A district court does not have jurisdiction under the Hobbs Act to review an FCC order in a Telephone Consumer Protection Act case when the plaintiff does not challenge the validity of the order, the FCC said in an amicus brief filed with the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. In the case from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, Mark Mais filed suit against Gulf Coast Collection Bureau. Mais charged the debt collection company “violated the TCPA by using a predictive dialer to make between 15 and 30 calls to his cellular telephone number, and left four messages, in an effort to collect a debt Mais had incurred for medical services,” the FCC said (http://fcc.us/1bsBppH). “Mais’s wife had provided the cellular telephone number on his behalf at the time the medical services were rendered.” Gulf Coast sought summary judgment, citing a 2008 FCC ruling that since the calls had been made with express consent by Mais, via his wife, Gulf Coast could not be held liable for violating the TCPA. The district court let the case proceed, “holding it was not bound by the 2008 FCC decision” and “the Hobbs Act did not divest it of jurisdiction because ’the Plaintiff does not seek to collaterally attack an FCC order in any respect,'” the FCC said. The agency disagreed. “Section 402(a) of the Communications Act ... specifies that (with certain exceptions not applicable here) any challenge to a final order of the FCC must be brought under the Hobbs Act,” the FCC said. “The Hobbs Act, in turn, gives the courts of appeals ‘exclusive jurisdiction to enjoin, set aside, suspend (in whole or in part), or to determine the validity of’ such action.” Upholding the lower court’s decision would have many negative implications, the FCC said. “If the district court’s decision is left to stand, the validity of FCC orders and rules could be called into question in a host of collateral challenges in which the FCC is not a party and as to which its lawyers have no notice,” the agency said. “That result raises the specter of conflicting opinions from different courts as to whether a particular FCC order or rule is, or is not, valid. ... There would be little point to consolidating challenges to agency orders in a single court of appeals if the validity of the agency’s order also could be challenged during the course of private litigation in courts across the country."

Twitter (TWTR) stock value was up by nearly 4.8 percent at the close of the New York Stock Exchange Thursday (http://bit.ly/K77WLU). After closing at $70 per share on Tuesday, Twitter stock was trading at $73.31 per share by the end of trading Thursday.

Doctor Television Channel (DrTV), a broadcast network with a focus on medical news and health related programming, will launch Jan. 6, it said in a news release Thursday. DrTV’s focus is on “medical programming by medical professionals,” said DrTV president Jim West in the release. The channel has affiliation agreements in 93 markets, covering almost 30 million homes, the release said. The largest affiliate group signed is DTV America with 68 TV markets. The new channel allows the affiliate group to “build partnerships with local medical professionals” to “reach consumers with targeted health initiatives and community programs,” said DTV America CEO John Kyle.

The FCC should maintain a “flexible regime” in its oversight of closed captions, said NAB in an ex parte filing Tuesday (http://bit.ly/1cUfWad). Broadcasting is a “diverse industry” with “some errors and latency issues that cannot be avoided, due to human and transmission issues,” said NAB. The commission should continue to allow broadcasters to use the Electronic Newsroom Technique (ENT) to provide captions, the filing said. A phase-out of ENT “could likely result in a loss of competitive local news coverage, as well as additional voices in the market,” NAB said. Instead, the commission should “work with industry to examine how ENT can be better utilized to ensure local viewers have improved access to important news and information,” said the filing.

The FCC should grant time extensions to stations that need to buy new equipment to comply with the commission’s proposed procedural update to the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act rules, said NAB in comments filed in response to the commission’s November FNPRM on the proposed update (http://bit.ly/1aaVmBV). The proposed changes are prompted by changes in March to the Advanced Television Systems Committee algorithm used to calculate loudness (CD Nov 5 p18). Because the CALM Act legislation references the old standard, the commission proposal would update the language with the new standard. NAB supports the proposed change, and said most stations should be able to follow the proposed new standard with “relatively low-cost software upgrades” within the proposed one-year deadline. However, some stations may need to buy additional equipment, and may need time to do it, since most 2014 budgets have already been finalized, NAB said. The commission should “clarify that it will look favorably on requests for waivers for extensions of time” to comply with the proposed new standards, NAB said.

