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  • FCC Chairman Carr announced that the FCC will be considering two orders concerning foreign ownership requirements, including those for broadcasters,
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  • The National Association of Broadcasters filed a Petition for Rulemaking asking the FCC to require that full-power television stations complete
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For years, we have warned about the need to license music in podcasts – and how such licenses need to be obtained directly from copyright holders.  We’ve noted demand notices sent to podcasters causing those podcasters to pull their programs from various distribution platforms (see, for instance, our articles here and here).  We warned that, as podcasts are on-demand performances and are permanently “fixed” with other audio, the public performance rights given by the licenses that broadcasters and some other services obtain from ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, GMR, and even SoundExchange, are insufficient to cover broad uses of music in podcasts (see, for example, our articles here and here).  A Press Release yesterday from NMPA (the National Music Publishers Association that represents publishing companies that generally hold the copyrights in musical works – the musical compositions that provide the word and music in a song) announces that the organization has sent a take-down notice to Spotify asking it to remove from podcasts hosted by Spotify “thousands of unlicensed uses of NMPA members’ works.”  The Press Release indicates that over 2,500 notices have been sent, and that more are on the way.

This action should reinforce our concerns about the use of unlicensed music in podcasts.  But, contrary to the suggestion that the NMPA letter makes that licensing “is not hard to do,” for many podcasters, it is in fact hard.  There is no central organization, like the PROs or SoundExchange, that provides blanket licenses that cover all music uses in podcasts.  A podcaster who wants to use a popular song in a podcast has to find the copyright holder (or, more frequently, the copyright holders) to both the sound recording (the artist who recorded the music or their copyright holder, often the record company) and to the musical work (the composer or composers and lyricists or their publishing companies, which normally hold the copyrights) and get their permission to include the song in the podcast – most often at a price.  This often involves significant research to find the proper rightsholders. Continue Reading NMPA Calls for Takedowns of Spotify Podcasts Using Unlicensed Music – A Reminder to Podcasters of the Perils of Music in Their Productions

It’s a new year, and as has been our custom at the beginning of each year, we dust off the crystal ball and take a look at what we think may be some of the significant regulatory and legislative issues that broadcasters will be facing in 2025.  This year, there is an extra layer of uncertainty given a new administration, both in the White House and at the FCC.  Already, it appears that a new administration will bring new priorities – some barely on the radar in past years – to the top of the list of the issues that broadcasters will need to be carefully monitoring.

One of those issues has been a possible FCC review of the meaning of the “public interest” standard under which all broadcasters are governed.  As we wrote when President-Elect Trump announced his pick for the new FCC Chair starting on Inauguration Day, Chair-Designate Brendan Carr has indicated that this public interest proceeding will be a high priority.  In his opinion, broadcasters, or perhaps more specifically the news media, have suffered from an erosion of trust, and it has been his expressed opinion that a reexamination of the public interest standard might help to restore public trust.  We noted in our article upon his selection that this is not the first time that there has been a re-examination of that standard.  It has traditionally been difficult to precisely define what the standard means.  In the coming days, we will be writing more about this issue.  But suffice it to say that we are hopeful that any new examination does not lead to more paperwork obligations for broadcasters, as seemingly occurred whenever any broadcast issue was addressed by the current administration.  As we note below, there are several paperwork burdens that we think may disappear in the new administration, so we are not expecting more paper – but we will all need to be carefully watching what develops from any re-examination of the public interest standard.Continue Reading Looking Into the Crystal Ball – What Legal and Policy Issues are Ahead for Broadcasters in 2025?

  • The FCC released its agenda for its Open Meeting scheduled for February 15.  The FCC will consider two items of
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  • On July 28, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issued an opinion rejecting appeals
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  • Since the February 24 hearing designation order (HDO) from the FCC’s Media Bureau referring questions about Standard General Broadcasting’s proposed
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  • The FCC, as required by the Communications Act, released a Public Notice announcing the start of the 2022 Quadrennial
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