Opinion ID: 2314971
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: ASCAP's Remaining Objections

Text: ASCAP's remaining objections were properly rejected by the District Court. For clarification, we discuss briefly two such matters. ASCAP contends that the District Court erred in failing to test the resulting fee for reasonableness. Although the size of the fee is clearly relevant to its reasonableness, there is no requirement that the District Court explicitly engage in a testing of the fee resulting from its formula. On the contrary, the AFJ2 requires only that the District Court determine a reasonable fee. AFJ2 § IX(D). ASCAP also contends that the District Court erred by failing to include the value of licenses for content acquired by others but streamed to customers using Mobi's back-end technology infrastructure. Such content would include, for example, television programming acquired by Sprint directly from the networks, and then provided to its customers using Mobi's servers and patented technology. ASCAP argues that Mobi is required to obtain a performance license for all unlicensed content that it streams, regardless of whether it has been assured by its upstream partner that such a license has already been procured. This objection also lacks merit. If an upstream content provider has already acquired a TTTA license from ASCAP, it would be unfair to require Mobi to make a second payment for the same content. See United States v. ASCAP (In re Application of AT & T Wireless), 607 F.Supp.2d 562, 570-71 (S.D.N.Y.2009). Furthermore, Mobi is entitled to rely on its upstream partner's assurances that it is protected and to manage the accompanying risk that the partner has not obtained the promised right. [13] ASCAP, for its part, retains the power to protect its rights by bringing an infringement action against Mobi or any other party. As a result, the District Court did not err by construing the license to exclude such content.