February 2011

Consumers who don't read the terms of their online purchasing agreements may not be aware that buying an e-book off Amazon affords them a right to loan out the book to a friend. The contract for Kindle book purchases lets users lend out each book to one user for 14 days.

"That's just not widely known yet," says Catherine MacDonald, owner of BookLending.com. It can also be tough to find another Kindle user who owns the book on your reading list. That's why MacDonald started a site to help match borrowers with lenders, which has grown to 15,000 users since its launched last month. The start was shaky: Amazon stepped in. The company said the service must change its name, so KindleLendingClub became BookLending.com. "We knew we were on the wrong side of that particular discussion," MacDonald said. Amazon has since embraced the offering, according to MacDonald, who makes a commission when consumers buy Amazon books they've accessed through links on her website. MacDonald takes home between 4 to 8 percent of any book they buy, and has made thousands of commissions in the last month, she said.

On Feb 24, the Media Access Project's Andrew Schwartzman, on behalf of Prometheus Radio Project, will again be arguing the Federal Communications Commission's media ownership rules before the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia.

The court is hearing challenges from A) Prometheus, Consumers Union and others which argue the FCC went too far in 2007 by loosening the ban on newspaper-broadcast cross ownership and B) by broadcasters and newspapers who argue the FCC should have removed the ban altogether and loosened other rules. The FCC is independently reviewing those rules again to see if it needs to make any changes, and had asked the court to hold off on a decision until it could weigh in again, suggesting it could come to a different conclusion from the members of the 2007 FCC, only two of which remained. But the court lifted a years-long stay on enforcement of the 2007 rules last March and got the briefing schedule/oral argument ball rolling. An FCC spokesman said that associate general counsel Jacob Lewis will argue the case. On behalf of the deregulatory side-newspapers and broadcasters-- there will be a series of lawyers arguing various parts of the case, with Virginia Seitz of Sidley & Austin said to be handling much of the heavy lifting. Each side will get a half-hour, with the FCC getting a full hour to defend itself.

A study into how the profile of the web’s most-visited sites have changed since 2004 highlights the increasing concentration of ‘Media’ and ‘Information & Reference’ brands in the Top 50 sites.

In January 2004, nine media companies featured in the UK’s 50 most-popular brands online. This has risen to almost a third (16) last month, thanks to more time being spent on sites for TV broadcasters ITV, Channel 4 and Sky, and national newspapers owned by Associated, Guardian News & Media, News International and the Telegraph Media Group. The BBC commandeers two entries, one for its general news and TV business and one for its commercial BBC Worldwide operation. Meanwhile, there are also strong showings for Reed Business Information and Hachette Filipacchi UK, the magazine owner of Sugar (online) Red, Psychologies and Elle currently being sold to US giant Hearst. It appears that as the web matures, the content specialists of the offline world are starting to shine online too. It follows increased investment by media companies in time and resources to their digital operations. James Smythe, general manager at UKOM, said: "Over the last seven years, we have seen media owners significantly rise in our Top 50 rankings. Clearly they own the very best content and people are responding to that. With hindsight, I'm sure a few media owners probably wish they had charged for their content from the beginning."

The Obama Administration is appealing the first and likely only lawsuit resulting in a ruling against the secret National Security Agency warrantless surveillance program adopted in the wake of the 2001 terror attacks.

US District Judge Vaughn Walker in December awarded $20,400 each to two American lawyers illegally wiretapped by the George W. Bush administration, and granted their counsel $2.5 million for the costs litigating the case for more than four years. Although Judge Walker had called it “unlawful surveillance,” he went soft on the government because the authorities, he said, believed they were protecting the country in the aftermath of the worst terrorist attack on US soil. Judge Walker did not declare the administration’s so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program unconstitutional, and he declined to issue punitive damages to punish the government for wiretapping in the country without warrants. Instead, the judge granted the two spied-upon lawyers for the now-defunct Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation charity $100 a day for each of the 204 days their telephone calls were wiretapped beginning February 2004, an amount they sought. In addition, they requested about $200,000 each in punitive damages, and the same amount to be awarded to the charity—all of which was denied. The government lodged what is known as a notice of appeal with the judge’s court Feb 18. The government has about three months to file its opening brief with the San Francisco-based 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals.