FCC Tweets Baseball Updates To Avoid Blackouts

By Paul

Those disclaimers spoken on Major League Baseball broadcasts, you know:

“Any rebroadcast, retransmission, or account of this game, without the express written consent of Major League Baseball, is prohibited,”

Well, after Fox and Cablevision couldn’t agree and blackouts during the playoffs ensued, the FCC stepped in with Twitter updates of the games in progress. Its not particularly interesting that someone would tweet about baseball games. I’ve checked the #twins hashtag on Twitter during a Twins just to see what other people think of the game. That the FCC would do it, more interesting. I’m fairly certain that MLB won’t sue the FCC, partly because facts, such as what’s the score aren’t copyrightable (not withstanding the “account of this game” language).

H/T to Consumerist

FCC Launches Spectrum Dashboard

By Paul

The FCC has created a tool that allows people to quickly see how spectrum is allocated. You can use a map to find all the licensees in a particular county or state. All this is particularly interesting now as there is currently some interest in reallocating spectrum that was used for television broadcast and allowing more wireless broadband services.

FCC Spectrum Dashboard

HT to the CommLawBlog.