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In the News
In the News

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    • CCIA filed a complaint to the FTC over unfair copyright warnings that it says mislead consumers on their right to fair use. CCIA President Ed Black said that these warnings created a “chilling effect”, deterring consumers from lawfully using copyrighted content, and that the FTC should investigate these companies and order copyright holders to cease making misleading warnings.

    • The FCC approved Chairman Kevin Martin's rules for the 700 MHz spectrum auction, adopting only two of the four principles of open access: open applications and open devices. In an article for the Huffington Post, Gigi wrote:

    “The FCC's failure to take this bolder step represents a tremendous missed opportunity that will have repercussions in the broadband market for years to come. While inevitably there will be lots of finger pointing, particularly at Chairman Kevin Martin, the plain fact is that save for a few enlightened souls like House Telecommunications and Internet Subcommittee Chairman Ed Markey (D-MA), Subcommittee member Chip Pickering (R-MS) and Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND), Congress did not give Chairman Martin the political cover he needed to propose a decision that would have made the telephone companies apoplectic and guaranteed years and years of litigation”

    • As part of a Congressional mandate for regular review, the FCC released 10 studies on media ownership. However, the Commission has given public interest groups only two months to comment on the findings, which according to Commissioners Copps and Adelstein, is not nearly enough time: “These are ten supposedly serious studies put together by teams of economists and analysts over an eight month period. One study alone contains over 13 million data points. Yet the Commission expects the public to analyze all ten studies, and reams of underlying data, and file comments 60 days from today!”

    • IP Watch has a summary of yesterday's House hearing on performance right royalties. According to ranking Republican Howard Coble (R-NC), advocates of a performance right make three arguments: first, that the exception to paying performers has no justification in copyright law, that the US Copyright Act currently requires Internet radio stations to pay a performance fee, that every other developed country compensates performers for on-air play. Opponents of the performance royalty used payola as evidence that performers and labels considered free air-time valuable enough to pay for it.

    • Verizon released its second quarter earnings report Monday, and it appears its FiOS fiber broadband subscriptions are way up. In just three months Verizon added 203,000 fiber broadband customers, for a total of 1.1 million FiOS users. 22% of the FiOS users upgraded from Verizon's DSL service. However, despite the strong showing, the US lags far behind in Fiber-To-The-Home connections. China has 47% of FTTH market share, Japan 35%, and Korea 8%. the US has only 3% of the world FTTH share.