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Last week, Aaron Burstein of our law firm and I conducted a webinar for several state broadcast associations on legal issues in digital and social media advertising. As broadcasters become more active in the digital world, whether it be through social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, or by posting their content online through…

May is one of those months where there are neither deadlines for EEO Public File Reports nor for any of the quarterly filings of issues/programs lists and children’s television reports. But the lack of these routine filing deadlines does not mean that there are no dates of interest in the coming month to broadcasters and other media companies. As seemingly is the case every month, there are never times when Washington is ignoring legal issues potentially affecting the industry.

May 10 brings an FCC meeting where two items of interest to broadcasters will be considered. One is a proposal to abolish the requirement for posting licenses and other operating authorizations at a broadcaster’s control point and to eliminate the requirement that FM translators post information about the station’s licensee and a contact phone number at their transmitter sites (see our post here for more details). The second is a proposal to modify the processing of complaints about new or modified FM translators causing interference to existing stations. See our summary of that proposal here. If adopted at the May 10 meeting, these proposals will be available for public comment after they are published in the Federal Register.
Continue Reading May Regulatory Dates for Broadcasters – FCC Meeting, FM Translator and LPTV Filing Windows, Political Windows and More Consideration of Music Reforms

With the NAB Convention upon us, and much of the talk being centered on television issues including the repacking of the TV band after the incentive auction, the conversion to the next-generation of TV transmission as allowed by the new ATSC 3.0 transmission standard, and the effects of the FCC’s changes in the local television ownership rules and the reinstatement of the UHF discount in connection with the national ownership cap, it almost seems like radio is an afterthought. The FCC is considering some matters of interest to radio, including how to revitalize the AM band, and it has taken steps to revitalize individual AM stations through the use of FM translators. And the FCC is apparently considering changes in FM through the creation of a new class of C4 stations (see our post here). Yet, in recent ownership orders from the FCC, while TV ownership rules have been dramatically relaxed in the face of new video competition so that local TV owners can more robustly address their challengers, there were no corresponding changes in the radio rules. In the last ownership proceeding (which we summarized here), other than making changes to the embedded market rules (potentially affecting only radio stations in the suburbs of New York and Washington), and allowing ownership joint ownership of radio with TV and newspapers through the abolition of the cross-ownership rules that had limited or prohibited those combinations, radio ownership rules themselves have not been subject to any real changes in ownership limits since those limits were set in the wake of the 1996 Telecommunications Act. The FCC did make some changes early in this century when it adopted Arbitron (now Nielsen Audio) markets as the way in which competition in rated markets is defined, but the numbers of stations that one party can own has not changed since those numbers were established in the 1996 Act – even though Congress gave the FCC the authority to review and revise the rules to insure that they remained in the public interest.

While there have been no changes in the ownership rules for radio, think about the changes that have taken place in the competitive environment since 1996. At that point, streaming was something only a few technologically-forward people even knew existed. Pandora did not launch its streaming service for another decade, and Spotify was even further behind – not launching in the US until 2011. Even those few people who knew that audio streaming existed in 1996 would never have thought that they could listen to a streaming service in their cars. Apple was not offering a streaming music service – in fact it had not even introduced the iPod (introduced in 2001) or the iTunes store (2003) – both now about to become technological relics themselves because of technological changes. Given that there was no iPod, there were obviously no podcasts to bring audio storytelling to the millions who now listen to their favorite programming through the multitude of services that provide podcasts on almost any subject. There was no Alexa to bring Amazon and other music services into the home – in fact Amazon itself had only begun selling books online in 1995. Even Sirius XM (then Sirius and XM as two competing companies) had not initiated their services at the time of the 1996 Act – as XM did not start providing service to consumers for another 5 years (with Sirius launching a year later). And the pace of change for audio technology is not slowing.
Continue Reading What’s Next for the FCC’s Radio Ownership Rules? – Do Changes in the Audio Marketplace Justify Changes in Ownership Limits?

In recent weeks, I have had several calls from broadcasters asking if it was permissible to copy articles from other news sources and post them on the station website – with attribution to the original source. As I told them, posting content without permission of the copyright holder can lead to big problems. We have written about these issues in connection with the use of photos and video (see, for instance, our articles here, here and here), and recently even using embedded photos from a social media site have been called into question (see our article here). The copying of any substantial part of a news article raises the same issues as posting pictures or video found on the Internet onto your site. Such actions diminish the ability to of the content’s owner to profit from its own content. If someone can read a story on a broadcaster’s website, why would they need to go to the site of the originator of that content – even where attribution to the originating site (and even a link to that site) is given on the broadcaster’s site?

