CongressDaily's AM edition on Tuesday reported that the Coalition for Patent Fairness, which has championed the congressional effort to overhaul the U.S. patent system, hired former Sens. Trent Lott, R-Miss., and John Breaux, D-La., to help lobby on behalf of the group. Tech Daily Dose has now learned that the coalition added another power player to its roster -- former House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt, D-Mo. The prominent policymaker, who ended his three-decade political career in 2005, is now senior counsel at the law firm of DLA Piper.
An article I wrote in CongressDaily on March 11 previewing a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Federal Financial Management Subcommittee hearing about the Federal Information Security Management Act struck a nerve over at the National Institute of Standards and Technology -- big time.
In the story, Alan Paller, director of research at the SANS Institute, a nonprofit cybersecurity research group, blamed NIST for some of FISMA's failings. He said NIST's guidelines are too broad and he claimed that "the people at NIST, if they ever ran IT systems, it's been decades."
Since the piece was written on a tight deadline, I was unable to reach out to get a reaction from NIST at the time, so Ron Ross, leader of NIST's FISMA implementation project offered up some thoughts on Monday (per my suggestion). So, here goes...
The Digital Freedom campaign, a group that supports "fair use" of copyrighted content, responded Monday to recent remarks made by Motion Picture Association of America chief Dan Glickman regarding his opposition to net neutrality legislation. Read more about his speech last week at CongressDaily's TechCentral.
At the ShoWest summit in Las Vegas, Glickman railed against government regulation of the Internet, claiming it would impede studios' ability to respond to their consumers in an innovative ways. Digital Freedom spokeswoman Maura Corbett said it was shocking "that a group that regularly pleads for government regulation of technology could suddenly develop total amnesia."
"We suspect the big studios are rolling the Trojan Horse of 'copyright enforcement' to Congress to protect their business models from openness offered by the Internet," she said. "Given MPAA’s aversion [to] government regulation, we eagerly look forward to them standing down on broadcast flag legislation, the analog hole bill, and other initiatives to restrict consumers and limit new technologies.” Ouch!
Friday's announcement that Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo for $44.6 billion not only riled privacy and antitrust watchdogs but it also excited analysts. Jessica Zufolo, a senior telecom analyst at Medley Investment Group, said the proposal "raises a lot of complications" if Yahoo takes the bait.
The combination would likely "stir a lot of unrest on Capitol Hill and in the consumer services community about the kinds of antitrust concerns that increased consolidation would mean" -- especially in the search market, which is dominated by Google, she said.
Time Warner, which owns America Online, as well as other competitors may oppose the merger at the FTC, Justice Department and in Congress, Zufolo said. There is little doubt that regulators and antitrust officials "will take a very slow, careful review" if Yahoo accepts Microsoft's offer.
Google's merger with online ad firm DoubleClick "was a large transaction and it indeed cleared the way for other transactions," she said. Yahoo's partnership with AT&T and Microsoft's filings at the FCC may also raise questions. "It opens up a Pandora's Box of federal regulatory review -- not to mention possible [interest from] state attorneys general.
A Google spokesman said "it would be premature to comment at this point" and an AOL official declined to comment.
I couldn’t help following up on last week's post about Consumer Electronics Association President Gary Shapiro's live, televised fight with CNN anchor Lou Dobbs. The CEA chief took Dobbs to task for his "anti-trade" agenda and the sparks flew.
A colleague sent me this video of funnyman Stephen Colbert's interview with the controversial pundit. In the skit, the Comedy Central fixture poses as "Esteban Colbert" and questions Dobbs en espanol. While much of the one-on-one focuses on immigration, there was this interesting exchange:
Colbert: Listen, Benjamin Franklin was a businessman.
Dobbs: He certainly was and an imminently successful one.
Colbert: Corporations have rights too. You don’t want to deny corporations their own American dream of outsourcing jobs.
Dobbs: I wouldn’t want to… I would prefer that they find a conscience and deny themselves that expediency.
I hate to go on and on about Google's posh new Washington office, but when they sent me a few samples of their lunch menu, I nearly fell out of my chair. Journalists in D.C. are used to scarfing down a protein bar or fast food while running from hearing to hearing or meeting to meeting, but this makes me rethink my daytime dietary habits...
