LG sought permission to file under seal its reply memorandum of law and related documents in support of its request for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction to bar Dolby from terminating LG’s license to AC-4 audio codec patents for NextGenTV, in a letter motion Monday to U.S. District Judge Paul Crotty in Manhattan. It appears from heavily redacted public filings in the case that disputed patent royalty audit reports are at the root of the LG-Dolby court fight (see 2202090028). The papers LG wants to file under seal, LG lawyers wrote Crotty, include declarations in support of the TRO and PI from Justin Lewis, managing director of Ocean Tomo’s intellectual property practice, and Allan Shampine, an antitrust expert at Compass Lexecon. LG has “a significant interest in maintaining the confidentiality of highly sensitive commercial information concerning its business relationships and sensitive financial information that, if disclosed, would cause competitive harm, including by giving an unfair advantage to competitors,” they said.

Six companies “consistently competed” in patenting activity involving four technologies “central to 5G,” but of the six -- Ericsson, Huawei, LG, Nokia, Qualcomm and Samsung -- “no single firm dominates 5G innovation at present,” reported the Patent and Trademark Office Tuesday. “The results suggest that there remains ongoing competition among these six 5G companies in patenting activity,” said PTO. “Given the complexity of the results, caution is recommended when reviewing media claims of 5G dominance.” The findings “call into question claims that any single firm or country is ‘winning’ the 5G technology race,” said the agency.

It appears from the heavily redacted public version of Dolby’s memorandum of law in opposition to LG’s motion for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction (see 2201060058) that LG is seeking to enjoin Dolby from terminating its license to the AC-4 audio codec patents for NextGenTVs due to a dispute over royalty audit reports. LG can’t demonstrate “irreparable harm” from Dolby’s threatened license termination, the first prerequisite for a TRO or PI, because any potential harm is “self-inflicted,” said the Dolby memorandum, dated Jan. 31 and posted Tuesday in docket 1:22-cv-42 in U.S. District Court in Manhattan. Case law shows a “failure to comply with a royalty audit is a paradigmatic example of material breach” of a license agreement, said Dolby. Courts have said licensees “materially breached” their license agreements “(permitting termination by licensor) by refusing to provide additional records after the auditor discovered unpaid royalties based on initial samples of the records,” it said. On LG’s complaint that Dolby reneged on its commitments to ATSC to license its AC-4 patents on fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory terms, said Dolby, a 5th Circuit 2021 opinion in HTC v. Ericsson said FRAND doesn't require giving identical licensing terms to all prospective licensees, giving patent holders some flexibility in coming to reasonable agreements with different potential licensees. Other Dolby filings, including a declaration from Massachusetts Institute of Technology economics professor Jerry Hausman in support of Dolby's memorandum, were redacted in their entirety. LG is scheduled to file its reply on Monday under seal.

The American Music Fairness Act “will hurt the very artists that it claims to help” by harming local radio stations, blogged NAB President Curtis LeGeyt Tuesday, restating many points he made at a House Judiciary hearing last week (see 2202020070. “Want to ensure artists get less airtime? Pass the AMFA,” LeGeyt wrote. The proposed bill addresses only one element of a complex system, which deserves “a holistic look,” LeGeyt said. NAB has argued that digital fees should be reduced if artist fees are introduced. “By lowering barriers to entry and making streaming more affordable for broadcasters, we can allow more radio stations to invest in online delivery of music and grow the pot of digital revenues for music creators,” LeGeyt wrote.

Sony America’s new subsidiary, Sony Immersive Music Studios, applied in recent weeks to trademark the phrase, “Where Music Meets,” as a promotional trademark for “video recordings featuring virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality content,” Patent and Trademark Office records show. The application lists subsidiary head Brad Spahr as its main contact. Spahr introduced Sony Immersive Music Studios at the all-digital CES 2021.

In granting Sonos the cease and desist order it sought on Google smart speakers, phones and other devices found to infringe five Sonos multiroom audio patents, the International Trade Commission, in a previously undisclosed ruling, denied Google’s request for an exemption to donate the infringing products in its “significant” domestic inventory to nonprofits, said the ITC’s opinion posted Tuesday in docket 337-TA-1191. The opinion details the ITC’s “reasoning in support of its final determination,” issued in a sparse public notice Jan. 6 (see 2201070022), that Google violated Section 337 of the Tariff Act. “Sonos raises a number of questions regarding the scope of the requested exemption that remain unanswered because Google did not request this exemption until remedy briefing before the Commission,” said the opinion. The ITC “agrees with Sonos that the proposed, unbounded exemption could enable Google to flood the market with infringing devices, thus inflicting harm on Sonos notwithstanding” the CDO and the other remedies imposed, it said. “Google has failed to provide any evidence to support its assertion that the exemption it seeks” would result in no cost or harm to Sonos, it said.

