April 2014

The FCC on Friday issued a reminder to all TV stations that, as of July 1, they will have to upload all of their new political broadcasting documents to their online public files.  Up to this point, only stations affiliated with the Top 4 networks in the Top 50 markets had to worry …

The Copyright Office recently issued a Notice and Request for Public Comment on a study that they have commenced on music licensing in all of its forms.  We’ve written about the complexity of the music licensing process many times, and about proposals for reform.  Many of these proposals have been issued in connection with the speeches of Copyright Register Maria Pallante’s discussion of copyright reform (see our article here), and the subsequent Green Paper on Copyright issued by the Patent and Trademark Office (see our article here).  This Notice appears to be one more step in this overall review of copyright underway throughout the administration and in Congress.  The Notice released by the Copyright Office is wide-ranging, and touches on almost every area of controversy in music licensing.  Comments are due on May 16, and the Copyright Office promises to hold roundtable discussions to further explore the issues in music licensing.

The issues on which the Copyright Office asks for comments deal both with the licensing of the musical composition or musical work (the words and music of a song) and the sound recording (the song as actually recorded by a particular artist).  The request deals with both the public performance right for musical compositions, usually licensed through ASCAP, BMI and SESAC, and the rights to make reproductions of the works, which are usually licensed by the music publishers, sometimes through organizations like the Harry Fox Agency.  On the sound recording side of the music world, the rights are usually licensed by the record company except for the public performance royalties paid by non-interactive music services, which are collected in the United States by SoundExchange. 
Continue Reading Copyright Office Begins Wide-Ranging Inquiry Into Music Licensing

While we are waiting for the full text of the FCC’s decision  taken Monday on the multiple ownership rules, rolling one Quadrennial Review into another and prohibiting most Joint Sales Agreements, we can look in more detail at the FCC’s decision on retransmission consent issues.  We wrote about the historical background of both of these issues earlier this week.  When that is finally released, the full text of the decision will give us the details of the multiple ownership decision.  But the Commission has released the full text of its decision prohibiting two independently owned Top 4 TV stations in the same market from jointly negotiating retransmission consent agreements, and starting a further proceeding to look at whether the network non-duplication and syndicated exclusivity rules should be abolished.

The restriction on the joint negotiation of retransmission consent agreements was founded on the FCC’s sense that such joint negotiations gave the negotiating stations too much power in their negotiations with cable systems and other multichannel video providers.  The Commissioners concluded that this meant that TV stations engaged in such joint negotiations could get more money from cable systems than they could get if they negotiated independently.  While the statements made by the Commissioners at Monday’s open meeting suggested that such negotiating power led to higher rates paid by consumers, the evidence cited by the Commission was principally based on theoretical arguments by economists as to the ability of jointly-negotiating stations to get these high rates.  What specifically did the FCC prohibit?
Continue Reading Details of the FCC Decision Prohibiting the Joint Negotiation of Retransmission Consent By Local TV Stations and Starting Proceeding to Examine Syndex and Network Nonduplication Protections

The FCC meeting yesterday proposed to attribute Joint Sales Agreements (making them “count” for multiple ownership purposes – meaning that one broadcaster can’t do a JSA with another station unless it can own the other station).  The Commission also apparently kicked the can down the road on all other multiple ownership matters – not changing the local TV ownership rules or amending the newspaper broadcast cross-ownership restrictions, instead deciding to further consider any modification of the rules.  No decision on these issues is expected until probably 2016.  See the FCC’s Public Notice of that action here.  Shared Services Agreements will also be examined – though new ones have effectively been put on hold during the course of the examination by an FCC processing policy released two weeks ago that requires that any party proposing any sort of sharing agreement in a transaction requiring FCC approval demonstrate how that sharing agreement serves the public interest.  Also at the meeting, the FCC took actions to ban joint negotiation of retransmission consent fees by any two of the top 4 rated stations in a TV market, and to reexamine the network nonduplication and syndicated exclusivity rules (see the FCC’s decision here).  While we will have more details on these decisions in the coming days, as we fully analyze the texts of the FCC decisions as they are released, for now it is interesting to look at these decisions with the perspective of history.

Having represented broadcasters in Washington for over 30 years, one sees many of the same issues debated over and over again.  Many of the issues that were thought to be settled years ago come to the fore after most of the participants at the FCC, and even those in industry, forget that these battles had already been fought and seemingly decided.  In introducing the FCC’s examination of Shared Services Agreements at yesterday’s meeting, the representative of the FCC’s Media Bureau talked about how the examination of each transaction will be important for the FCC to determine if there are too many interlocking ties between stations that are supposed to be competitors in a market.  Not mentioned was the fact that this same kind of review used to be done by the FCC under what was called the “cross-interest policy,” a policy that was repealed by the FCC in 1988.
Continue Reading FCC Attributes JSAs, to Examine SSAs and Network Nonduplication and Syndex Rules – A Return to the 1980s?