February 2018

The FCC yesterday released a Public Notice announcing a filing window from March 14 to March 28 for “long-form” applications for new translators that were filed in last summer’s window for Class C and D AM stations to seek new FM translators to rebroadcast their stations. The Public Notice also sets the procedures for filing in this window. The window is for the filing of complete Form 349 applications by applicants who were deemed mutually exclusive in a notice released by the Commission last year (see our article here) but who were able to work out a settlement or technical solution to that mutual exclusivity in the window at the end of last year for resolving such conflicts. By resolving those situations of potential interference with other applicants, these applications can now be granted. The list of applicants who are invited to file the long-form application is here (in an Excel format). The long-form application requires more certifications and more specific technical information than that which was submitted during the initial filing window. It also allows for minor amendments to applications as long as they do not create any new conflicts.

After the long-form application is submitted to the FCC, the application will be published in an FCC public notice of broadcast applications. Interested parties will have 15 days from that publication date to comment or object. If no comments are filed, and no other issues arise, the FCC’s Audio Division is known for its speed in processing translator applications so that grants might be expected for many of the applications late within a month or two of the filing deadline.
Continue Reading FCC Announces Long-Form Application Deadline for AM Stations that Resolved Mutually Exclusive Situations in First Translator Window

On Friday, the FCC issued a Public Notice announcing its first EEO audit of 2018. The Notice lists the almost 300 radio and television stations that will be subject to the review as well as the rules that apply to that audit. And those rules are somewhat new.  First, the notice itself was not sent by mail, but instead by email – the first time that email has been used to deliver the notice of an EEO audit.  Some broadcasters who received the email seemed surprised and wondered if the email really was an official FCC communication, so the FCC included verification methods in the letter including a link to the Public Notice.  So, if you are listed on the Public Notice, you are subject to the audit.

Second, the procedure for responding to the audit is different.  No longer does the broadcaster subject to the audit have to submit paper copies of all of its documents to the FCC through the FCC Secretary’s office.  Instead, the response will be filed in the station’s online public file.  The response must be uploaded to the online public file by April 12.  There, the FCC can review that response (as can anyone else anywhere, at any time, as long as they have an internet connection).  The audit requires that the broadcaster submit their last two EEO Public File Reports (which should already be in the online public file) and backing data to support the outreach efforts.  Broadcasters subject to the audit should carefully review the audit letter to see the details of the filing.
Continue Reading The First EEO Audit of 2018 With a New Wrinkle – Notifications by Email and Responses Submitted Through the Online Public File

March is one of those months where without the Annual EEO Public File Reports that come up for different states every other month, or without the Quarterly Issues Programs List and Children’s Television Report obligations that arise following the end of every calendar quarter. But this March has two very significant deadlines right at the beginning of the month – Online Public Files for radio and Biennial Ownership Reports – that will impose obligations on most broadcasters.

For radio stations, March 1 is the deadline for activating your online public inspection file. While TV stations and larger radio clusters in the Top 50 markets have already made the conversion to the online public file, for radio stations in smaller markets, the requirement that your file be complete and active is Thursday. As we wrote here, there are a number of documents that each station should be uploading to their file before the deadline (including Quarterly Issues Programs Lists and, if a station is part of an employment unit with 5 or more full-time employees, Annual EEO Public Inspection File Reports). As the FCC-hosted online public file date-stamps every document entered into the file, and as the file can be reviewed by anyone at anytime from anywhere in the world, stations need to be sure that they are timely uploading these documents to the file, as who knows who may be watching your compliance with FCC requirements. And this is not the only big obligation for broadcasters coming up in March.
Continue Reading March Regulatory Dates for Broadcasters – Including Online Public File for Radio and Biennial Ownership Reports, Effective Date of ATSC 3.0, Comments on TV National Ownership and Media Modernization, and GMR Extension

At its meeting yesterday, the FCC adopted a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking suggesting the abolition of the EEO Mid-Term Report, FCC Form 397. That form is filed at the mid-point of the renewal term of TV stations with 5 or more full-time employees and radio clusters with 11 or more full-time employees (see our post here about the form). As the content of the report is principally made up of the broadcaster’s last two EEO Public Inspection File Reports, and those reports are available in a broadcasters online public inspection file (which should be in place for virtually all broadcast stations when the final radio stations covert to the online public file next week, see our post here), the FCC concluded that there is no real reason that these reports need to be separately submitted, and thus proposed its elimination.

