Vringo subsidiary I/P Engine filed a patent suit against Microsoft, claiming Microsoft violated two patents on search relevance filtering technology -- the patents I/P Engine used to successfully sue Google and others last year. The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in New York, alleges repeated violations of U.S. Patent Nos. 6,314,420 and 6,775,664. Vringo acquired the patents when it merged with I/P Engine; Lycos previously owned them (http://xrl.us/bodwup). A Microsoft spokeswoman said the company is “unable to ... comment at this time."

Sports programming is expensive for pay-TV distributors, even when the distributor owns the regional sports network (RSN) carrying the most popular games. That’s a lesson Time Warner Cable (TWC) executives say they're learning in Los Angeles, where the company has recently secured the long-term rights for both basketball’s Lakers and baseball’s Dodgers games through expensive contracts with the teams. “In both cases these rights were up for auction in a sense and they were going to be expensive no matter what,” CEO Glenn Britt told analysts Thursday during the company’s Q4 earnings teleconference. “We do not pretend these deals are inexpensive or cheap,” he said. “We think we've done the best of the alternatives,” he said.

FCC members and Media Bureau staff are considering seeking comment on waivers of media ownership rules for foreign investments in broadcast companies and for those who've overcome economic and other types of non-racial or gender disadvantages, agency and industry officials told us this week. They expressed varying degrees of hope whether incorporating such proposals into separate rulemaking proceedings might be part of a wider-ranging compromise among commissioners to resolve a deadlock. The officials said it will be hard to end a split (CD Jan 28 p7) between the two Republicans who support broadcast/daily newspaper cross ownership and the two regular Democratic members who don’t generally support such deregulation without first studying barriers to entry faced by minorities and women.

The Wyoming Legislature may limit state regulation of Internet Protocol-enabled services. About half of U.S. states have passed laws limiting state regulators from overseeing IP, most notably California, which adopted its law last fall (CD Oct 2 p7). Months of tense debate last year generated the Wyoming bill, stakeholders told us. House Bill 18 was introduced to the Wyoming House of Representatives Jan. 8, unanimously passed the nine-member Corporations, Elections and Political Subdivisions Committee Jan. 24 and passed out of the House after three readings Thursday, moving to the Senate.

Samsung violated Apple’s design and utility patents, but its intent was “not willful,” U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh ruled late Tuesday, denying Apple’s request for additional damages on top of an existing damage award. A jury for the San Jose, Calif., federal court decided in late August that Apple should receive more than $1 billion in damages after it ruled Samsung had infringed multiple Apple patents on its mobile products (CD Aug 28/12 p6).

The chief architect of the National Broadband Plan wants the FCC to grant AT&T’s deregulatory test bed proposal as soon as possible. “If a picture is worth a thousand words, an experiment is worth a thousand pleadings,” said Blair Levin, Gig. U executive director and former director of the broadband plan at the FCC. The FCC is considering AT&T’s controversial proposal to run deregulatory “experiments” in various wire centers to gauge the effects of eliminating ILEC obligations (CD Jan 30 p2). AT&T Senior Vice President Jim Cicconi said it’s “vital that the FCC, for its own future relevance, tackle this -- tackle it today -- and reassess the basis on which it regulates."

Cisco views last week’s NTIA report on the 5 GHz band as mostly a positive development for industry, hungry for more bandwidth for Wi-Fi, said Mary Brown, director-government affairs, in an interview Wednesday. Cisco also released a report by Plum Consulting, which predicts Europe could reap more than €16.3 billion ($22.1 billion) in future economic benefit if 5 GHz spectrum there is made available for Wi-Fi. The FCC announced Wednesday the 5 GHz notice of proposed rulemaking on Wi-Fi in the band is tentatively on the agenda for the commission’s Feb. 20 meeting. The only other item is a cell signal booster report and order.

Acceptance of cable industry arguments that the FCC should avoid adopting digital cable performance testing requirements could hurt customers, NATOA and some municipal governments told the commission last week, in reply comments on a rulemaking that would set up digital cable signal leakage and quality rules (CD Aug 6 p10). Distributors continued to push in their replies against such testing requirements and for a certification process instead.

The FCC should impose a relatively early deadline on all interconnected text message providers to send bounce-back messages to their customers when text-to-911 isn’t available, not just the nation’s four biggest carriers, AT&T said in comments filed at the FCC. The National Emergency Number Association said the deadline for all should be “generous, but firm.” Under an agreement last year with the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials and NENA, the top four providers said they would implement systems for transmitting bounce-back messages by June 30. T-Mobile warned that meeting the deadline won’t be easy.

The Communications Workers of America formally asked the FCC to reject a proposal by Japan’s Softbank to buy Sprint Nextel. CWA filed a petition to deny at the commission, a step it did not take in November when it raised job-related concerns over Deutsche Telekom’s proposed combination of T Mobile USA with MetroPCS. The Consortium for Public Education, and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Erie, Pa., also filed a petition to deny Sprint’s takeover, as did a group of CLECs.