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Telecommunications
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June 25, 2024
Disney Must Face Trimmed ESPN Streaming Fee Antitrust Suit
A California federal judge on Tuesday threw out some antitrust claims in a sprawling proposed class action over Disney's ESPN livestreaming carriage agreements, although he permitted other portions of the suit to proceed, finding that consumers have adequately alleged Disney's actions could have hobbled competition.
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June 25, 2024
NFL Moves To Sack Commercial Class In Sunday Ticket Trial
An attorney for the NFL argued on the eve of closing arguments Tuesday that jurors shouldn't be allowed to consider damages for one of two plaintiff classes in a multibillion-dollar antitrust trial over the league's DirecTV Sunday Ticket television package.
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June 25, 2024
Google Says Epic's Play Store Changes Could Cost $137M
Google urged a California federal judge Monday to reject Epic Games' proposed Play Store remedies following Epic Games' antitrust jury trial win, arguing that the changes could cost up to $137 million plus ongoing maintenance costs and create new security risks while potentially harming Google's reputation.
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June 25, 2024
AT&T Says No Windfall From FirstNet Managing 4.9 GHz Band
AT&T is finally weighing in on the robust debate over whether the FCC should hand over control of the recently revamped 4.9 gigahertz public safety band to an entity with strong ties to the telecom behemoth, denying that it would get a "windfall" if the agency were to go through with it.
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June 25, 2024
Verizon To Pay $1M For Southeast 911 Outage, FCC Says
Verizon has agreed to pay just more than $1 million and follow a compliance plan after a December 2022 breakdown of 911 connectivity throughout the Southeast, the Federal Communications Commission said Tuesday.
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June 25, 2024
No Need To Ship Net Neutrality Appeals To DC, 6th Circ. Told
The Sixth Circuit should stand up to the "concerted effort" to push administrative law matters out of other appellate courts and into the D.C. Circuit by refusing to transfer a bundled set of challenges to the FCC's new net neutrality rules, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has said.
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June 25, 2024
FCC Says Anti-Redlining Rule 'Dutifully' Carries Out Law
The Federal Communications Commission has urged the Eighth Circuit to toss multiple industry challenges to its rules against discrimination in broadband deployment, saying its use of a wide-reaching standard for prohibited bias fits the law's requirements.
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June 25, 2024
Sinclair Accused Of Violating Video Privacy Law
Sinclair Inc. was hit with a lawsuit in Illinois state court Monday alleging it uses tracking technology to see which videos users watch on its tennis streaming service and target advertisements to them accordingly, in violation of the Video Privacy Protection Act.
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June 25, 2024
Noteholder Deal Spares Telecom WOM From Ch. 11 Dismissal
Chilean telecommunications company WOM told Delaware's bankruptcy court it reached a deal with a group of noteholders and the unsecured creditors committee to resolve their bid to dismiss the debtor's bankruptcy case.
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June 25, 2024
EU Opens Microsoft Case, Unappeased By Teams Unbundling
European Union antitrust authorities opened a formal complaint against Microsoft on Tuesday over the company's bundling of its Teams communications program with its Office 365 suites, calling out as insufficient the disconnection of the services Microsoft initiated last year to appease enforcers.
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June 24, 2024
Localities Redouble Effort To Block House Broadband Bill
The U.S. Conference of Mayors is leaning on Congress to abandon the American Broadband Deployment Act of 2023, saying the bill is trying to cut red tape for broadband permitting at the expense of local governments' control over their own territories.
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June 24, 2024
DC Circ. Affirms Verizon Win In Conspiracy Defamation Row
The D.C. Circuit upheld the toss of a conservative commentator's defamation suit over a Yahoo News podcast that covered the 2016 killing of a Democratic National Committee staffer and the conspiracy theories the homicide produced, ruling that the commentator's allegations fell short of the actual malice threshold.
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June 24, 2024
Harvard Prof Calls NFL Sunday Ticket 'Highly Anticompetitive'
A Harvard law professor testified Monday in a multibillion-dollar antitrust lawsuit over the NFL's Sunday Ticket that pooling teams' television rights into exclusive deals is not like Beyoncé having an exclusive music distributor — as an NFL expert testified — but like Beyoncé, Rihanna, Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish pooling rights.
