Category: issues

Copyright Board Asks Supreme Court To Keep Royalty Rates It Set For Religious Stations.

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The Copyright Royalty Board is defending its rate setting decision-making to the U.S. Supreme Court where religious broadcasters are looking to overturn June 2021 decision in the so-called Web V proceeding that covers radio’s streaming royalties for 2021 to 2025. The CRB says it largely maintained the rate structure that has governed noncommercial radio webcasts since 2006, which has set significantly lower rates for noncommercial stations.

The National Religious Broadcasters Noncommercial Music License Committee has asked the Supreme Court to overturn the rates set by the CRB. It doubled the minimum fee for noncommercial webcasters to $1,000 per year for each station or channel. But that rate will go up if a station has a large online audience. The CRB says noncommercial operators will need to pay an additional $0.21 for every 100 songs streamed for all digital audio transmissions above 159,140 aggregate tuning hours in a month per station or channel. Those rates rose to $0.25 for every 100 songs on Jan. 1 under annual inflation adjustments.

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News Corp. and OpenAI strike ‘multi-year global partnership’ deal to use journalistic content to improve ChatGPT

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OpenAI and News Corp. on Wednesday announced a “multi-year global partnership” that will allow OpenAI to access current and archived articles from News Corp.’s outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch, Barron’s, The New York Post and more.

As part of the deal, OpenAI will be able to display content from News Corp.-owned outlets within its ChatGPT chatbot, in response to user questions. The startup will also be able to use News Corp.’s content “to enhance its products,” or, likely, to train its artificial intelligence models.

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NAB Says Multilingual EAS Alert Plan Could Do More Harm Than Good During Emergencies.

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The National Association of Broadcasters says a proposal to use pre-scripted alerts to help ensure non-English speakers are reached during an emergency could be more of a hindrance than a help. It is warning the execution could cause “further confusion” for non-English language audiences during an emergency, saying multilingual template EAS alerts will be “ineffective and confusing” as well as putting a new cost burden on broadcasters.

“The messages will have to be stripped of meaningful content to their essentials to be translated into pre-canned scripts in 13 different languages. No doubt, those pre-canned scripts will omit information and nuance that may be crucial to delivering an effective warning to the receiver,” NAB says in comments filed with the Federal Communications Commission.

The FCC is currently considering a proposal (PS Docket No. 15-94) that it says would help ensure that alerts reach the more than 26 million Americans with limited English-language proficiency. It would create an alert reservoir that stations could tap into during a disaster situation to deliver EAS alerts in 14 languages, including English and Spanish. The recordings would be stored in EAS devices, and the translated audio for each template would be provided as audio files or links to streaming audio.

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11 States Now Have Laws Limiting Artificial Intelligence, Deep Fakes, and Synthetic Media in Political Advertising – Looking at the Issues

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Artificial Intelligence was the talk of the NAB Convention last week.  Seemingly, not a session took place without some discussion of the impact of AI.  One area that we have written about many times is the impact of AI on political advertising.  Legislative consideration of that issue has exploded in the first quarter of 2024, as over 40 state legislatures considered bills to regulate the use of AI (or “deep fakes” or “synthetic media”) in political advertising – some purporting to ban the use entirely, with most allowing the use if it is labeled to disclose to the public that the images or voices that they are experiencing did not actually happen in the way that they are portrayed.  While over 40 states considered legislation in the first quarter, only 11 have thus far adopted laws covering AI in political ads, up from 5 in December when we reported on the legislation adopted in Michigan late last year.

The new states that have adopted legislation regulating AI in political ads in 2024 are Idaho, Indiana, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, and Wisconsin.  These join Michigan, California, Texas, Minnesota, and Washington State which had adopted such legislation before the start of this year.  Broadcasters and other media companies need to carefully review all of these laws.  Each of these laws is unique – there is no standard legislation that has been adopted across multiple states.  Some have criminal penalties, while others simply imposing civil liability.  Media companies need to be aware of the specifics of each of these bills to assess their obligations under these new laws as we enter this election season where political actors seem to be getting more and more aggressive in their attacks on candidates and other political figures.

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Baltimore Bridge Collapse Reinforces The Essential Need For Local Coverage

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Like so many of us, I awoke on Tuesday to the horrific news of the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge that acted as a major artery across Baltimore Harbor.

My first instinct was to turn to a national cable channel so that I could better understand the alerts humming across my phone. But as the morning wore on, I found myself turning to the local stations in Baltimore and watching and reading their superb coverage on their websites.