A House Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday on the American Music Fairness Act (see 2109200050) will include testimony that broadcasters are falsely “crying poor” on compensating performers for radio play, and that musician groups failed to come to the negotiating table with radio stations, said the two sides in dueling previews of the testimony on AMFA. HR-4130 would charge radio stations a performance royalty fee for the artists, in the form of yearly payments based on station size and profitability. “NAB put forward serious proposal after serious proposal” on compensating artists but “received no serious counteroffer,” said President Curtis LeGeyt in an interview Tuesday. LeGeyt will testify, along with singer Gloria Estefan, American Federation of Musicians (AFM) International Executive Officer Dave Pomeroy and others. LeGeyt said it's “disappointing” to broadcasters to be relitigating the issue before legislators. In a virtual news briefing Tuesday, musicFIRST Coalition Chairman Joe Crowley slammed NAB for not producing a broadcaster to address legislators, and condemned iHeart Media CEO Bob Pittman for not testifying. MusicFIRST is made up of several music industry entities, including AFM, SoundExchange and RIAA. Pittman is “unwilling to flip open his laptop” and “defend the indefensible,” Crowley said. IHeart declined to comment. Large radio groups make billions of dollars from the “unpaid labor” of artists, and the AMFA would charge lower rates to 63% of radio stations -- only the largest radio groups would face significant fees, Crowley said. “We are not an industry rolling in revenue,” LeGeyt said. Even the largest groups maintain community stations that require resources, he said. In addition to iHeart, he said the bill would affect middle-size radio groups such as Beasley and Hubbard. The AMFA would draw a bright line for stations with revenue of over $1.5 million that would cause fees to shoot up. A “performance tax” is “not a workable business model,” LeGeyt said. “NAB loves to call any attempt to ensure fair pay for artists a performance tax,” Crowley said. “This legislation doesn’t direct money to the government, it directs money to performers.” Former Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Craig Fugate and the National Association of Black Owned Broadcasters wrote the committee this week in support of NAB.

BlackBerry signed a definitive agreement to sell its “legacy” patents to Catapult IP Innovations for $600 million, BlackBerry announced Monday. BlackBerry will receive back a license to the patents being sold, which mainly involve mobile devices, messaging, wireless networking and other businesses in which BlackBerry is no longer actively involved, it said: “Patents that are essential to BlackBerry’s current core business operations are excluded from the transaction.” Satisfying the regulatory conditions to complete the sale could take up to seven months, said BlackBerry. The process to sell the “noncore” portion of the patent portfolio took “much longer” than BlackBerry hoped, said CEO John Chen on a Dec. 21 earnings call (see 2112220013)

Eleven initial licensors populate MPEG LA’s patent pool for the next-generation H. 266 video codec, said the license authority Thursday. H.266, also called Versatile Video Coding, is trumpeted as having 50% more efficiency than the existing H.265 codec for 4K video and ATSC 3.0 and is said to be optimized for resolutions up to 16K and for 360-degree omnidirectional video for augmented and virtual reality (see 1903140012). Licensors in MPEG LA’s one-stop pool are b-com, BBC, Digital Insights, FG Innovation, Hanwha Techwin, KPN, NHK, Orange, Siemens, Tagivan and Vidyo. Access Advance also bowed a one-stop H.266 patent pool in July and has 28 licensors.

TV was the most pirated industry between January and September 2021, with pirate websites being visited 67 billion times for TV content during that nine-month span, Akamai said Wednesday, citing Muso-provided data. Total visits to pirate sites during that span for TV, film, music, software and publishing content topped 132 billion, Akamai said. Many of the titles being pirated aren't generally available in the areas where visitors are coming from, it said. During that nine months, the U.S. was the biggest location for pirate site visits, at 13.5 billion, with Russia following at 7.2 billion, India (6.5 billion), China (5.9 billion) and Brazil (4.5 billion), Akamai said.