Discussion of FCC, copyright, advertising and other legal issues of importance to radio and television broadcasters and other media companies
Principal Editor: David O’Connor
Here are some of the regulatory developments of significance to broadcasters from the past week, with links to where you can go to find more information as to how these actions may affect your operations.
October is, on paper, another busy month of regulatory deadlines for broadcasters. But there is again the looming possibility of a federal government shutdown beginning October 1 if Congress fails to fund the government for the coming year (or pass a “continuing resolution” to allow government agencies to function at their current levels). While as of today there are reports of a plan to extend funding through December, until a continuing resolution is passed, the threat remains. If a shutdown does occur, the FCC, the FTC, and the Copyright Office may have to pause their operations which may result in some of the regulatory deadlines discussed below being delayed. However, in some cases agencies have leftover funding to keep them functioning for a few extra days. Stay tuned to see if any of the dates below have to be rescheduled. [Update – 9/26/2024, 9:00 AM – a continuing resolution extending government funding through December 20 was passed late yesterday by both the House and the Senate averting, for now, the shutdown about which we were concerned. Thus, the deadlines listed below are in effect as scheduled]
Assuming this recurring issue is resolved, let’s look at some of the October dates and deadlines, starting with the routine dates of importance to broadcasters. October 1 is the deadline for radio and television station employment units in Alaska, American Samoa, Florida, Guam, Hawaii, Iowa, Missouri, Northern Mariana Islands, Oregon, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Washington with five or more full-time employees to upload their Annual EEO Public File Report to their stations’ Online Public Inspection Files. A station employment unit is a station or cluster of commonly controlled stations serving the same general geographic area having at least one common employee. For employment units with five or more full-time employees, the annual report covers hiring and employment outreach activities for the prior year. A link to the uploaded report must also be included on the home page of each station’s website, if the station has a website. Be timely getting these reports into your station’s OPIF, as even a single late report can lead to FCC fines (see our article here about a recent $26,000 fine for a single late EEO report).Continue Reading October 2024 Regulatory Dates for Broadcasters – Quarterly Issues Programs Lists, Annual EEO Public File Reports, ETRS Form One, Comment Deadlines, and More
Here are some of the regulatory developments of significance to broadcasters from the past week, with links to where you can go to find more information as to how these actions may affect your operations.
Our recent posts have been obsessed with the FCC’s regulatory fees and the issues with the CORES fee filing system miscomputing the fees for many radio stations (an issue that seemingly has now been resolved so that payments can be made by the September 26 deadline). In doing so, we have minimized our coverage of some of the other interesting decisions and regulatory activity from the FCC and other agencies that affect broadcasters. One of those actions involved the proposal of a now-silent AM station to move from the small Alabama community of Bay Minette, Alabama to another small Alabama community, Spanish Fork. The Commission issued a letter saying that they could not grant the application as the proposal would move the station from a rural area to a community within an urbanized area – the Fairhope-Daphne urbanized area. The FCC found that this move would violate the FCC’s rural radio policy unless a showing could be made that there were public interest reasons to rebut the application of the policy in this case. The letter gave the applicant 30 days to attempt to rebut the presumption against the move.
The rural radio policy was adopted more than a decade ago to, in theory, preserve program diversity in rural areas by restricting the move of radio stations into more urbanized areas through community of license changes. The policy restricts rural stations from changing their city of license to a location from which the station could place a principal city contour over 50% of any urbanized area (see our articles here and here for more details on this policy). As the proposed move in the Alabama case would allow the AM to cover more than 50% of the Fairhope-Daphne urbanized area with its proposed new 2 mv/m contour, the change would be prohibited unless a special showing can be made overcoming the presumption against such moves, even though the move would allow the AM station to cover over 250,000 more people than it currently does. The Commission notes that it also disfavors removing a second local service (a service licensed to a particular community) from a community of over 7,500 people. As Bay Minette has over 7,500 people, and the town has only one other existing radio station, the move of the AM station would also run afoul of this policy. These presumptions are very difficult, if not impossible, to overcome absent some showing that the FCC’s technical analysis is incorrect. Continue Reading FCC Applies Rural Radio Policy to Block Move of Silent AM Station to New City of License – Do We Still Need a Rural Radio Policy?
Here are some of the regulatory developments of significance to broadcasters from the past week, with links to where you can go to find more information as to how these actions may affect your operations.
Here are some of the regulatory developments of significance to broadcasters from the past two weeks, with links to where you can go to find more information as to how these actions may affect your operations.
It seems like virtually every panel at every broadcast and media convention, at some point, ends up involving a discussion of Artificial Intelligence. Sessions on AI are filled to capacity, and sessions unrelated to the topic seem to have to mention AI to appear relevant. Whenever there is a topic that so thoroughly takes over the conversation in the industry, we lawyers tend to consider the legal implications. We’ve written several times about AI in political ads (see, for instance, our articles here, here and here). We will, no doubt, write more about that subject (including addressing further action in the FCC’s proceeding on this subject about which we wrote here, on the Federal Election Commission’s pending action on its separate AI proceeding, consideration of which was again postponed at its meeting last week, and on bills pending in Congress to address AI in political advertising).
We’ve also written about concerns when AI is used to impersonate celebrities and to create music that too closely resembles copyrighted recordings (see, for instance, our articles here and here). When looking for new creative ways to entertain your audience, a broadcaster may be tempted to use AI’s ability to have a celebrity “say” something on your station by generating their voice with some form of AI. As we noted in our previous articles, celebrities have protected interests in their identity in many states, and there has been much recent activity, caused by the advent of easily accessible generative AI that can impersonate anyone, to broaden the protections for the voice, image, and other recognizable traits of celebrities. A federal NO FAKES Act has also been introduced to give individuals more rights in their voice and likeness. So being too creative with the use of AI can clearly cause concerns.Continue Reading Using Artificial Intelligence in Developing Broadcast Programming – Watch for Legal Issues
It is time for our update on the coming month’s regulatory dates and deadlines to which broadcasters should be paying attention – and the deadline that probably is most important to all commercial broadcasters is not yet known. That, of course, is the deadline for the payment of annual regulatory fees – which must be made before the federal government’s October 1 start of the new fiscal year. We expect an announcement of the final decision on the amount of those fees for various broadcasters, and the deadlines for payment, in the next few days. Keep on the alert for that announcement.
A second big date for all commercial broadcasters is September 6, when the lowest unit rate period for political candidate advertising – the “political window” – opens for the November 5 general election. During this 60-day period prior to the general election, legally qualified candidates buying advertising on a broadcast station get the lowest rate for a spot that is then running on the station within the same class of advertising time and in the same daypart (see our article here on the basics of computing LUR). Candidates also get the benefit of all volume discounts without having to buy in volume – i.e., the candidate gets the same rate for buying one spot as the station’s most favored advertiser gets for buying hundreds of spots of the same class. For a deeper dive on how to prepare for the November general election, see our post, here, which also includes a link to our comprehensive Political Broadcasting Guide. Continue Reading September 2024 Regulatory Dates for Broadcasters – FCC Regulatory Fees, LUC Window for the General Election, Comment Deadlines on AI in Political Advertising and More
Here are some of the regulatory developments of significance to broadcasters from this past week, with links to where you can go to find more information as to how these actions may affect your operations.
Here are some of the regulatory developments of significance to broadcasters from this past week, with links to where you can go to find more information as to how these actions may affect your operations.
