June 2012

The chairman of the Federal Trade Commission called the Washington attorney hired by the agency to help determine possible antitrust action against Google a "world-class litigator" and said it is still examining the case. Chairman Jon Leibowitz said the recent hiring of former Justice Department prosecutor Beth Wilkinson gives the FTC some ammunition to go up against Google's high-powered legal team, but said the commission is still gathering evidence to see if there is a case.

At the close of a two-day hearing to determine whether TV broadcasters will prevail on a motion for a preliminary injunction against Barry Diller's Aereo, a judge made no explicit indication of which way she is leaning. That said, one thing is clear from two days of testimony and arguments: If the Internet broadcaster survives, the revolution in how content is televised will be traced back to Aug. 4, 2008.

As the parties made closing arguments for and against an injunction, the potential impact of this case became apparent: It's huge. And to borrow the word used by New York Federal Court Judge Alison Nathan, what was being presented before her was "slippery." To understand why, consider that in 1984, in the famous Sony Betamax case at the U.S. Supreme Court, the VCR got legal blessing. Nearly a quarter-century later -- Aug. 4, 2008, to be exact -- remote-storage DVRs received a similar stamp of approval from the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in the so-called Cablevision decision. In that case, the appellate division ruled that "because each RS-DVR playback transmission is made to a single subscriber using a single unique copy produced by that subscriber, we conclude that such transmissions are not performances 'to the public,' and therefore do not infringe any exclusive right of public performance."

Now consider for a second what happens if someone builds a system where a DVR-type device captures an over-the-air TV signal and transmits it to a single subscriber over the Internet. What if the subscriber is able to "play back" the "copy" of the recording "contemporaneous" with the original live transmission?

With his career in the balance, Culture Minister Jeremy Hunt said at a judicial inquiry into the British media that he had been personally sympathetic to a bid by Rupert Murdoch to take over Britain’s most lucrative pay-television network, but that he did not act with improper bias.

Hunt, 45, was responsible for overseeing the regulatory processes for the $12 billion bid for the 61 percent of the British Sky Broadcasting network, or BSkyB, that Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation did not already own, and held the ultimate authority to approve it. Last July, Murdoch withdrew the bid amid widespread outrage over the phone hacking scandal, which has enveloped two newspapers in Murdoch’s British stable and shaken his global media empire. At the inquiry, headed by Lord Justice Sir Brian Leveson, Hunt faced intense questioning over e-mails, phone calls, text messages and other communications with Murdoch, his son James and News Corporation executives that suggested he was sympathetic to the bid. Confronted with the cascade of supportive communications that flowed between his office and a Murdoch lobbyist — and in one case, with James Murdoch himself — Hunt admitted that he had strongly favored the takeover but insisted that he had set aside his own bias when taking on the “quasi-judicial” decision.