The village of Oyster Bay Cove, New York, and its planning and zoning appeals boards subjected AT&T to an “unreasonably protracted” application process to approve an 85-foot-tall cell tower, ultimately failing to act on the application before the last-extended expiration of the Telecommunication Act’s shot clock Nov. 23, alleged the carrier in a Dec. 22 complaint (docket 2:22-cv-07807) in U.S. District Court for Eastern New York in Central Islip.

Here are Communications Litigation Today's top stories from last week, in case you missed them. Each can be found by searching on its title or by clicking on the hyperlinked reference number.

The request of the village of Muttontown, New York, to file a motion to dismiss AT&T’s complaint over the municipality’s denial of the carrier’s efforts to build a cell tower should be rejected “because the application would be futile,” AT&T wrote U.S. District Judge Joanna Seybert for Eastern New York in Central Islip in a letter Friday (docket 2:22-cv-05524). Muttontown and its four component governing boards signaled their intentions to seek dismissal of AT&T’s complaint in a Dec. 12 letter motion to the judge (see 2212140001).

An inter partes review (IPR) proceeding related to VLSI Technology’s $2.1 billion jury verdict against Intel can proceed, Patent and Trademark Office Director Kathi Vidal said Dec. 22, calling the merits in two related cases “compelling.”

U.S. District Judge William Orrick for Northern California in San Francisco signed an order Thursday (docket 3:22-cv-03580) denying the plaintiffs in a privacy class action their Aug. 25 motion for a preliminary injunction to enjoin Meta from intercepting and disseminating their patient information via the Pixel tracking tool. The plaintiffs represent one of seven consolidated cases.

Facbook will pay $725 million to settle a U.S. class action lawsuit over its 2018 Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal, parent company Meta said Thursday in a filing before the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in 18-md-02843-VC.

The Dec. 8 decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit denying Nimitz Technologies mandamus relief from its dispute with a district judge (see 2212090027) is contrary to four Supreme Court decisions safeguarding the law of attorney-client privilege, said Nimitz in its Dec. 21 combined petition (docket 23-103) for panel rehearing or rehearing en banc.

The FCC's Q4 2022 universal service contribution factor proceeding isn't the right venue for challenging the constitutionality of the entire universal service fund regime, and Section 254 of the Communications Act "easily" answers questions about whether Congress wrongly delegated its lawmaking power by limiting and guiding the FCC's universal service implementation, the agency told the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Dec. 22. In a docket 22-13315 reply to a challenge to the USF (see 2211220075), the FCC said the 11th Circuit also lacks jurisdiction because the suit is attempting "an end-run" around time limits for challenging an agency rule. Counsel for the petitioners didn't comment Friday.

A request to supplement a renewed motion to compel with related interrogatories “did not need to be made” and should be denied, said defendants T-Mobile and Inteliquent in a Dec. 21 response (docket 1:19-cv-07190) to Craigville Telephone and Consolidated Telephone’s Dec. 12 motion filed in U.S. District Court for Northern Illinois in Chicago.

Many eyes were trained Thursday on U.S. District Court for Delaware for Chief Judge Colm Connolly’s reaction to Nimitz Technologies’ latest refusal to produce bank records, emails and other materials responsive to his Nov. 10 order for documents that would identify third-party funding of four Nimitz patent lawsuits against Bloomberg, BuzzFeed, Cnet and Imagine Learning.