The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals would put every DVR user at risk of copyright infringement liability if it overturns a district court’s decision not to block Aereo from operating while litigation over its remote DVR service continues, Aereo said in a brief filed with the appeals court Friday. Broadcasters appealed a decision by Judge Alison Nathan of the U.S. District Court in Manhattan (CD July 13 p3) that rejected their arguments over why Aereo’s service, which lets subscribers watch and record broadcast TV programming over the Internet, should be stopped.

Europe’s privacy framework could harm the development of a global cloud-computing industry, said U.S. and Japanese business interests in a report last week. It was prepared for a “Director General-level meeting” of the U.S.-Japan Policy Cooperation Dialogue on the Internet Economy in Washington, the State Department said Friday (http://xrl.us/bnvifp). State said “participants concurred” at the meeting last week that the U.S.-Japan Cloud Computing Working Group, set up earlier this year, should “continue its discussions while giving consideration to the balance between free flows of information and personal data protection."

Lawmakers are skeptical that Congress will pass cybersecurity legislation this session, despite a commitment by Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., to resurrect the Cybersecurity Act (S-3414) in November. Aides to Senate Commerce Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., and the leader of the House Cybersecurity Task Force, Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, said during a cybersecurity event Monday hosted by 1105 Media that the effort would likely fail.

Dish Network’s settlement with Cablevision and AMC Networks will strengthen its hand in wireless, giving it multichannel video distribution and data service (MVDDS) spectrum licenses potentially for microwave backhaul to help in building out a network, analysts said.

The way Congress and the president ultimately address the dire economic questions looming over this election will have a tremendous impact on federal agencies’ procurement strategies and payroll decisions, analysts said at a TechAmerica event Monday. Though lawmakers still have time to deal with the pending Jan. 2 sequester, federal agencies are already discussing contingency plans to dramatically reduce their expenses, and contractors should prepare for tougher contract negotiations and more limited procurement decisions, they said.

T-Mobile and MetroPCS need to merge to have the scale to challenge Verizon Wireless and AT&T, the two combining companies said in an FCC filing Friday. It said the new company formed will be called Newco, to be renamed T-Mobile, and will have enough spectrum to support 20 x 20 MHz LTE deployments in many parts of the U.S. The two also said combined they don’t hold spectrum above the levels in the most recent screen in any U.S. market. Parts of the carriers’ arguments were redacted from the public version of the filing. The deal, in which T-Mobile USA parent Deutsche Telekom is buying MetroPCS to merge it with its U.S. subsidiary, was announced Oct. 3 (CD Oct 4 p1). That deal and Softbank agreeing last week to buy control of Sprint Nextel may mean smaller carriers will be bought by the Big Four, analysts predicted. (See separate report below.)

Other smaller carriers will eventually be purchased or merged with the “Big Four” U.S. carriers, now that T-Mobile and MetroPCS are combining, analysts said. MetroPCS stockholders will get $1.5 billion in cash and 26 percent ownership of the merged company (CD Oct 4 p1), and Japanese carrier SoftBank said Monday it will buy 70 percent of Sprint Nextel for $20.1 billion (CD Oct 16 p1). Leap Wireless backs consolidation, the company told us. Also Friday, T-Mobile and MetroPCS made the case for their deal in a filing applying for FCC approval. (See separate report above.)

AT&T is raising questions about one part of Softbank’s proposed buy of a majority stake in Sprint Nextel that so far has gotten little attention, namely, provisions in the Communications Act limiting the ability of companies with more than 25 percent foreign ownership to invest in U.S. spectrum licenses. The restriction in Section 310(b)(4) provides for wiggle room, since the FCC needs to impose the restriction only if it finds doing so is in the public interest. Industry sources said Friday they do not expect the foreign ownership provisions to present an impediment to approval of the Softbank/Sprint deal.

The FCC will probably take a wait-and-see approach to some of the questions it raised in a further notice of proposed rulemaking (FNPRM) on program access rules, agency officials and communications lawyers predicted. Along with letting its ban on exclusive contracts between cable operators and the networks they own expire Oct. 5, the agency solicited comments on several other proposals to expand some program access protections to multichannel video programming distributors seeking to license national cable channels (CD Oct 9 p1). Should the commission see competitive problems developing as a result of letting the exclusivity ban expire, the further notice could give the commission a way to reopen the issue, an FCC official said.

ORLANDO -- Seeking to maintain cable’s competitive edge in selling broadband service and forestall the need to lay fiber all the way from headends to the home, industry technologists started drafting a new technical standard designed to enable the ISPs to provide downstream and upstream speeds greater than 1 Gbps. In a special session at the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers conference, engineers from CableLabs, SCTE, Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Cox Communications spelled out their plans to create and deploy the proposed DOCSIS 3.1 specification over the next two years. While the plans have been a somewhat open secret in the industry for months, the session marked their first public airing and discussion. Also Thursday, the cable industry for the first time acknowledged publicly the coming 3.1 spec form CableLabs (CD Oct 19 p15) , via a release from SCTE (http://xrl.us/bnu3nn).