The Notice of Proposed Rulemaking did suggest that there were issues on which comments would be appropriate. The one bit of information that would not be readily available without the filing of the Form 397 would be which TV stations have 5 full-time employees and which radio clusters have more than 11 full-timers. That is important as Congress required the mid-term review of the EEO performance of stations meeting these employment thresholds. So the FCC asks how that information should be tracked. It is also noteworthy that the FCC will continue to conduct the EEO mid-term review of stations meeting these employment thresholds even without the filing of the Form 397 reports.
Continue Reading Another Media Regulation Modernization Proposal – Abandon the Form 397 EEO Mid-Term Report (Though Maintain the EEO Performance Review)

Last week, a US District Court Judge in the influential Southern District of New York issued an opinion finding that the fact that a picture of New England Patriot quarterback Tom Brady that was displayed on the websites of a number of media defendants was potentially infringing – even though the photo was not copied by the website owners and hosted on their servers. Instead, the photo was “embedded” on the websites and actually came from Twitter where it was hosted on servers maintained by that company. The Judge determined that because the photo automatically showed up on the defendants’ websites when those sites were visited by members of the public and appeared to visitors to be an integrated part of their websites, the mere fact that the photo was not hosted on the servers of the defendants, but instead on the server of Twitter, was not enough to provide a defense to the claim that the defendants had displayed the content without permission of the copyright holder. The right to “display” a copyrighted work is an exclusive right given to the copyright holder under Section 106 of the Copyright Act, meaning that the copyrighted work cannot be displayed without the permission of the copyright holder. As we wrote here, here and here, there have been many cases where photographers have sued broadcasters and other media companies for posting photos on their websites or even on their social media feeds without permission.

It had been widely accepted for the last decade that website owners were safe from copyright liability if they merely embedded content that was served from another site (e.g. social media sites like Twitter or YouTube) as contrasted to actually hosting the content on the website owner’s own server. This feeling of security stemmed from a case last decade where the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals made the distinction between hosting content and merely linking to content on another site. In that case, the Perfect 10 case, the defendant hosted an image search site with thumbnail images of pictures (the thumbnails hosted on the site of the defendant), and when a visitor to the site clicked on the thumbnails, the image was expanded by launching the image on the hosting site. In that case, because the large photos that were displayed when the user clicked on the thumbnails were hosted on the plaintiff’s site, the defendant was not found to be infringing for displaying those larger photos. The Judge in last week’s case found some striking differences in the use of an embedded Twitter photo case that, she said, made clear that there should be no clear safe harbor from liability simply because the image was hosted on a site not owned by the defendants in this case.
Continue Reading Court Finds That Embedded Twitter Photo on Website May Subject Website Owner to Copyright Liability – Be Careful What You Post

One of the first proposals in Chairman Pai’s initiative for the modernization of media regulation (see our post here from when the Chairman announced the initiative) was to repeal an FCC rule that many did not even know was a rule – one requiring that broadcasters who have secondary licenses maintain a paper copy of…

Note, for all of you who are trying to complete your Biennial Ownership Reports that are due for commercial and noncommercial stations on March 2 (see our post here about the March 2 filing date), the FCC yesterday posted a notice on the log-in screen for its LMS electronic database, in which the ownership …

As we wrote here, MMTC (a DC-based public interest group) had petitioned the US Court of Appeals for a Rehearing on its decision (about which we wrote here) upholding the FCC decision deciding not to impose any multilingual EAS obligations on broadcasters.  The full Court of Appeals has just issued a one …

On a day when the rest of the country is thinking about chocolate and Champagne, many radio stations need to be considering the FCC requirement that their public inspection file be made available online in a system hosted by the FCC. From the calls I have received in the last few days, it appears…

FCC Commissioner Michael O’Rielly today released a statement announcing that Chairman Pai has requested that he lead an effort to review the FCC’s “KidVid” rules – the rules that govern the amount of educational and informational programming that each broadcast station is required to air to meet the needs of children. Commissioner O’Rielly recently…