The Rockstar Consortium has become a “patent dragnet” that’s intent on killing off Google’s Android mobile operating system, Google said Monday in a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in San Jose. Apple, BlackBerry and Microsoft are among the Google competitors that co-own Rockstar, which some critics claim is a patent assertion entity. Rockstar has filed multiple lawsuits against Google over the Android OS, including one in October that alleged Google had violated Rockstar-owned Nortel patents because of Google’s purchase of Motorola Mobility (CD Nov 4 p18). Rockstar’s lawsuits have created “a cloud on Google’s Android platform; threatened Google’s business and relationships with its customers and partners, as well as its sales of Nexus-branded Android devices; and created a justiciable controversy between Google and Rockstar,” Google said in the lawsuit. Rockstar did not comment.

The FCC defended its denial of Spectrum Five’s request for a review of the International Bureau’s decision to grant EchoStar special temporary authority to move its EchoStar 6 satellite (CD July 10 p20). Spectrum Five appealed the decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. The FCC questioned whether Spectrum Five has standing to appeal the ruling and asserted that the decision made was well within agency authority. Spectrum Five is a privately held company formed in 2004 to develop and operate satellite systems, and does not yet have any satellites in operation. “This case lies in the heartland of agency discretion: the Commission’s judgment involving the technically complex allocation of orbital slots and the evaluation of the public interest in light of arrangements with foreign nations,” the FCC said (http://bit.ly/1g4o2RU). “Spectrum Five questions the agency’s policy judgment, but the Commission acted reasonably and explained its actions. Nothing more is required."

Members of the Public Interest Spectrum Coalition made their case for unlicensed use of the TV bands following the incentive auction and channel repacking, in a meeting with Roger Sherman, FCC Wireless Bureau acting chief, and others from the bureau. PISC said the FCC should designate “an unlicensed and contiguous duplex gap (and/or guard band) of at least 20 MHz” and maintain two designated channels for wireless mics, opening “them for shared unlicensed use; shrinking the separation distances that limit wireless microphone use of locally-vacant, out-of-market TV co-channels; and requiring microphones to rely first on out-of-market TV co-channels that are not available to unlicensed devices,” said a filing on the meeting (http://bit.ly/1eCAKdd). It said the FCC should also make Channel 37 available on a limited basis for unlicensed use and maintain “the status quo with respect to unlicensed access to 600 MHz spectrum, post-auction, in each local area until it is actually in use.” Michael Calabrese of the New America Foundation, Harold Feld of Public Knowledge and Matt Wood of Free Press were at the meeting for PISC.

Members of the GPS community again said the FCC shouldn’t permit the operations proposed in LightSquared’s request to use its spectrum for a terrestrial network until technical interference concerns have been resolved. The concerns should be resolved in “transparent, public notice and comment rulemaking proceedings,” like the process involving Dish Network’s AWS-4 spectrum, the GPS Innovation Alliance said in an ex parte filing in docket 11-109 (http://bit.ly/1cPXT5e). The filing recounted a meeting last week with members of the Wireless Bureau and the Office of Strategic Planning & Policy Analysis, it said.

Open interconnection and a “healthy transit market” for Internet traffic are important, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings told FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler and aides in what agency records show was a rare commission lobbying meeting for the company. Those two factors are “prerequisites to scaling the Internet as a global content distribution platform,” an ex parte filing, released Monday in docket 09-191 (http://bit.ly/1boC0ce), recounted Hastings as saying during the Dec. 18 meeting. Hastings cited the online video distributor’s Open Connect program and explained it to Wheeler and aides including Senior Counselor Phil Verveer, wireline aide Daniel Alvarez and media aide Maria Kirby. Open Connect is a content delivery network that locates Netflix’s content closer to ISPs, said a blog post that the ex parte filing referenced (http://nflx.it/1c3FPHa). Netflix last lobbied the FCC in an ex parte meeting 13 months ago, according to agency records (http://bit.ly/19e0bNM). A company spokesman declined to comment further.