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Island tuna cakes with homemade basil tartar sauce
Winter snap peas and pasta salad served with feta cheese
Roasted asparagus / Salad bar / Cranberry bread
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Beef fajitas served with sour cream and cheese
Cinnamon rice with black beans
Baja salad with tomatoes, red onion, and Mexican romaine
Winter vegetables / Tropical fruit skewers
Monday, January 14, 2008
Herb marinated chicken
Harvest grains: to include couscous, scallions, and quinoa
Salad bar / Winter green vegetables
Homemade chocolate chip cookies
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Tropical chicken on a bed of grilled pineapple and mango
Brown rice, garbanzo, and black bean salad
Steamed broccoli with roasted red peppers
Salad bar / Banana creme brulee
The Progress and Freedom Foundation's Adam Thierer has published an analysis of the online child safety effort announced earlier this week by MySpace and 49 state attorneys general. In his paper, Thierer concluded that despite some concerns, the guidelines are a good alternative to federal or state regulation of social networking sites.
The proposed child e-mail registry, where parents would submit addresses that would be barred from opening a MySpace account, raises questions about privacy and security, he wrote. The database could also be circumvented by acquiring an alternate e-mail address.
Thierer also warned that a proposed online child safety task force must not become a rubber stamp for age verification mandates, as some state law enforcers seemed to imply. Age verification is a thorny, technical issue that has serious free speech implications, he said. Read the full document here.
E-commerce trade group NetChoice on Tuesday weighed in on this week's pledge by MySpace and a collection of state attorneys general to work jointly on ways to keep children safe on social networking sites.
The roadmap outlined by MySpace at a press briefing on Monday is "a far better solution than some misguided legislative proposals that would be impossible to implement effectively," NetChoice Executive Director Steve DelBianco said.
"Industry players have grown increasingly concerned about the safety and welfare of the millions of children that use these platforms every day, and have been exploring ways to make social networking safe for Americans of all ages," he said.
The only way to truly protect Web-surfing youngsters "is for industry, government, nonprofits and parents to work together to educate kids and to pursue and control predators" and the statement by MySpace and the states would do just that, he said.
Technology Daily's PM Edition on Monday included a story about social-networking firm MySpace and attorneys general from 49 states and the District of Columbia issuing guidelines for keeping kids safe on the Internet, with the aim of involving other high-tech and child-protection stakeholders [read the full story here].
It was noted that Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott was not among the state law enforcers who publicly backed the effort. His office did not return calls by deadline but later in the day, we received a letter written by Abbott to MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe addressing the issue.
In the letter, Abbott said he is concerned that sites like MySpace "do not adequately protect young users" and as a result he was unable to join the joint statement that other state attorneys general issued. However, he did note that he appreciates "the spirit of cooperation" that MySpace has fostered in recent months.
Abbott goes on to claim that MySpace and other social networking sites are unable to truly protect minors until an age verification system is effectively developed and implemented. Signing onto the guidelines "would be misperceived as an endorsement of the inadequate safety measures contained therein," he wrote.
Rob Faris of Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society is circulating some interesting thoughts about the second Internet Governance Forum, which took place in Rio de Janeiro this month.
This was not a forum for making major decisions or generating new strategies for tackling profound questions, he wrote in a lengthy commentary. It was also not a venue for finding the best way to reward innovative thinkers while continuing to promote innovation.
Yet, there is "inestimable value in the conversations and connections made off the official record and unknown benefits to be reaped by the potential future collaborations," he noted.
"If the diversity of attendees or the number and range of opinions expressed is the gauge of success, then the 2007 IGF was a huge success," he wrote. There were nearly 1,400 attendees from all walks of Web life.
But many sessions involved "people talking past one another" and the question Faris is left to ponder is "how the exchanges of opinions can be aggregated and channeled into something genuinely useful."
On a lighter note, he added: "I find fresh coconut milk the perfect fuel for digesting the enormity of Internet governance, particularly in combination with the sonorous lapping of waves. When that isn’t enough, a caipirinha can help with one’s courage of conviction."
Read Faris's detailed reflections on IGF in the next issue of the Filter, Berkman's monthly e-newsletter.
The Supreme Court this week declined to hear an appeal of a trademark case brought against the media company Viacom by a small California software firm called M2. Read the full story in Technology Daily's PM Edition.
M2's owner Dave Escamilla sent us a statement after deadline emphasizing that his is a "federally-registered trademark, brand, and core corporate identity." "For a major conglomerate like Viacom to come along and steal our identity is not right," he charged.