Not only do they have the local knowledge and self-interest that elevates their coverage well beyond anything a national network or cable news channel might provide, but they are able to go deeper on everything from the heroic search and rescue operations; the victims and their impacted families and colleagues; the presumed cause (likely a tragic accident caused by a powerless and thus rudderless cargo ship); efforts to stop the flow of traffic and keep a number of cars off the bridge before the tragedy; complete coverage of the official press conferences; the helicopter footage supplied to all of the major cable channels and alternative routes for those individuals for whom this bridge was their daily commute.

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FCC Requests 14.8% Increase in Regulatory Fee Authority

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The fiscal 2024 budget request asks for $448,075,000 in budget authority from regulatory fee offsetting collections

WASHINGTON, D.C.—The FCC has released a budgetary request for Fiscal Year (FY) 2025 that asks for $448,075,000 in budget authority from regulatory fee offsetting collections. This request represents an increase of $57,883,000 or 14.8 percent from the FY 2024 Annualized Continuing Appropriations Act level of $390,192,000.

If enacted by Congress, that could lead to higher fees for broadcasters, though the FCC has not explained how it would achieve the regulatory fee increases.

The FCC also requests $139,000,000 in budget authority for the Spectrum Auctions program. Last year Congress allowed the FCC’s authority to conduct auctions to expire and the FCC is currently pushing Congress to renew the authority.  As of December 31, 2023 the Commission’s spectrum auctions program has generated over $233.5 billion for government use; at the same time, the total cost of the spectrum auctions program has been less than $2.5 billion or 1.1 percent of the total auctions’ revenue, the FCC said.

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Experts: Social media outages unlikely to affect voting

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Election officials in multiple jurisdictions told PolitiFact the March 5 Meta outages outages did not affect voting.

It’s Election Day in November 2024. Across the U.S., voters are heading to the polls. And major social media platforms are not working.

The scenario could alarm voters and draw news organizations’ attention. But would it affect voting?

A similar incident played out March 5, when Meta platforms including Facebook, Instagram and Threads stopped working worldwide for about two hours. The outages happened on Super Tuesday, when voters in 16 states and one territory were casting their ballots in the presidential primary.

DownDetector, a website that tracks outages using methods including user-submitted reports, said that more than 500,000 Facebook outages and 79,000 Instagram outages were reported around 10:30 a.m Eastern Time.

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How Streamer NBC News Now Is Being Positioned as the Future of the Network’s News

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“We’re using the same studios, control rooms, and are treating it like one big production,” says EVP of Programming Janelle Rodriguez

Super Tuesday at 30 Rock in New York City was a bustling affair. The halls were buzzing with activity as producers, anchors and crew all across NBC readied their wall-to-wall coverage of a predictable yet important event. When all was said and done, a rematch of Donald Trump and Joe Biden was largely assured for the forthcoming presidential election. And if NBC News NOW’s approach to Super Tuesday — as the streaming home of NBC News — was any indication, they’re more than ready for the monumental election ahead.

NBC News NOW — which is a free streaming service distributed across more than 20 platforms — serves as a seamless extension of NBC’s linear programming, and that linear-to-streaming symbiosis is believed to be the key to NBC News’ future.

“The tradition of providing high-quality, free content is in the DNA of NBC and so it’s the future and the past, merged together,” executive vice president of programming Janelle Rodriguez told TheWrap.

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AM Act Gets 218th Voting Sponsor In US House, Ensuring Majority

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The AM For Every Vehicle Act has hit the magic number of voting co-sponsors needed to pass the legislation through the US House of Representatives. The House version of the bill, led by New Jersey Representative Josh Gottheimer, announced its 218th voting supporter.

The surge of four new co-sponsors came the same day that the NAB joined state broadcast associations to lobby for AM radio and other pressing broadcast policy issues – a huge victory for those who made the trip to Capitol Hill. The total number of sponsors now sits at 224, with four non-voting members of Congress among the ranks.

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Former FEMA Admin Gaynor: Where Cell Signals Fail, AM Is There

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Former acting Secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security Pete Gaynor is the latest official to speak out in favor of the AM For Every Vehicle Act, referencing growing nuclear danger overseas as well as recent domestic technological troubles.

The past administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency published an op-ed in The Hill discussing how the nationwide cellular blackout on February 22 underscored the vital importance of retaining AM as the cornerstone of the United States’ emergency infrastructure.

This incident, which left millions of Americans without cell service, led to first responders voicing concerns about the potential dangers posed by the lack of cell reception, particularly the inability of the public to reach emergency services. Gaynor says the vulnerability of cell towers and internet signals, especially during disasters, to both natural and man-made threats, including potential foreign cyber-attacks, was starkly illuminated.

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