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June 24, 2024
Apple, Amazon Assail Hagens Berman's Class Rep 'Charade'
Apple and Amazon.com blasted Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro LLP for trying to "have it both ways" in an antitrust suit over a pact between the companies restricting Amazon iPhone and iPad sales to approved vendors, arguing the firm cannot withdraw its original named plaintiff without forcing him to testify.
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June 24, 2024
Sirius XM Made Millions Off Hidden Royalty Fee, Suit Alleges
Sirius XM Radio Inc. has been tricking customers into paying an extra 21% every month by tacking a hidden "royalty fee" onto bills, according to a new proposed class action alleging that the fee is responsible for every bit of the company's profits for the last several years.
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June 24, 2024
Broadband Advocates Urge FCC To Revisit Subsidy Fees
Advocates for broadband expansion are asking the Federal Communications Commission to revisit an April decision that exempted internet service providers, at least for now, from contributions to the FCC's telecom subsidy program.
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June 24, 2024
AT&T Must Keep Basic Services Intact, Calif. Regulators Say
California regulators have required AT&T to maintain its commitment to basic phone service by denying its bid to withdraw as a "carrier of last resort," a decision that has prompted the company to pursue legislation that would maintain the designation only for rural communities that have limited options for telecom service.
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June 24, 2024
Catching Up With Delaware's Chancery Court
Amendments to Delaware's General Corporation Law topped the news out of the Court of Chancery again last week, as the hotly contested measure sailed through the state's legislature. Tesla and its shareholders continued their tug-of-war over attorney fees for Chancery litigation about Elon Musk's pay package, and new cases were filed involving biotechs, car rental companies, workout platforms, telecom towers, and a cargo ship fire in Brazil.
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June 24, 2024
Defense Contractor Gresham Inks $83M SPAC Merger
Defense contractor Gresham Worldwide Inc. and special-purpose acquisition company Ault Disruptive Technologies Corp. agreed Monday to merge in a deal that values Gresham at $83 million and enlarges the company's profile, steered by two law firms.
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June 24, 2024
High Court Passes On Religious Webcasters' Royalty Hike Suit
The U.S. Supreme Court refused Monday to review the federal Copyright Royalty Board's latest hike in royalty rates webcasters must pay to play audio recordings, turning away a radio trade group's appeal challenging one of the increases on religious freedom and administrative procedure grounds.
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June 21, 2024
Drug Cos., IP Attys Back Cellect In High Court Efforts
A petition by patent litigation outfit Cellect that is looking to persuade the U.S. Supreme Court to wade into a double patenting dispute has drawn support from even more lawyers as well as a handful of major drugmakers and small tech companies like Sonos.
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June 21, 2024
Google Ditches Wiretap Suit Over AI Customer Service Calls
A California federal judge has tossed, for now, a proposed class action accusing Google LLC of using a "human-like" customer service product powered by generative artificial intelligence to illegally eavesdrop on Verizon users' calls, finding that Google was exempt from liability because it was acting as Verizon's agent.
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June 21, 2024
SC Agency Asks 4th Circ. To Rethink Google Ad Subpoena
South Carolina's parks and tourism department wants the Fourth Circuit to reconsider its order mandating the agency turn over documents about its own online advertising efforts to Google to aid the tech behemoth in a fight against several states accusing it of monopolization.
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June 21, 2024
Ex-Trump Aide Must Face Hunter Biden's Data Hack Suit
A California federal judge has refused to toss Hunter Biden's lawsuit accusing a former Trump White House aide of obtaining and publishing emails and photos purportedly taken from his laptop, finding Biden sufficiently alleged the aide illegally accessed a "protected computer" defined under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
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June 21, 2024
Texas Fines Major Carriers $10.2M For Deceptive Advertising
Some of the nation's biggest mobile carriers — including AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon — have inked a $10 million deal with Texas to end the state's probe into what the Lonestar State says are the carriers' "deceptive and misleading" advertising practices.
Expert Analysis
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Opinion
A Telecom Attorney's Defense Of The Chevron Doctrine
The Chevron doctrine, which requires judicial deference to federal regulators, is under attack in two U.S. Supreme Court cases — and while most telecom attorneys likely agree that the Federal Communications Commission is guilty of overrelying on it, the problem is not the doctrine itself, says Carl Northrop at Telecommunications Law Professionals.