Escamilla also took a swing at the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which previously refused to give M2 a cut of Viacom's revenues. A small shop battling a behemoth "is faced with a Hobson's choice" of either spending serious money on a suit or giving up its trademark, he said.
M2 Software is reviewing its options for rehearing. "We hope that, at minimum, we are raising recognition of the value of the trademark intellectual property rights of smaller companies," Escamilla added.
The curiously named Republican politician Bob Diebold defeated incumbent Bruce Bain last week to become the first GOP mayor of Newark, N.J. in almost two decades. The city councilman won with 52 percent of the vote, according to the Newark Advocate.
"We are going to be good, thoughtful leaders, and we are going to do what's best for the city," Diebold said. He projected a three- or four-point margin of victory, despite being outspent by a significant margin. Diebold said he won with "a good pair of shoes."
The Garden Stater, whose name is on touch-screen voting machines around the country, got our attention in May when he won the Republican primary. Diebold has no connection to Ohio-based Diebold Election Systems.
Elections officials in Newark's jurisdiction sought advice from Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner on whether it would be prudent to allow the machines to display Diebold's name because candidates in Ohio are not allow to display their names within 100 feet of polling places.
A new, highly critical analysis of the a la carte scheme that Sirius and XM hope will better their chances of getting regulatory approval on their merger is flawed, a merger supporter told us after deadline on Tuesday.
The study, conducted by the National Association of Broadcasters (see Technology Daily's PM Edition for more), argued that consumers will end up paying more under the a la carte models unveiled by Sirius CEO Mel Karmazin last month.
But a paragraph between NAB charts claims that "even the so-called 'best of both worlds' offer -- the 100 channel a la carte plan -- provides only a pre-selected sampling of the other service (a mere 11 channels and you have to buy a new radio)."
According to the source, NAB has incorrectly combined one a la carte plan, which does require a new radio, with a separate plan that would let the subscriber listen to all Sirius and select XM programming (with the same old receiver).
The NAB analysis is "misinformed and self-serving" and fails to mention that Sirius and XM would reduce the price for entry level service to $6.99 -- a reduction of 46 percent from the current base rate, the merger backer said.
The suits at NBC-Universal, one of several content creators named in an FTC complaint filed by the Computer and Communications Industry Association, were fit to be tied Wednesday afternoon.
CCIA, which represents tech firms like Google and Microsoft, alleged that NBC, DreamWorks, the Major League Baseball and the National Football League have misrepresented their intellectual property rights through warnings that precede a sports game, movie or book. Read more in Technology Daily's PM Edition.
"There is nothing unlawful, untruthful, or inaccurate about the warning labels on our movies, which adhere to long accepted legal standards and are nearly identical to the warnings used by some of CCIA's own members," NBC said in a statement.
Content creators are "working overtime to develop new digital distribution models to reach our audience" and CCIA "could be a serious and constructive participant" in reducing piracy, the media giant stated. Instead, the trade group has acted irresponsibly "by filing a frivolous complaint for the sake of little more than publicity." Zing!
Update: The NFL responded late in the day, saying that the Copyright Act grants the league, "as the exclusive owner of its game telecasts, a number of valuable rights." The notice has been used for many years and is well understood by viewers to ban uses that would violate the law as opposed to private or non-commercial uses, a spokesman said.
Earlier this week, Tech Daily Dose reported on President Bush's response to a question during a Nashville Q&A about music royalties. Now, thanks to YouTube, there is video of the incident.
Members of the China Copyright Alliance lauded Monday's announcement by U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab that the U.S. would file two requests for World Trade Organization consultations with China due to the country's lax enforcement of intellectual property rights and barriers it imposes on trade in music, movies and books.
The Alliance consists of the Art Copyright Coalition, Association of American Publishers, Independent Film & Television Alliance, International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America. Technology Daily's PM edition has details of Schwab's announcement.
So what happens now? According to the Jurist, the pair of cases enters a 60-day consultation period during which the U.S. and China will try to resolve their differences through negotiation. If the bilateral negotiations reach an impasse, WTO hearings will decide the outcome.
The China Hearsay blog, written by intellectual property attorney Stan Abrams, offers a detailed review of the WTO complaints and what they mean. Abrams works for Lehman, Lee & Xu, a Chinese law firm in Beijing.
Small commercial webmasters joined National Public Radio and digital music services on Monday in filing a detailed complaint with the Copyright Royalty Board concerning its March ruling to increase royalties paid to music labels for Internet radio.
