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In a brief statement last week, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin announced the FCC will try to complete its review of two major wireless mergers by the end of the year. The goal, Martin said, is to reach a decision before a new president takes office in January.

The deals are Sprint's proposed purchase of a 51 percent stake in a reconstituted Clearwire, and Verizon's planned $28 billion purchase of Alltel. If approved, the Alltel merger would make Verizon the largest U.S. cellular carrier with roughly 80 million subscribers, versus AT&T's 71.4 million.

According to Ross Rubin, director of industry analysis for The NPD Group, the FCC's push to resolve the mergers has more to do with the marketplace than politics.

"I could understand why there would be some eagerness," Rubin said, "since this is a launch of a new generation of wireless connectivity that can bring broadband to almost the entire U.S. population. Potentially, the Sprint/Clearwire initiative will cover 90 to 95 percent of the U.S. population. By allowing the investment to go forward, the FCC will accelerate competition and compel other companies to move forward."

Strong Opposition From AT&T

In a petition filed during the summer, AT&T asked the FCC to apply the same level of scrutiny to the Sprint/Clearwire deal as AT&T's own earlier acquisition of Dobson Communications.

"While AT&T does not fundamentally oppose the underlying transactions," AT&T wrote in its petition, "the regulatory process must be consistent for all entrants, including new Clearwire, and regulatory parity therefore requires an examination of the reformed company's spectrum aggregation."

In particular, AT&T believes the companies have not adequately accounted for all the airwaves that would be brought together by their merger. Sprint and Clearwire have announced they plan to use their joint spectrum holdings to launch a nationwide WiMAX network.

Verizon's proposal to buy Alltel was...

RealNetworks is feeling heat from the movie studios involving its just-released RealDVD software, and is firing back with a lawsuit.

RealDVD lets consumers store, manage and play DVDs on computers. Think of it as a DVD backup, since the software does not let users distribute copies of DVDs.

"RealDVD not only maintains the DVD's native CSS encryption intact, it also adds another layer of digital-rights-management encryption that effectively locks the DVD copy to the owner's computer to ensure that the content cannot be improperly copied or shared," the company said. "RealDVD provides consumers with a great solution for the playback and management of their DVD collections while adding security that is more robust than CSS."

Hollywood Objects

That's how RealNetworks sees it. But Hollywood seems to have a different take. The company says the "major movie studios" have made threats, and RealNetworks has filed for a declaratory judgment against the DVD Copy Control Association, Disney Enterprises, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox, NBC Universal, Warner Bros., and Viacom.

The suit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California asks for a ruling that RealNetworks Home Entertainment and RealDVD fully comply with the DVD Copy Control Association's license agreement. The company said it is taking action to protect consumers' ability to exercise fair-use rights for purchased DVDs.

"We are disappointed that the movie industry is following in the footsteps of the music industry and trying to shut down advances in technology rather than embracing changes that provide consumers with more value and flexibility for their purchases," RealNetworks said. "We expect to successfully defend our right to make RealDVD available to consumers and consumers' rights to use it."

A Precedent

There is a precedent for the RealNetworks case. The DVD Copy Control Association, whose members include all the major studios, previously sued another...

Hoping to end a long-running dispute over royalty rates that has endangered the future of Internet radio, the U.S. House of Representatives unanimously passed the Webcaster Settlement Act in a voice vote that occurred over the weekend.

Under a March 2007 decision reached by the U.S. government's Copyright Royalty Board, Internet radio stations were assigned royalty payments that would have caused them to exceed revenues by 125 percent or more, observed the bill's co-author, Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Washington).

"Webcasting really has become a fabric of peoples' daily lives, and certainly a lot of businesses would have been jeopardized by this decision," Inslee said. "The upshot of this legislation will be the survival of webcasting as we know it."

A Simple Plan

According to Inslee, nothing in the Webcaster Settlement Act will affect the scope of sound-recording performance rights or any underlying copyright law. The bill's goal is far more modest: to give webcasters ample opportunity to negotiate a royalty settlement with SoundExchange, the independent, nonprofit organization responsible for collecting and distributing digital performance royalties on behalf of the U.S. Copyright Office.

"This bill is really kind of simple," Inslee said. "It just basically says that if the parties can reach an agreement, Uncle Sam will not get in the way, and that certainly makes sense from all standpoints on both sides of the aisle."

Given that Internet radio royalties operate under a license granted by the U.S. government, congressional authority is required to allow any negotiated settlement to take effect. In the event that an accord can be reached on an alternative royalty rate while Congress is in recess, the Webcaster Settlement Act would enable the agreement to be implemented.

"This legislation benefits all music webcasters and excludes none," said Michael Riksen, a vice president at National Public Radio. "Passage will facilitate closure of...