Years ago, there were many websites that would “aggregate” news by taking significant portions of news stories from other sites and make it available to the aggregator’s readers. There was a rash of lawsuits where content owners, including newspapers and others, claimed that aggregators using even a paragraph or two of the original story were infringing on their rights to their content. Content owners had real concerns about this aggregation sites, as a reader can usually get the gist of the story from the introductory paragraphs and, even when the aggregator provided a link to the full story, the readers would be far less likely to go to the full story when they had already been given its substance. Today, to avoid these lawsuits, most such news aggregators provide at most a headline (and sometimes even the headline can be creative enough to pose a copyright risk if run on an aggregator’s site – so just a generic paraphrase of that headline is often used), and at most a very brief description of the story on the originating site – a description that only directs the users of the aggregator site to the originating site and does not use any of the originating story’s language or original reporting, e.g. a statement that “you can find a good story about Virginia’s collapse in the NCAA tournament in this story” or “for more developments on latest in the personnel changes in the Trump Administration, check out this story in the Washington Post.” Using more than this kind of generic referral is a risk, and fair use is no often going to be available as a defense.
Continue Reading Using Copyrighted Content on a Website – Including News Articles and Videos – Secure the Rights!

In December, we wrote about a proceeding initiated by the Copyright Office to review the reporting obligations of cable and satellite television systems related to the statutory license that permits those systems to carry the programming of local television stations.  Systems must report information including revenue and subscriber information that allow royalties to be computed. …

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

Recently, we wrote about a proceeding initiated by the Copyright Office to review the reporting obligations of cable and satellite television systems related to the statutory license that permits those systems to carry the programming of local television stations.  Systems must report information including revenue and subscriber information that allow royalties to be computed.  This…

Early this month, the Copyright Office released a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking dealing with two separate but related issues. First, it asks for comments on certain changes in the reporting that cable systems and satellite TV operators provide to the Copyright Office on the programming that they carry – information that is used to provide baseline information for the Copyright Royalty Board to use in its determinations on how the royalties paid by cable systems for the carriage of television stations are distributed to the programmers and content owners that provide programming to the stations.   While certainly the reporting of information used to distribute the royalties paid by cable and satellite for their compulsory license to carry the programming broadcast by TV stations is important, perhaps the more interesting portion of the Notice was the questions that it asked about the definition of a cable system – proposing to adopt the definition of cable systems that exclude Internet-based systems that has been reflected in recent court cases.

We have written about the issue of whether online platforms qualify for the compulsory license to carry television stations many times (see for instance our article here when the issue was first raised by Aereo), when services such as Aereo and FilmOn argued that they could carry television stations on their online platforms without specific consent from the stations as they qualified as cable systems.  These arguments have been consistently rejected by the Courts (see, for instance, our articles here and here) , most recently in the Spring when the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the one District Court decision that had found that the argument advanced by FilmOn had merit (see our summary of the Ninth Circuit decision here).  The Copyright Office proposes to adopt that definition.
Continue Reading What is a Cable System – The Copyright Office Wants to Know

The Copyright Office yesterday issued a “Final Reminder” to Internet Services that want to be able to assert that they are insulated from Copyright liability for content posted on their sites by third-parties.  Services need to be sure that they have used the Copyright Office’s new online system to the register the names…

While the end of the year is just about upon us, that does not mean that broadcasters can ignore the regulatory world and celebrate the holidays all through December. In fact, this will be a busy regulatory month, as witnessed by the list of issues that we wrote about yesterday to be considered at the FCC meeting on December 14. But, in addition to those issues, there are plenty of other deadlines to keep any broadcaster busy.

December 1 is the due date for all sorts of EEO obligations. By that date, Commercial and Noncommercial Full-Power and Class A Television Stations and AM and FM Radio Stations in Alabama, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Dakota, and Vermont that are part of an Employment Unit with 5 or more full-time employees need to place their Annual EEO Public File Reports into the public file (their online public file for TV stations and large-market radio and for those other radio stations that have already converted to the online public file). In addition, EEO Mid-Term Reports on FCC Form 397 are due to be filed at the FCC on December 1 by Radio Station Employment Units with 11 or more full-time employees in Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont; and Television Employment Units with five or more full-time employees in Colorado, Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota.  We wrote more about the Mid-Term EEO Report here.
Continue Reading December Regulatory Dates for Broadcasters – EEO, TV and Translator Filing Windows, Ancillary Revenue Reports, Main Studio Rule Effective Date, Copyright Office Take-Down Notice Registration and More