In addition to reinforcing points raised in their own motion for rehearing, the firms (including Accuradio, ioMedia and Radio Paradise) said the retroactive impact of the board's ruling should be axed. The decision applies to 2006 and lasts until 2010.
The filers also complained that the board failed to adopt a definition of "small webcaster" and took issue with the minimum $500 fee established for each channel or station offered. "The CRB must stay the rate changes it has adopted pending exhaustion of administrative rehearing and judicial review," the group said.
"The board decision is devastating to [small webcasters] as it would require that they pay more than 100 percent of their revenues in most cases, and the application of the new royalties in the manner set out in the board's decision would be inconsistent with the Copyright Act as well," they argued.
In related news, the grassroots campaign Save Net Radio has brought on Qorvis Communications to help spread word of their effort. The coalition of independent webmasters started an online petition urging Congress to take action. So far, more than 37,000 signatures have been collected.
Technology Daily's AM edition reported that U.S. trade officials have successfully forged a free trade agreement with South Korea. The deal, which still needs the blessing of lawmakers in both countries, would be the biggest brokered by the U.S. since the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1992.
The agreement will boost high-tech exports by eliminating tariffs on most products, improving access for services, strengthening intellectual property protection and tackling non-tariff regulatory barriers, said William Archey, who heads tech group AeA. In 2006, U.S. high-tech exports to South Korea totaled nearly $11 billion making it the sixth largest market for those exports, AeA said.
The Recording Industry Association of America also weighed in. RIAA Executive Vice President Neil Turkewitz said that Korean copyright legislation and enforcement practices, particularly as they relate to Internet-based theft, are lacking. Korea's broadband penetration is high, which has worsened piracy problems, he said.
"We understand that this agreement will also require Korea to extend the term of protection for sound recordings and performances to 70 years. Achieving global harmonization of the term of protection is increasingly important in a world so interconnected through digital media," he said.
The deadline for filing reconsideration petitions in the Copyright Royalty Board's Internet radio royalties proceeding was 5 p.m. on Monday. Therefore, our coverage in the PM edition did not include input from two key constituencies who requested that details of their filings be withheld until later in the day.
National Public Radio filed a motion for rehearing with the CRB on behalf of its member stations. "The decision, unless modified, will have crippling effects on the availability of public radio to fulfill its mandate to serve the public interest," the document said.
The CRB-imposed minimum $500 annual fee per NPR station or channel is "arbitrary and insupportable" and makes the "erroneous and extremely prejudicial determination that many NPR stations should be treated no differently than commercial webcasting services."
The public radio community wants a rehearing so the three-judge panel can reconsider its "aggregate tuning hour threshold" (ATH) which, if surpassed by any NPR station, would trigger additional royalty payments on a per-performance basis. At a minimum, the CRB should stay the ATH threshold and per-performance aspects of the decision until NPR can file an appeal with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
According to the document, the vast majority of NPR stations cannot track ATH in order to calculate the threshold nor can they keep tabs on the number of copyrighted sound recording performances in order to calculate payments due beyond the ATH threshold.
"The board's decision to dramatically raise public radio stations' rates was based on inaccurate assumptions and lack of understanding of the issues," NPR spokeswoman Andi Sporkin said in a statement. "The new rates inexplicably break with the longstanding tradition of recognizing public radio's noncommercial, nonprofit role."
The Cable Satellite Public Affairs Network, commonly known as C-SPAN, announced on Wednesday that it is liberalizing its copyright policy for "current, future and past coverage of any official events sponsored by Congress and any federal agency -- about half of all programming." The network will permit non-commercial copying, sharing and posting of C-SPAN video on the Internet, with attribution. C-SPAN also plans to expand its capitolhearings.org Web site to make it "a one-stop resource" for congressional webcasts. My editor Danny Glover has more thoughts on the issue at the Beltway Blogroll.
The Copyright Royalty Board decision on royalties for Internet radio services is now posted on the panel's Web site (PDF format). Previous coverage of the issue can be found here.
Although Technology Daily ran a story in Monday's PM edition, National Public Radio took a better-late-than-never approach, offering a reaction to the ruling today.
Andi Sporkin, NPR's vice president for communications, said: "NPR is deeply concerned about the CRB decision since it ignores the unique circumstances of public radio, stifles our shared public service mission to bring music and culture to the broadest possible audience and threatens our survival in digital media."