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Attorneys Have An Ethical Duty To Protect The Judiciary
The tenor of public disagreement and debate has become increasingly hostile against judges, and though the legislative branch is trying to ameliorate this safety gap, lawyers have a moral imperative and professional requirement to stand with judges in defusing attacks against them and their rulings, says Deborah Winokur at Cozen O'Connor.
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What Cos. Should Know About FTC's Proposed Junk Fee Rule
The Federal Trade Commission recently announced a notice of proposed rulemaking targeting junk fees and how businesses may advertise prices to consumers — and since it would give the agency powers to seek monetary penalties against businesses that do not comply, companies should look to get ahead now, say Phyllis Marcus and Nicole Johnson at Hunton Andrews.
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9th Circ. ERISA Ruling Informs DOL's New Fiduciary Proposal
The Ninth Circuit's reasoning in its recent Bugielski v. AT&T decision illustrates the importance of the U.S. Department of Labor's proposals to expand the reach of Employee Retirement Income Security Act third-party compensation disclosure rules and their effect on investment adviser fiduciaries, says Jeff Mamorsky at Cohen & Buckmann.
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AI Can Help Lawyers Overcome The Programming Barrier
Legal professionals without programming expertise can use generative artificial intelligence to harness the power of automation and other technology solutions to streamline their work, without the steep learning curve traditionally associated with coding, says George Zalepa at Greenberg Traurig.
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Why The Effect Of Vivint Has Been Minimal
A survey of recent ex parte reexamination decisions since the Federal Circuit’s 2021 In re: Vivint decision appears to support the court’s conclusion that the ruling was limited in scope and would have limited impact, says Yao Wang at Fish & Richardson.
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Preparing Law Students For A New, AI-Assisted Legal World
As artificial intelligence rapidly transforms the legal landscape, law schools must integrate technology and curricula that address AI’s innate challenges — from ethics to data security — to help students stay ahead of the curve, say Daniel Garrie at Law & Forensics, Ryan Abbott at JAMS and Karen Silverman at Cantellus Group.
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Series
ESG Around The World: South Korea
Numerous ESG trends have materialized in South Korea in the past three years, with impacts ranging from greenwashing prevention and carbon neutrality measures to workplace harassment and board diversity initiatives, say Chang Wook Min and Hyun Chan Jung at Jipyong.
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General Counsel Need Data Literacy To Keep Up With AI
With the rise of accessible and powerful generative artificial intelligence solutions, it is imperative for general counsel to understand the use and application of data for myriad important activities, from evaluating the e-discovery process to monitoring compliance analytics and more, says Colin Levy at Malbek.
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The Scope Of Challenged Claims After Fed. Circ. Sisvel Ruling
Joshua Weisenfeld at Sheppard Mullin considers the Federal Circuit's recent Sisvel v. Sierra decision and its impact on claim construction and post-issuance claim amendments that broaden the scope of challenged claims.
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Tips For Avoiding Disputes From M&A Earnout Provisions
Attorneys at Freshfields review key Delaware cases to outline several important considerations that may reduce the risk of an earnout dispute arising from a merger agreement and help the parties navigate disputes when they do occur.
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A Look At Successful Bid Protests In FY 2023
Attorneys at Sheppard Mullin look beyond the statistics in the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s recent annual report on bid protests, sharing their insights about nine categories of sustained protests, gained from reading every fiscal year 2023 decision in which the protester had a positive result.
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Trending At The PTAB: Administrative Procedure
A pair of recent Federal Circuit rulings on Patent Trial and Appeal Board inter partes review shed light on applications of the Administrative Procedure Act, adding to an ever-growing body of case law showing the board's final written decision must be based on arguments clearly put forth by the parties, say Robert High and Benjamin Saidman at Finnegan.
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Retailers: Beware Legislator And Regulator Junk Fee Focus
In light of the Biden administration’s recent focus on restricting so-called junk fee surcharges across industries, attorneys at Benesch discuss what retailers should know about several evolving developments, including a new California law, a proposed Federal Trade Commission rule, an expanding litigation landscape, and more.
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Navigating Discovery Of Generative AI Information
As generative artificial intelligence tools become increasingly ubiquitous, companies must make sure to preserve generative AI data when there is reasonable expectation of litigation, and to include transcripts in litigation hold notices, as they may be relevant to discovery requests, say Nick Peterson and Corey Hauser at Wiley.