, and the support offered for those arguments during the presentation. Alternatively, parties may provide detailed citations to prior filings containing that information.
  3. Because of these added complexities, the filing deadline for submitting an ex parte notice will now be two full business days after the presentation (rather than one). However, during the “Sunshine Period” prior to an FCC vote, the notice must be filed on the same business day in which the presentation is made.

On a related note, the FCC this week published in the Federal Register a request for comments establishing the comment deadlines for those wishing to provide input on when and how real parties-in-interest must be disclosed in ex parte filings. A copy of the request for comments can be found here.

In particular, the FCC is interested in whether disclosure requirements should apply to other types of filings in addition to ex parte notices, whether disclosures should be made in only some or all types of FCC proceedings, whether different disclosure requirements should be applicable to different types of entities (such as trade associations or non-profit groups), and whether a party should be deemed to have made adequate disclosure if its filing references information appearing on the Internet or available from the FCC’s databases. Comments are due by June 16, 2011 and Reply Comments are due by July 18, 2011.

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Broadcasters don’t know it yet, but recent actions by the Department of Justice suggest that the federal government may be moving closer to raining on their upcoming license renewals. The reason? Medical marijuana advertising. While it seems like a recent phenomenon, the first state laws permitting medical marijuana go back some 15 years. The movement by states to permit the use of medical marijuana has grown steadily since then, with half the states in the U.S. (and the District of Columbia) now having medical marijuana laws on the books or under consideration.

Of course, when an entrepreneur sets up a medical marijuana dispensary, the next step is to get the word out to the public. In the past few years, these dispensaries began approaching broadcast stations in growing numbers seeking to air advertising. In the depths of the recent recession, medical marijuana dispensaries were one of the few growth industries, and many stations were thrilled to have a new source of ad revenue.

However, marijuana, medical or otherwise, is still illegal under federal law. When we first began receiving calls a few years ago from broadcast stations asking if they could accept the ads, the federal government’s position was ambiguous. Many stations, and in some cases, their counsel, concluded that as long as the activity was legal in the state in which the station was located, airing medical marijuana ads was fine. In 2009, the Department of Justice gave some comfort, if not support, to this school of thought when it internally circulated a memo to some U.S. attorneys suggesting that the DOJ was not interested in pursuing medical marijuana businesses as long as they operated in compliance with state law.

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Headlines:

  • FCC Begins to Move on Pending Video News Release Complaints
  • Failure to Monitor Tower Lighting Results in $12,000 Penalty

Video News Releases Garner $4,000 Fines for Two Television Broadcasters
After a flurry of complaints from advocacy groups a few years ago raised the issue at the FCC, the Commission has been pondering how to treat Video News Releases (VNRs) with respect to its sponsorship identification rule. The result has been a growing backlog of enforcement investigations involving VNRs. However, the release of two decisions proposing fines for stations that aired all or part of a VNR without identifying the material on-air as being sponsored appears to indicate that the dam is about to break. In its first VNR enforcement actions in years, the FCC fined two unrelated television stations $4,000 each for violating the sponsorship identification requirements found in Section 317 of the Communications Act and Section 73.1212 of the FCC’s Rules.

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Caught between a rock and the Second Circuit, the FCC hesitantly took the defense of its indecency policy to the Supreme Court today. The FCC filed a petition seeking the Court’s review of the Second Circuit’s decisions in indecency cases involving Fox and ABC programs. Last year, the Second Circuit found the FCC’s interpretation of indecency to be arbitrary and capricious. On appeal, the Supreme Court disagreed, and lobbed this perennial hot potato back over the net to the Second Circuit for an assessment of the constitutionality of the FCC’s indecency policy.

Whether intentional or not, the Supreme Court’s return of the matter to the Second Circuit was the legal equivalent of a high lob, and the Second Circuit enthusiastically slammed the ball back across the net, ruling that the FCC’s current indecency policy is unconstitutionally vague. In light of its earlier ruling, the Second Circuit’s conclusion was hardly a surprise. More curious, however, was the government’s reaction to it. Rather than again storming to the Supreme Court to defend its indecency policy, the FCC first asked the Second Circuit to reconsider its decision (a request that was denied in November 2010), and then sought not one, but two extensions of the deadline for requesting Supreme Court review.