While the CRB decision claims to make an exception for public radio, the loophole is a limited one that "otherwise imposes a commercial-level tax on anything beyond the most basic music programming and the least amount of listeners," she said.
"NPR is consulting with the public radio community to determine what steps must be taken to reverse this decision and its dire consequences on public service media," Sporkin said.
Tech associations are piling on the praise for the America Competes Act introduced Monday in the Senate by a bipartisan group of leaders including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.
The bill includes education and basic research funding recommendations in recent reports including the National Academies "Rising Above the Gathering Storm.”
"TechNet passionately believes that the most important economic policy issue today is helping our nation remain the global innovation leader," said Lezlee Westine, President and CEO of TechNet.
"The America Competes Act provides a terrific blueprint to ensure our nation remains the world's innovation leader. With Democrats and Republicans from all the relevant committees signed on to this proposal, we are hopeful that the proposal will quickly pass through the Senate. We applaud the authors of this important measure for their strong bipartisan work to keep America the epicenter of cutting edge discovery,” Westine said.
"This new legislation would establish a broad blueprint to strengthen the pillars of American innovation and competitiveness — education, basic research and a business environment to drive innovations,” said Catherine Hunt, president of the American Chemical Society.
Remarks by VeriSign CEO Stratton Sclavos at the Tech Policy Summit in San Jose this week unsurprisingly rubbed Internet registrars the wrong way. Sclavos estimated that competitors like GoDaddy and Network Solutions spent about $15 million lobbying against his company's continued control of the lucrative .com Internet address.
But a spokeswoman for Network Solutions criticized Sclavos' math, saying her firm and GoDaddy, the only two registrars that spent money on lobbying efforts in 2006, doled out considerably less than his guess.
According to GoDaddy's lobbying disclosures filed with the secretary of the Senate, the company spent about $245,000 on outside consultants last year. The firm's in-house lobbying activity associated with staff salaries amounted to about $460,000. Network Solutions appropriated about $420,000 on consultants and spent no money in-house because the company does not have lobbyists on staff.
Meanwhile, Verisign's outside spending on consultants for 2006 was about $885,000, according to disclosures provided by Network Solutions. The company spent $398,435 in-house through June 2006 (no year end report was filed). It is conceivable that VeriSign spent twice as much throughout the year on in-house salaries related to lobbying, the Network Solutions official said.
Remember a few weeks ago when the Republican Study Committee claimed that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was pirating C-Span content by posting video of floor debate on her blog?
Well, techie Carl Malamud used the uproar as inspiration for a hack that might ruffle some feathers in Washington. According to Malamud, Congress largely offers webcasts that are "live only" and in many cases archives of the stream are not provided. In some instances, committees put a "copyright, all rights reserved" notice on the video.
He considers this "really dumb" and has started ripping all congressional streams starting with the House and posting them in a nonproprietary format for download, tagging, review and annotation on Google Video and placing another copy at the Internet Archive.
Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig says the topic raises larger questions. On his blog, Lessig wrote: "As more and more 'notice and take-downs' get directed at people doing political remixes of candidates and their speeches, it's time for a candidate to take the lead to assure that the Web can be used for politics (without the mess of copyright)."
Read more about it in Technology Daily's PM edition on Friday.
Download transmissions are public performances under the Copyright Act and the "plain language" of the law defines the public performance right to encompass the activity, lawyers for the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers told a federal court in New York this week.
Technology Daily ran a story on digital media firms' opposition to ASCAP's claim in Wednesday's PM edition but ASCAP's filing was not made available by our deadline. The Digital Media Association called ASCAP's definition of public performance "a money grab."
In its brief, ASCAP alleges that legislative history also supports the group's conclusion that downloads are public performances. ASCAP cites the Digital Performance in Sound Recordings Act and U.S. adherence to the World Intellectual Property Organization's copyright treaty as proof.
Judicial interpretation of the Copyright Act also supports the claim, ASCAP told the court, adding that "transmissions of copyrighted works are public performances even when the public cannot receive them immediately." "Streams involve the public performance right because they are transmissions of performances," the group alleged. "There is no reason to treat downloads and streams differently."
"The emergence of the digital world is dramatically reshaping the way music is purchased and enjoyed," ASCAP CEO John LoFrumento said in a statement. "We strongly believe that our members are entitled to be compensated for all Internet transmissions of their music to the public – including the public performance that is an essential part of a music download.”
Additional briefs opposing ASCAP were expected from the wireless group CTIA and the Recording Industry Association of America.
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