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Graham Seeks DOJ Meeting Before Decision on ASCAP/BMI Consent Decrees

john.eggerton@futurenet.com (John Eggerton) — Fri, 15 Feb 2019 15:18:45 +0000

Senate Judiciary Committee chair Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C..) has asked the Justice Department to hold off on lifting the consent decrees on music licensing groups ASCAP and BMI until he has had a chance to discuss them with antitrust chief Makan Delrahim.

The decrees affect how those organizations collect fees from programmers and distributors for music in their content.

In a letter this week to Delrahim, Graham said the decrees appeared still to be working well.

According to Justice, which struck the decrees with the organizations back in 1941, the ASCAP decree requires it to “grant to any music user making a written request therefor a non-exclusive license to perform all of the works in the ASCAP repertory . . . .” The BMI decree requires that BMI licenses provide access t o“those compositions, the right of public performance of which [BMI] has or hereafter shall have the right to license or sublicense.” The Second Circuit Court of Appeals in 2015 ruled, in the Pandora decision, that ASCAP is “required to license its entire repertory to all eligible users.”

“The purpose of my letter is not to prejudge the outcome of your review, but rather to express my concern that moving to terminate or even sunset the ASCAP & BMI consent decrees, without first working with my committee and the Congress as a whole to establish an alternative licensing framework, could severely disrupt the entire music licensing marketplace," said Graham.

President Trump signaled last October, when signing the Hatch-Goodlatte Music Modernization Act into law, that if the DOJ review of the consent decrees leads to a decision to lift them, he would try to provide notice to Congress, but was giving no guarantees depending on the circumstances.

The bill provided for congressional overnight of the Justice Department review of the long-standing consent decrees. Graham wants to do some of that overseeing.

Delrahim had signaled almost a year ago that his division was taking a fresh look, and with a fairly critical eye, at the consent decrees—they date from 1941—under which performance royalty organizations (PROs) collect their fees.

Justice also reviewed the decrees in 2015.

One of the key issues is whether music licensing organizations can collect fees for fractional rights under blanket licenses. The court concluded that the decrees neither required full licensing of musical works nor prevented fractional licensing.

Fractional licenses are works with multiple authors using different licensing organizations, so, say, BMI has some fraction, rather than all, of the rights.

Graham does not say that the decrees are the perfect solution to the current marketplace, but he wants a committee staff-level discussion that includes licensors and licensees before Justice takes any action.

This story has been revised. It originally misidentified the letter as from former Alabama senator and attorney general Jeff Sessions.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions Launches Crackdown on Chinese IP Theft

john.eggerton@futurenet.com (John Eggerton) — Thu, 01 Nov 2018 18:27:38 +0000

Citing a U.S. Trade Representative report on Chinese hacking into commercial communications networks, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has announced a new initiative to combat that country's theft of intellectual property, including a review of foreign investments in U.S. telecommunications.

Sessions said the department will recommend legislation if necessary to combat state-sponsored espionage and theft.

Sessions said DOJ is creating a China Initiative, led by Assistant Attorney General John Demers, to "identify priority Chinese trade theft cases, ensure that we have enough resources dedicated to them, and make sure that we bring them to an appropriate conclusion quickly and effectively."

Sounding like Howard Beale in Network, Sessions said: "We are here today to say: enough is enough. We’re not going to take it anymore.

Among the initiatives tasks will be to look at "the Foreign Investment Review staff’s review of investments and licenses in U.S. infrastructure and telecommunications, and the Foreign Agent Registration Act Unit’s work to counter covert efforts to influence our leaders and the general public."

Sessions also announced that an indictment has been returned by a San Francisco Grand Jury in a civil suit filed by the Department of Justice to prevent Chinese and Taiwanese companies from transferring technology it says was stolen from Micron, A San Francisco-based semiconductor maker worth $100 billion and in control of almost a quarter of the RAM (random access memory) market, which is central to computing.

The Grand Jury decision is not a conviction, but is a finding that there is enough evidence to proceed to a trial.

DOJ claimed that the former president of a company acquired by Micron in 2013, left that company in 2015 and took $8.75 billion in trade secrets with him to a Taiwanese company that is one of the defendants in the suit and which partnered with a Chinese State-owned company so it could steal the technology.

If convicted, the defendants could get up to 15 years in prison and the Chinese and Taiwanese companies involved up to $20 billion in penalties.

President Donald Trump is all about "fair dealing" the Administration has emphasized, but Sessions signaled that it will not allow "our sovereignty to be disrespected, our intellectual property to be stolen, or our people to be robbed of their hard-earned prosperity."

The Administration has arguably been sending something of a mixed message about China given that it worked out a deal to restore U.S. tech imports to Chinese telecom ZTE (lifting lifting a previous ban). ZTE had violated terms of an earlier agreement and been identified by major U.S. intelligence officials as a security threat.

The Commerce Department had issued the ban after ZTE failed to keep its end of a settlement over supplying tech to Iran and North Korea, but after talking to the President of China, President Trump instructed Commerce to strike a deal to save Chinese jobs, which was subsequently struck.