The FCC waited until the end of even that extended period before seeking joint review of the Fox and ABC decisions (the deadline for the Fox decision was today, while the FCC actually had until May 4th to seek review of the ABC decision). In asking that the cases be considered together, the FCC is making the calculation that “scripted nudity” in ABC’s NYPD Blue presents a more compelling case for government regulation than the Fox case, where the agency concluded that fleeting expletives (during the Billboard Music Awards) were a form of actionable indecency despite years of precedent to the contrary. That new interpretation, which the FCC first announced with regard to an NBC broadcast of the Golden Globe Awards, gave everyone (including FCC staff) a case of regulatory whiplash, whereas the FCC’s ongoing, if erratic, feud with broadcast nudity was hardly a surprise (and therefore less controversial).

The government’s hesitance to bring all of this to the Supreme Court’s doorstep a second time is even more curious after reading the petition, which bluntly states that “The court of appeals has effectively suspended the Commission’s ability to fulfill its statutory indecency enforcement responsibilities unless and until the agency can adopt a new policy that surmounts the court of appeals’ vagueness rulings.” The petition then suggests that no functional indecency policy could overcome that hurdle. It is therefore apparent that the FCC’s delay in bringing the challenge (which to be fair, necessarily involves getting the Department of Justice on board) is not the result of any belief that the agency might have been able to “live with” or “work around” the Second Circuit’s ruling by revising its policy. There is clearly something else at work here.

From a legal perspective, the FCC’s petition is well written. However, in reading through it, you can’t avoid the impression that even the FCC is trying to convince itself that the technological and cultural shifts of the last decade or two have not rendered the notion of government second-guessing broadcast content an anachronism. In particular, it is hard to escape the irony of the FCC seeking to bring high speed Internet into every home by reallocating broadcast spectrum based on the argument that only 10% of Americans are viewing over-the-air television. If true, then the government is expending a lot of effort to control what that 10% sees on their televisions, while racing to use those airwaves to bring these same households the wonders of the Internet–including all of that content that they aren’t allowed to see on their TV’s.

The convergence of distribution technologies is upon us, and whether that claimed 10% of households uses their TV’s V-Chip, or an Internet software filter on their computer, to prevent unwelcome content from entering their home, the result is hardly different. The FCC’s sudden shyness in defending its indecency policy suggests that it is concerned that the Supreme Court may note that incongruity as well.

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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. Among other things, the CAN-SPAM Act makes it “unlawful for any person to initiate the transmission, to a protected computer, of a commercial electronic mail message, or a transaction or relationship message, that contains, or is accompanied by, header information that is materially false or materially misleading.”

On March 28, 2011, a U.S. District Court in California held for the first time that the CAN-SPAM Act’s restrictions on the transmission of unsolicited commercial e-mail extends beyond traditional e-mail to include communications to other electronic medium, including Facebook friends’ walls, news feeds, and home pages. As John Nicholson of Pillsbury’s Global Sourcing group describes in detail in a recent Client Alert found here, the ruling is the most expansive judicial interpretation so far regarding the types of messages that fall within the scope of the CAN-SPAM Act.

John’s Client Alert is definitely worth a read for companies using social media in marketing. As John points out, companies should verify that they (and any marketing services they engage) comply with CAN-SPAM’s requirements for commercial messages sent via social media platforms.

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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 watch their entire channel lineup on an iPad.

Suddenly cable and satellite companies are rushing to review their programming and retransmission deals to figure out what rights they have obtained, while programmers frantically review distribution agreements to see what rights they may have given away. We can find a few lessons about retransmission consent agreements in the App Flap, but let’s save those for another day.

What this really comes down to is whether the iPad apps qualify as “cable system” distribution, Internet distribution, or something else. Most programmers (and a few careful broadcasters) specifically carve out Internet distribution when signing carriage agreements – existing deals cover distribution for in-home viewing over cable and DBS systems. Internet distribution rights are negotiated separately, if at all. But many broadcasters who signed MSO form retrans agreements may have given away a lot more than they intended to.

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Last Fall, the FCC adopted final rules allowing Part 15 unlicensed Television Band Devices (TVBDs) to operate in “white spaces”, the slivers of unused spectrum in the television band. To find available slivers of spectrum, the TVBDs will consult a database that is intended to contain information about every use being made of TV spectrum throughout the United States. However, certain users of television spectrum have only until April 5, 2011, to ask the FCC to grant a waiver in order to be included in the interference protection database or risk debilitating interference.

