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The National Association of Broadcasters has filed the initial brief in its challenge to the Federal Communications Commission's June decision that, as of December, cable operators no longer have to provide both an analog and digital versions of must-carry TV station signals.

In August, the FCC denied NAB's request for a stay of the viewability/dual carriage decision. NAB argues that millions of viewers would lose access to broadcast stations "providing foreign language, religious and other niche broadcast programming that have historically opted for 'must-carry' on cable systems." NAB then asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to review that decision. NAB says that decision was arbitrary, capricious and does not square with congressional intent -- in the 1992 Cable Act -- that must-carry signals have to be viewable without added equipment, "not merely available in theory."

A jury acquitted a Florida photojournalist who was arrested on January 31 while documenting the eviction of Occupy Miami protesters.

The police accused Carlos Miller, author of a popular blog about the rights of photojournalists, of disobeying a lawful police order to clear the area. But another journalist testified he had been standing nearby without incident. After Miller's January arrest, the police confiscated his camera and deleted some of his footage, including video documenting his encounter with the police. That may prove to be an expensive mistake. Miller was able to recover the footage, which proved helpful in winning his acquittal. He says his next step will be to file a lawsuit charging that the deletion of the footage violated his constitutional rights.

[Commentary] Most of us already live in a world where voice minutes are moot. But what about a world where international long-distance costs don’t matter, or phone numbers are rendered completely irrelevant? All of these are relics of the circuit-switched copper phone network, and if AT&T gets its way those things could all go by the wayside.

We’ll enter the VoIP future and drag everyone who isn’t already making Skype calls or subscribing to digital voice lines with us. But before we can move forward there are several issues that must be dealt with — from broadband and VoIP access for all to the role of the FCC, which will have to fight for relevance and regulatory power in an all-IP world. And if you think that the world has already gone VoIP, you’re wrong. The Federal Communications Commission counted 192 million circuit-switched lines in 2001. By mid-2011,there were still 112 million lines. Because of the prevalence of the original network, most calls made still touch the original copper network at some point. Even your cell phone calls.

Roughly six months after the Commercial Mobile Alert System (CMAS) – a free, national alert system that sends emergency notifications to the public via their mobile phone during emergencies – went live, alert messages were sent out during superstorm Sandy, which swept across the eastern seaboard in late October.

Despite damages caused by Sandy, however, some experts said CMAS was ultimately successful during the storm. CMAS is the interface to the Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) service that wireless phone carriers began rolling out earlier this year, and according to confirmations from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the National Weather Service, messages were sent out to people located in Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine when Sandy hit the East Coast. The WEA alerts, which appear in the form of a 90-character or less SMS message, function as a point-to-multipoint system; like a radio broadcast, the messages are sent to individuals in a target-specific area, whereas text messages aren’t location aware, according to the CTIA - The Wireless Association. What this means is that individuals who may be from the East Coast but were not physically in the storm-affected areas when alerts were being sent would not have received the messages.