roundtable: Cable Leased Access: Class Action Lawsuit Forum

roundtable: Cable Leased Access: Class Action Lawsuit

Cable Leased Access: Class Action Lawsuit

Thomas M. Schaefer (stratvid@ix.netcom.com)
Sat, 20 Apr 1996 11:29:46 -0700 

Message-Id: <31792D1A.62C5@ix.netcom.com>
Date: Sat, 20 Apr 1996 11:29:46 -0700
From: "Thomas M. Schaefer" <stratvid@ix.netcom.com>
To: muni-telecom@civicnet.org
Subject: Cable Leased Access: Class Action Lawsuit



LEASED ACCESS CLASS ACTION LAW SUIT AGAINST MSOs (please distribute)

Thank you very much for your interest in this important media democracy 
issue.

The cable industry has a strangle-hold on the distribution of 
television, preventing thousands of new and small video producers and 
animators from exhibiting their work.  We would like you to help create 
a legal action fund that will help break this strangle-hold, putting 
over a billion dollars a year into the equipment budgets of 
up-and-coming video producers. 

The law (47 USC 532) provides that channel capacity on cable systems 
shall be made available for affordable commercial lease. This is 
different than public, government, or educational access, in that it 
accommodates commercial programs and therefore allows money to be made. 
Cable operators are required to lease roughly 10 to 15% of their 
discretionary capacity for about $1 per thousand subscribing households 
per hour. (See the implementing FCC rules 47 CFR 76.970-76.975 for a 
more precise statement.) The cable operators have been given ample time 
and warning by the FCC to obey the law, but many have chosen to thwart 
it using a number of tactics including: 1) refusing to quote hourly 
rates, 2) refusing to state terms, conditions, and channel availability, 
3) refusing to make capacity available, 4) demanding excessive deposits 
and E&O insurance, 5) making only odd hours available, 6) moving the air 
time of regular programs arbitrarily and at the last minute, 7) putting 
programs on the least desirable channels, 8) generally treating leased 
access programmers like dirt and tarnishing their relations and 
undermining their marketing efforts with sponsoring businesses.

The FCC has been slow enforcing the law and its own rules, generally 
siding with the cable operators in any dispute. (In fact, the FCC often 
acts as an industry lobby within the government as the commissioners and 
commission employees posture for lucrative industry jobs.) It is time 
for legal action to give the law teeth. We are organizing a class action 
civil law suit, documenting and bringing forward a number of 
representative violations by offending cable operators.  Faced with a 
serious legal challenge, we believe some operators will settle out of 
court, allowing litigation against the unrepentant from a stronger 
position. If this strategy is successful, several mostly locally 
programmed channels will appear in almost every community across the 
country, creating billions of dollars a year in new video production.

But we need your help. The law, as it stands now, only allows 
programmers to recover ACTUAL damages, which are difficult to 
demonstrate when capacity isn't being made available. Few new and small 
programmers have the individual resources to go it alone against the 
unlimited resources of the cable industry. We are establishing a 
non-profit mechanism to accept your tax-deductible contribution to a 
legal action fund that will make this class action law suit viable. Your 
contribution can be instrumental in creating a flowering of small-scale 
alternative programs, with the potential for creativity and innovation 
not easy to come by amongst the mega-media cartel. This outlet will 
incentivise the purchase and use of the profusion of desk-top video 
hardware and software now coming to market. Further, the creation of 
video production at the community level can help strengthen the local 
social institutions and social capital that are usually weakened by 
big-media television. Please, help give new and small producers a voice 
on television.

60 million US households receive television through cable.  For the 
majority of these, it is the only way they receive television.   The law 
requires that cable operators make roughly 10% of their channel capacity 
available for affordable commercial lease.  Using a variety of tactics, 
the majority of the cable industry has thwarted this law.   There are 
roughly 1,200 cable operators who would be leasing an average of five 
channels each if this were not the case. Each of those channels could 
support $500,000 of video production annually, mostly programmed by 
small local producers.  Combined, these video production businesses 
could be spending over a billion dollars on equipment, each year.

New and small producers do not have the money or time to pursue complex 
and expensive FCC complaints and federal civil litigation against cable 
operators with unlimited resources.  We therefore request that you 
consider helping to create a legal action fund.  The fund will pay for a 
class action law suit against offending cable operators, and then use 
the precedent set in this case to vigorously defend small producers’ 
right to lease access.

Concentration of media access and production resources, made worse by 
recent mergers, endangers the video revolution being enabled by new 
products. Without the means to exhibit their productions, few new and 
small video producers will survive in competition against the mega-media 
cartel.  The equipment purchases of the media giants are concentrated 
towards a few established manufacturers.  It is in your self interest to 
broaden the base of local producers.

To learn more about how you can help, visit our web page
at: http://www.stratvid.com/lawsuit.html or call us at (209) 369-9181.


Thomas M. Schaefer
<stratvid@ix.netcom.com>

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