Any facility, including a cable headend, satellite receive facility, TV translator, Class A television station, low power television station or broadcast auxiliary station, that picks up an over-the-air broadcast signal at a point located more than 80 kilometers outside the originating station’s protected contour must file a waiver request with the FCC by April 5, 2011 seeking to have that use included in the white spaces database and protected from interference.

At a later date, the FCC will allow users to register without a waiver those receive sites that are located within the 80 kilometer zone (but outside the station’s protected contour) for interference protection. They cannot do so now because the database is still being developed. In the meantime, waiver requests for locations located outside of the 80 kilometer zone must be filed now and should include the coordinates of the receive site, the call sign of the originating station received over-the-air, and an indication of how potential white space devices would disrupt existing service. According to the FCC, it will accept public comment on waiver requests prior to making a decision on whether or not to grant them.

As a result, any cable headend that has built a tower with a directional receive antenna to pick up particularly distant television station signals, or any broadcaster or TV translator that uses over-the-air signals or a UHF microwave backbone to connect a series of translator facilities, will be prevented from registering such sites outside the 80 kilometer zone unless they seek a waiver by the April 5 deadline. Unintended interference to a cable system’s ability to receive a television station’s signal could result in the television station being dropped from the cable system. Interference to a single link in a long microwave backbone could interrupt signal delivery to all sites further down the line.

While the 80 kilometer “no waiver” zone may seem large, one multiple system cable operator has already filed a waiver request with the FCC indicating that it has headends receiving over-the-air television signals outside that zone in eleven different locations spread across multiple states, including Alabama, Arizona, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan and Minnesota. Thus, if a station is being carried by a far off cable or satellite system, it would be wise for cable and satellite operators as well as TV licensees to double check how and where the TV station’s signal is being received. For TV signals being picked up over-the-air more than 80 kilometers from their protected contour, a waiver request now will be required to ensure continued interference-free signal delivery.

Although receive sites located within the 80 kilometer zone do not face the April 5, 2011 waiver deadline, they will still be affected by the implementation of the white spaces database. Because the data that will be used to populate the database will be taken from the FCC’s existing records, it is important that parties review the data in the FCC’s databases to make sure it is accurate to avoid potential interference from future white space operations.

In January, the FCC’s Office of Engineering and Technology (OET) conditionally designated nine companies as white-space device database administrators: Comsearch, Frequency Finder Inc., Google Inc., KB Enterprises LLC/LS Telcom, Key Bridge Global LLC, Neustar Inc., Spectrum Bridge Inc., Telcordia Technologies, and WSdb LLC. The FCC held a training session for these entities earlier this month. Thus, the rollout of these databases will soon be at hand. OET recently stated that it intends to “exercise strong oversight of the TV bands databases and administrators.” That said, parties should still exercise their own diligence in reviewing the FCC’s databases, registering receive sites, and applying for any needed waivers if they want to avoid interference problems down the road.

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I wrote last week about the FCC’s announcement that broadcasters must certify in their license renewal applications that their advertising contracts have, since March 14, 2011, had a nondiscrimination clause in them. Specifically, broadcasters must certify that their “advertising sales agreements do not discriminate on the basis of race or ethnicity and that all such agreements held by the licensee contain nondiscrimination clauses.” The good news from last week’s announcement was that the FCC chose to apply the advertising nondiscrimination certification (which was originally announced in 2008), prospectively, rather than announcing that stations would have to certify their contracts included such language since 2008 or 2009.

That was the good news, and what government giveth with one hand, it can taketh away with the other. Today the FCC released an FCC Enforcement Advisory and News Release emphasizing how seriously it intends to treat that certification. The FCC’s Advisory states that broadcasters unable to make that certification will need to “attach an exhibit identifying the persons and matters involved and explaining why the noncompliance is not an impediment to a grant of the station’s license renewal application.”

The Advisory goes on to state that “Licensees must have a good faith basis for an affirmative certification” and notes that “a licensee that uses a third party to arrange advertising sales is responsible for exercising due diligence to ensure that the advertising agreement contains the nondiscrimination clause and does not discriminate on the basis of race or ethnicity.”

