The TVStudy software is necessary to conduct the incentive auction and Sinclair lacks standing to challenge the repacking process, the FCC said in a legal brief filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in response to Sinclair and NAB’s petition for review against the incentive auction order. The congressional requirement that the FCC use the OET-69 methodology is not violated by the commission’s plan to use TVStudy, the FCC said in response to NAB. “Software and data are not methodology,” the agency said. The commission also responded to NAB’s argument that the order violated its legislative mandate by failing to preserve broadcast contours. The order preserves the coverage area and populations served of repacked stations by trying to ensure that a station's signals after the auction will reach “substantially the same geographic area at the same signal strength” and the same viewers as it did before, the FCC said. Sinclair, separate from NAB, challenged the FCC’s 39-month deadline for stations to cease broadcasting on their old channels after the auction. However, since Sinclair doesn’t yet know if it has stations that will be affected by the repacking, it doesn’t have standing to challenge that aspect of the rule, the FCC said. FCC rules give new licensees 36 months to build a new station, the FCC said. “The modifications that existing stations will have to make to their facilities following the auction are, at worst, no more complicated than those faced by new licensees constructing new stations,” the commission said. The petitions for review should be denied, the FCC said.

Copyright industries in the U.S. produced $1.1 trillion revenue in 2013, said a report released Wednesday by the International Intellectual Property Alliance. Copyright revenue was 6.71 percent of the U.S. economy overall in 2013, it said. “Core” copyright industries employed almost 5.5 million people, more than 4 percent of the U.S. workforce, said IIPA. The average earnings of those employees were 34 percent higher than other U.S. workers, it said.

The FCC should update its rules to promote competition among set-top devices that integrate pay-TV content with over-the-top services, said former FCC General Counsel Austin Schlick in an ex parte filed on Google's behalf Monday in docket 10-91. He said the FCC “should promote development of open, standard protocols that allow for devices that let consumers fully benefit from their [multichannel video programming distributor] subscriptions while integrating content accessed from the Internet.” Such rules would allow consumers to use “lower-cost or technically superior” devices and encourage innovation that “has yet to develop for navigation devices,” Schlick said. The FCC should create "open, standard protocols" for navigation devices that have "industry wide applicability," said the filing.

The FCC issued a second Further NPRM on closed caption quality standards, seeking comment on ways to make video programmer contact information readily available to video programming distributors and others in order to resolve captioning problems. Since the commission's previous captioning quality notice proposed making both programmers and distributors responsible for caption quality, the FCC is seeking comment “on requiring video programmers to file contact information and certifications of captioning compliance” with the FCC, the notice said. The second Further NPRM also seeks comment on whether VPDs should be required to alert programmers that they must provide certification of caption quality to the FCC, the notice said.

NBCUniversal is launching a broad marketing effort to promote its TV Everywhere offering, the company said in a news release Tuesday. Using the tagline “Watch TV without the TV” and associated hashtag #TVwithoutTHETV, the campaign will include “a digital and on-air cross-portfolio promotional activation” Dec. 26 to Jan. 1, said the broadcast and cable programmer. The campaign will begin with a digital media push and highlight all of NBCUniversal's TV networks and their respective apps, it said. That includes Bravo, E!, NBC News, Syfy and USA, said the unit of Comcast.

A torrent search version of The Pirate Bay website was posted online Monday after being shut down by Swedish police last week (see 1412100031), said a tweet by isoHunt, a peer-to-peer file sharing and search site. The Pirate Bay site thanked its users, saying, “We really appreciate all your efforts to help us save the Freedom of information on the Internet.” A Swedish court found some of The Pirate Bay's operators guilty of mass copyright infringement in 2006. IsoHunt didn’t comment.

Yahoo completed the purchase of BrightRoll, whose approximately 400 employees will continue working on digital video advertising, said Yahoo in a news release Monday. It said BrightRoll is expected to have 2014 revenue above $100 million, and the deal makes Yahoo the No. 1 U.S. video ad platform.

E-readers, whose primary purpose isn't advanced communications services, nonetheless are adding accessibility features, said a group of device makers seeking a longer waiver (see 1411120048) of FCC rules requiring accessibility. Improvements to "a number of products and services" show the commitment to accessibility by members of the waiver-extension-seeking Coalition of E-Reader Manufacturers, said that coalition in an ex parte letter posted Monday to docket 10-213. It responded to the National Federation of the Blind, which opposes a waiver extension, and other groups. The coalition said accessibility has been addressed by members including Amazon, which introduced the accessible Fire phone, and Sony, which developed entertainment access glasses with audio. Kobo is also a coalition member, and the group said the company has "maintained a number of accessibility features on its e-readers."

Online news publication Re/code should destroy, not publish, any information it might have related to the Sony Pictures Entertainment data breach, said Sony lawyer David Boies, chairman of law firm Boies, Schiller, in a letter Sunday. Boies said SPE would hold Re/code responsible for “damages or loss” stemming from the publication of the breached data. Rep. Marsha Blackburn said earlier this month that the SPE breach is another reason to pass her Secure It Act (HR-1468) (see 1412080061).

The FCC’s ruling that confidential programming contract and retransmission consent deal information would be available to parties involved in the AT&T/DirecTV and Comcast/Time Warner Cable transactions is “an abrupt and unexplained departure” from its prior policy, said content companies Monday in their initial brief on the matter before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. The FCC “disregarded its own past practice, judicial precedent, and the rights of entities like Petitioners,” said CBS, Univision, Viacom and the other programmers involved in the petition for review. The content companies want the court to vacate the portion of the Media Bureau’s Modified Confidentiality Orders that would make Video Programming Confidential Information available to parties to the mergers. Because of the scale of the deals, access to the contracts those companies are involved in would give the parties involved access to contract information “covering most of the major television markets in the United States,” NAB said Monday in an intervenor brief filed in support of the content companies. “The sheer size of the merging parties and the scope of their agreements exacerbate the risk of harm from disclosure to third parties of broadcasters’ negotiating strategies and contract terms with the five affected” multichannel video programming distributors, NAB said.