The reaction of Mark Warner (D-Va.), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and no fan of the ZTE deal, signaled the Administration initiative was good, as far as it went. "The Administration has powerful, targeted tools at its disposal to hold bad actors accountable for theft of U.S. companies’ IP and trade secrets, even when the theft takes place abroad," he said in a statement e-mailed to B&C/Multichannel News. "I applaud the Department of Justice for using one of those tools today to hold China accountable, and encourage the Administration to take additional steps to crack down on economic espionage by Chinese businesses and the Chinese government.”

Dems Take Aim At Sessions Over Russian Communications

john.eggerton@futurenet.com (John Eggerton) — Thu, 02 Mar 2017 18:46:00 +0000

In the wake of reports that Attorney General Jeff Sessions talked with a Russian government official (the Russian ambassador to be specific) during the campaign after saying in his confirmation hearing in the Judiciary Committee that he had not had any communications with the Russian government, Democratic members of Congress were calling for his resignation, or at least his recusal from any investigation into allegations of Russian communications with campaign officials.

Sessions said late Thursday he would recuse himself, but that his answers to the committee were truthful.

Justice generally handles the antitrust reviews of communications mergers.

Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), ranking member of the Senate Communications Subcommittee, was focused on the investigations into those Russian ties.

“These new reports make it clear: Attorney General Jeff Sessions cannot and should not be the person to investigate the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia which now include the Attorney General himself," he said in a statement. "The reports also make clear that this administration struggles with telling the truth. We need an independent prosecutor, and we must empower all relevant committees in the Congress to conduct an exhaustive, bipartisan, and transparent investigation.”

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) went further. "“It’s clear that Attorney General Sessions gave false testimony under oath at his hearing," she said. "This should disqualify him from leading the Justice Department. “Between Attorney General Sessions’ false testimony and the Senate Intelligence Committee chairman working with the White House to kill stories about Russian contacts, we need to get all of the facts."

She said she wanted not only a special prosecutor but a 9/11-style commission" to "get to the bottom of Russia’s ties to the Trump administration and election hacking.”

The Administration has said the allegations of ties are bogus and the stories about them "fake news."

The New York Times was reporting that some Republican members were also calling for Sessions to recuse himself from any investigation.

Sessions said at a press conference Thursday afternoon (March 2) that he never had meetings with Russian operatives or intermediaries about the Trump campaign. He said any suggestion he had such meetings with intermediaries was not true. And that it was the question about such meetings that he answered in the negative at the hearing, an answer he said was correct.

He also said he would write to the Judiciary Committee to explain.

Sessions also said he had met with senior officials about the rules on recusals and was advised to recuse himself from any campaign investigation, so he has recused himself from matters that deal with Trump campaign.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said that any talk of resignation was "nonsense," but that recusal was the right move.

"We all know Attorney General Sessions to be an honest and forthright public servant," he said in a statement. " When we spoke earlier this afternoon, between votes on the Senate floor, I suggested, as I did with Attorney General Lynch after she met with President Clinton on her airplane, that his recusal may be the best course of action. He indicated that he had been consulting with the professionals at the department, and that he agreed. There’s little doubt that alleged conflicts, no matter how flimsy and regardless of whether or not they are based in fact, will be used against him to discredit him and any potential investigation into alleged conversations between the campaign and the Russian government. So, his actions today were the right thing to do."

CPJ, Sen. Klobuchar Push AG Nominee to Support Journalist Protections

john.eggerton@futurenet.com (John Eggerton) — Thu, 12 Jan 2017 14:27:00 +0000

The Committee to Protect journalists is calling on Attorney General nominee Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) to commit to support guidelines that make it harder for the Justice Department to subpoena journalists' records.

At the hearing, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), whose father was a journalist, said she was particularly sensitive to the journalist's role as a watchdog and asked him to commit to guidelines Attorney General Eric Holder issued in 2015, which include releasing an annual report on any subpoenas and promising not to put journalists in jail for doing their jobs.

Sessions did not commit, saying he needed to study the guidelines.

RELATED: Trump Calls CNN 'Fake News'

Klobuchar said that while there were "a few examples of where the press and the Department of Justice haven't agreed," she believes DOJ "does have sensitivity to this issue" and that "for the most part there is a broadly recognized and proper deference to the news media."

But she added a caveat, saying, "You could have a situation in which the media is not really the unbiased media we see today and they could be a mechanism through which unlawful intelligence is obtained."

RELATED: Committe to Protect Journalists Brands Trump Threat to Press Freedom

Klobuchar said she would follow up with Sessions in written questions, but the CPJ was not waiting around.

"We urge Senator Jeff Sessions, if confirmed as attorney general, to follow the revised guidelines set out by Attorney General Eric Holder," said Carlos Lauría, CPJ's senior program coordinator for the Americas, in a statement. "The U.S. government should be expanding protections for journalists to gather the news and maintain confidential sources. They must not roll these protections back."