Lawyers are perhaps unique in their ability to acknowledge the validity of a legal requirement while still questioning the logic of it. Make no mistake–this new certification is the law and broadcasters need to make sure that they can truthfully make this certification at license renewal time. The goal itself is admirable. Indeed, as Univision’s Washington counsel during the time that it grew from only seven TV stations to 162 TV and radio stations, I saw first hand the challenges of persuading advertisers (and others) that Spanish-language viewers and listeners are an important group of consumers worthy of advertisers’ dollars.

However, as I noted in last week’s post, trying to use the FCC’s authority over broadcasters as a method to modify the conduct of advertisers (who are generally beyond the FCC’s authority) is a futile approach. Advertisers aren’t too worried about a broadcaster’s license renewal. As a result, the only one to be hurt here is the broadcaster, not the discriminatory advertiser.

The FCC can counter that preventing broadcasters from accepting ads of discriminatory advertisers ensures such advertisers will cease their discriminatory ad practices if they want air time. This assertion suffers, however, from two debilitating flaws. First, if the current FCC’s view is accurate that broadband,and not broadcasting, is the way of the future, then there will be plenty of non-broadcast venues for advertisers wishing to engage in discriminatory ad buys. Indeed, the FCC’s certification will not even prevent the same advertiser from making discriminatory ad buys in non-broadcast media while avoiding such discrimination on the broadcast side.

That brings us, however, to the bigger flaw in this approach, and that is the simple fact that clauses in a contract can generally only be enforced by the parties to that contract. As a result, a broadcaster can place the required nondiscrimination clause in its contract, and if the advertiser proceeds to purchase ads in a discriminatory manner (e.g., splitting its ad buying money among all of the broadcaster’s local radio stations except the one with the Spanish-language format), the FCC can’t really do anything about it. The only party in a position to enforce the nondiscrimination clause in the contract is the broadcaster, who will understandably be hesitant to spend precious resources suing an advertiser. There is no financial incentive to spend money on litigation, and there is obviously a huge disincentive for the broadcaster to sue a revenue source that can readily take its advertising dollars elsewhere (and who won’t care what happens to the broadcaster’s license renewal application).

Even today’s FCC Enforcement Advisory seems to overlook this, asserting that “a broadcaster that learns of a violation of a nondiscrimination clause while its license renewal application is pending should update its license renewal application so that it continues to be accurate.” However, whether an advertiser has proceeded to engage in discriminatory ad buying practices in violation of the contractual nondiscrimination clause would not necessarily affect the accuracy of the broadcaster’s certification that its “advertising sales agreements do not discriminate on the basis of race or ethnicity and that all such agreements held by the licensee contain nondiscrimination clauses.” The broadcaster could certainly volunteer to the FCC that it had discovered an advertiser discriminating, but the FCC has no authority to punish the advertiser, and punishing the broadcaster who uncovered the advertiser’s discriminatory efforts doesn’t make much sense. As a result, the new certification adds to the regulatory thicket surrounding broadcasters, but leaves discriminatory advertisers free to roam.

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Pillsbury’s communications lawyers have published FCC Enforcement Monitor monthly since 1999 to inform our clients of notable FCC enforcement actions against FCC license holders and others. This month’s issue includes:

  • Florida FM Translator Fined $13,000 for Unauthorized Operations
  • Latest Public Inspection File Violation Nets Upwardly Adjusted Fine
  • Failure to Monitor Inactive Tower Results in $6,000 Penalty

Failure to Operate as Authorized Costs Florida Broadcaster an Additional $4,000

A recent FCC Notice of Apparent Liability (“NAL”) for $13,000 against a Florida broadcaster serves as a costly reminder that stations must operate in accordance with the FCC’s Rules, and more notably, as specifically authorized in their station license. According to the NAL, the Florida broadcaster failed to heed a verbal warning from Tampa field agents that its station was operating beyond the technical parameters of its authorization. The NAL stated that the Tampa field agents, pursuant to an investigation and following two complaints, took field strength measurements on five separate occasions and visited the station’s transmitter site on two separate occasions over approximately 11 months between October 2009 and September 2010. Field measurements undertaken in October 2009 and early February 2010 indicated that the station was operating with a power level well in excess of its authorization in violation of Section 74.1235(e) of the FCC’s Rules, which states, “[i]n no event shall a station authorized under this subpart be operated with a transmitter power output (TPO) in excess of the transmitter certificated rating and the TPO shall not be more than 105 percent of the authorized TPO.”

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