The FCC is considering a draft order that would let Pandora own a broadcast station as long as the company is less than 49 percent foreign owned, said an agency official. Pandora asked the commission to sign off on its plan to buy KXMZ (FM) Box Elder, South Dakota (see 1411260042), even if it were 100 percent foreign owned, because the company has been unable to verify how foreign owned it is, said Garvey Schubert attorney Melody Virtue, who represents Pandora. “Most publicly traded companies are widely held.” She said the 49 percent threshold reportedly in the draft order would let Pandora proceed with the transaction. The order also includes a requirement that Pandora monitor its ownership going forward, said an FCC official. Pandora and FCC staff have been in contact over how the order would work, and the monitoring conditions are expected be acceptable to Pandora if the order is approved by the full commission, Virtue said. A Media Bureau spokeswoman had no comment.

A recently leaked portion of the Trans-Pacific Partnership purports to show provisions that would “enable multinational corporations to undermine public interest rules through an international tribunal process called investor state dispute settlement (ISDS),” the Electronic Frontier Foundation said in a blog post Wednesday. The authenticity of the leaked documents couldn't be independently confirmed. “Under this process, foreign companies can challenge any new law or government action at the federal, state, or local level, in a country that is a signatory to the agreement,” it said. That has implications for intellectual property, EFF said. The leaked text said the provisions don't "apply to copyright and patent rules as long as those rules are 'consistent with' the TPP's Intellectual Property Chapter" and the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights agreement, said EFF. "This means that the agreement gives the ISDS court the ability to interpret national compliance with the provisions of the TPP, a dangerous proposition given the partisan nature of the ISDS courts."

Language in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement “poses massive threats to users in a dizzying number of ways,” said Electronic Frontier Foundation Global Policy Analyst Maira Sutton in a blog post Thursday. All nations that sign the TPP will have to “accept the United States’ excessive copyright terms,” she said, as the U.S. exports “bad rules to other nations.” The broad definition of what constitutes a criminal violation of copyright could result in people being convicted of a crime for even noncommercial activities, Sutton said. “Fans who distribute subtitles to foreign movies or anime, or archivists and librarians who preserve and upload old books, videos, games, or music, could go to jail or face huge fines for their work,” she said. “Someone who makes a remix film and puts it online could be under threat.” The TPP also contains digital rights management “anti-circumvention provisions that will make it a crime to tinker with, hack, re-sell, preserve, and otherwise control any number of digital files and devices that you own,” according to the latest leak of the TPP in May 2014, Sutton said. The TPP encourages “ISPs to monitor and police their users likely leading to more censorship measures such as the blockage and filtering of content online in the name of copyright enforcement,” Sutton said. “TPP negotiators have already agreed to more vague provisions that would oblige countries to enact prison sentences and monetary fines that are ‘sufficiently high’ to deter people from infringing again.” Another concern is that law enforcement would be encouraged to seize laptops, servers or domain names. “These excessive criminal copyright rules are what we get when Big Content has access to powerful, secretive rule-making institutions,” which is “yet another reason why we need to stop the TPP,” Sutton said.

The Copyright Office will have three rounds of public comment on proposed exemptions under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, said a Federal Registernotice Friday. Section 1201 allows the Librarian of Congress to exempt certain works from prohibitions against the circumvention of technological measures that control access to copyrighted works. Comments from parties that support or remain neutral on the proposed exemptions are due Feb. 6; responses opposing such exemptions March 27; replies May 1.