November 2014

Big Four Affiliates Challenge Parts of Incentive Auction

The Big Four network TV affiliate associations all asked the Federal Communications Commission to revise the incentive spectrum auction framework before it holds the auction -- now sometime in early 2016 -- saying that, if left uncorrected, it would hurt stations and the public.

They have bones to pick with the repacking and reimbursement parts of the order. Most are things they had asked for but were not in the order when it was released in May. The petition described them as "limited" asks, but they were big ones. Those include not repacking any more stations than can be compensated with the $1.75 billion fund Congress has set aside for moving expenses; allow for reimbursement of expenses of stations not moving but related to the move. "Congress did not intend for television stations to subsidize the costs of reallocating spectrum to other wireless uses," they said, pointedly, in their petition. And if the FCC does not treat that $1.75 as a budget, it should require winning wireless bidders to make up the difference. They also want the FCC to reconsider some of the hard deadlines for applications, construction and transition; complete international spectrum coordination with Canada and Mexico before the auction, consider bagging the variable band plan and going with the national plan broadcasters advocated, rethink "rigid" broadcaster consumer education requirements about new channel assignments -- they argue stations will have plenty of marketplace incentive to let viewers know where they are, and rethink its use of the TVStudy software in calculating TV station interference and coverage areas.

Why You Can’t Copyright an API

[Commentary] It’s a basic fact of copyright law that you can’t copyright methods or procedures for doing things. You might be able to copyright particular expressions for things -- like an evocative description of how to combine and prepare ingredients in a recipe -- but you can’t copyright the basic facts behind it -- the ingredients, their amounts, and the order in which you combine them. The same is true of blank accounting forms, the rules of games, or any other situation where you need a set of structures in order to interface with an underlying system. What you’re doing is creating a set of ideas of how to interact with a system, and ideas in themselves aren’t copyrightable. You might copyright the book on accounting that contains your blank forms and explains them; you might copyright the booklet that contains your particular description of the rules of your new board game. But the underlying ideas that those things describe -- the forms and the rules -- can be used by others without your permission. The same thing should be true for APIs.

FBI director defends impersonation of AP reporter

The director of the FBI defended an agent's actions in impersonating an Associated Press reporter to track down a suspect -- a tactic criticized by the news agency as "unacceptable."

In a letter to the New York Times, FBI Director James Comey said the deception had occurred in 2007, as the agency tried to solve a series of bomb threats and cyberattacks directed at a high school in the Seattle area. And he rebuffed criticism of the agency's methods, saying, "We do use deception at times to catch crooks, but we are acting responsibly and legally."

The Budget Mobile Era Arrives

Seven years after the introduction of the iPhone, mobile devices are closer to commodities than novelties. Call it the end of the beginning of the mobile revolution, an inevitable transition in which people start to give up on the grand (and expensive) experiment of tacking new gadgets onto their lives at regular intervals.

We now know exactly where PCs are invaluable and where the usefulness of smartphones and tablets begins and ends. As a result, mobile prices are falling, and manufacturers are competing most fiercely at the bottom. “We are seeing the top of the market start to contract, with all the growth happening on the low end,” says Ryan Reith, program director of research firm IDC. The features that used to distinguish new releases -- such as processor speed and screen quality -- are becoming more standard across the industry, pushing prices down further.

You might not need a mobile carrier by 2020

Wi-Fi is ubiquitous.

No longer the realm of coffee shops and homes, Wi-Fi spans entire neighborhoods. Trains, planes and automobiles are Wi-Fi equipped. Cruise ships have Wi-Fi. Comcast has even made every customer's router into a public Wi-Fi hotspot. That's good news if you're a cell phone user. The more you email, watch Netflix, stream Pandora and surf Facebook over Wi-Fi, the fewer gigabytes you have to buy from your cell phone company. Plus, calls and texts are now able to be sent over Wi-Fi, too. Broadband customers that actively use Wi-Fi on a regular basis save more than $30 per month on their wireless bill, according to a Macquarie Group survey.

So what do you need your cell phone company for?

Forget the Candidates! The Real 2016 Campaign Is Between Old and New Media

As the dust settles on the GOP's midterms triumph, the obvious question presents itself: how soon until the media kicks into high gear for 2016 coverage. TV news networks, digital, and print outlets have already spent plenty of time on the “who's angling” for the 2016 question, looking both at potential candidates’ brand building and fundraising positioning. And surely, by early 2015, when the lame duck session of Congress is over -- barring big breaking news domestically or abroad -- full-throttle “who's running” will begin. Scratch that -- it has already started the day after the midterms. Part of the rush to cover a contest two years away is practicality -- and in some cases laziness. It's easy to fill TV news shows, digital sites, and newspapers with never-ending stories about Chris Christie visiting Iowa; Rand Paul vs. Ted Cruz; all things Hillary; will Elizabeth Warren play spoiler; can another Bush win, and on and on we go.

But aside from who will run, grab their party's nomination, and become the 45th president, there's another important competition with economic, social, and cultural implications. The media's intensified battle for eyeballs.

Disney Downplays a la Carte Plans as ESPN Preps OTT Services

Walt Disney chief Bob Iger likes experimenting with digital platforms, yet while ESPN -- one of Disney’s biggest moneymakers -- is getting ready to launch over-the-top services to stream more sports programming, don’t expect the move to lead to Disney backing a la carte options for its cable channels anytime soon. “We’re well-positioned to go direct to the consumer if the marketplace demands it, but we don’t feel a need to do that now,” Iger said. In fact, Iger has no interest in breaking up the bundles of channels it currently offers through cable and satellite services.

Taylor Swift on Why She's Paddling Against the Streams

A Q&A with Taylor Swift.

Asked about pulling her music off of Spotify she says, “If I had streamed the new album, it's impossible to try to speculate what would have happened. But all I can say is that music is changing so quickly, and the landscape of the music industry itself is changing so quickly, that everything new, like Spotify, all feels to me a bit like a grand experiment. And I'm not willing to contribute my life's work to an experiment that I don't feel fairly compensates the writers, producers, artists, and creators of this music. And I just don't agree with perpetuating the perception that music has no value and should be free.”

Bono: Don't blame Spotify

First Jimmy Buffett asked Spotify founder Daniel Ek for “a raise.” Then Taylor Swift pulled all her music from the music streaming service. Now, Bono is riding to Spotify’s defense.

“The real enemy is not between digital downloads or streaming. The real fight is between opacity and transparency,” he said at the Web Summit in Dublin, Ireland. “The music business has historically involved itself in quite considerable deceit,” Bono said. By opacity, Bono was referring to the smoke screen that artists and rights-holders encounter in trying to determine the royalties they are owed when their works are played or performed.

Let ISPs lock their customers into longer contracts, new EU digital economy chief suggests

The European Union’s new digital economy commissioner, Günther Oettinger, has already made the dubious claim that big telecoms providers need to make more money following his predecessor’s focus on improving things for consumers. Now we know one way he intends to make this happen.

Oettinger said that he wants to make it harder for people to switch ISP, so as to encourage ISPs to invest more in network-building. He said this would require discussion with regulators (no kidding) but “we need to increase the profitability of such investments by prohibiting changing suppliers for a certain time.” “I’m not talking about monopolies forever, but for several years, in which one has planning security as an investor,” he said, adding that similar rules apply in the energy industry.

Benton

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