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IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF MARYLAND SINCLAIR TELEVISION GROUP, INC., et al. v. MEDIACOM COMMUNICATIONS CORP. : : : : : Civil Action No. CCB-07-1001 : : ...o0o... MEMORANDUM Now pending before the court is a motion for summary judgment filed by plaintiffs Sinclair Television Group, Inc. ("Sinclair") and Second Generation of Iowa, Ltd. ("Second Generation") against defendant Mediacom Communications Corp. ("Mediacom"). Sinclair and Second Generation are suing Mediacom for breach of contract. The agreement at issue is the Retransmission Consent Agreement dated February 2, 2007 (the "RCA"), which was entered into by Sinclair and Mediacom to resolve a lawsuit brought by Mediacom against Sinclair in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Iowa (the "Iowa litigation"). See Mediacom Comm. Corp. v. Sinclair Broadcast Group, Inc., 460 F. Supp. 2d 1012 (S.D. Iowa 2006).1 The issues in this motion have been fully briefed and a hearing was held on January 25, 2008. For the reasons stated below, the plaintiffs' motion will be denied. BACKGROUND As general background to this lawsuit, until 1992, cable operators were not required to

In the Iowa litigation, Mediacom sued Sinclair for violations of the Sherman Act, tortious interference with contracts and business expectations, and unfair competition. The district court denied Mediacom's motion for a preliminary injunction on the antitrust claims, and the parties agreed to the RCA soon thereafter, resulting in dismissal of the suit with prejudice. 1

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compensate local broadcast stations for retransmitting local broadcasts on their cable networks. Congress's Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act of 1992, however, mandated that no cable system or multichannel video programming distributor ("MVPD") could retransmit the signal of a broadcasting station without the express authority of the originating station. 47 U.S.C.

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