April 2012

House should kill cybersecurity bill

[Commentary] When political polar opposites like Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) and presidential candidate Ron Paul (R-TX) are both arguing against a piece of legislation, you know it must have serious problems. The bill before the House is the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, known as CISPA. It has the best of intentions, to bolster the nation's defense against the very real threat of cyberattacks. But Democrat Lofgren is right when she argues it gives the government far too much access to the online data of every American Internet user. Paul's criticism goes even further, saying it makes "government spies" of companies such as Google and Facebook. He says it would allow them to share all kinds of information with the government, including members' emails, the websites they visit and the medical, educational and financial records they may have online. A House vote is scheduled April 27. Congress needs to kill this bill and start over. When it does, it should include Rep Lofgren or someone like her to help write it with the privacy interests of America's Internet users in mind.

Genres Stretch, for Better and Worse, as YouTube Takes On TV

YouTube announced a 100 or so new channels in October and those new channels — which for the first time are receiving money upfront from YouTube, rather than just a share of advertising revenue — have been seen as this video site’s first major effort to take on the television industry, and television-and-film-based competitors like Hulu and Netflix, for advertising dollars. With regular weekly shows and viewer-friendly playlists, they are indeed slightly more televisionlike than the millions of mostly homemade videos that surround them. But the harder they try to resemble television, the less interesting they are. About 60 channels are active, and during a week spent rooting among them like a truffle hog in the YouTube forest, I unearthed more than a few tasty morsels.

Art Is Long; Copyrights Can Even Be Longer

Artists’ copyright is frequently misunderstood. Even if a painting (or drawing or photograph) has been sold to a collector or a museum, in general, the artist or his heirs retain control of the original image for 70 years after the artist’s death. Think of a novel. You may own a book, but you don’t own the writer’s words; they remain the intellectual property of the author for a time. So while MoMA owns the actual canvas of “Les Demoiselles,” the family of Picasso, who died in 1973, still owns the image. And under existing law, the estate will continue to own the copyright until 2043. If someone wants to reproduce the painting — on a Web site, a calendar, a T-shirt, or in a film — it is the estate that must give its permission, not the museum. That is why, despite the expansion, Google Art Project still does not contain a single Picasso.

The Emergence of Online Video: Is It The Future?

The Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing to consider the future of online video, explore the migration of viewing from traditional television to Internet and broadband-enabled video content, and examine the role that disruptive technologies play in facilitating this transition, and the business and legal models that foster the growth of this sector.

Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) started with a couple of questions: 1) How will the disruptive technology that online viewing provides lead to better content and more consumer choice? And 2) How do we harness this change for the power of consumers so we can get higher quality programming at lower rates? He voiced concerns that despite the growth of new video services such as Netflix and Hulu, consumers are forced to pay too much for television programming and were saddled with channels they didn’t want.

Internet executives at the hearing touted the growth of online platforms which they said would give consumers more choices outside of traditional cable providers.

Paul Misener, Amazon.com vice president for Global Public Policy, warned that policymakers should ensure that the Internet remained a "nondiscriminatory, open platform" to protect consumer choice. "The open Internet encourages innovation and allows consumers to decide whether a particular product or service succeeds or fails," he said. Misener said online video providers were heartened that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has pledged to monitor the Internet for anticompetitive or otherwise harmful effects. But he said lawmakers also needed to "remain vigilant on … Internet openness." Misener singled out data caps imposed by many consumer Internet providers as requiring such vigilance.

IAC Chairman Barry Diller that the US telecommunications law must be rewritten because of the advance of the Internet. Diller said changes in media brought about by online content have made the 1996 Telecommunications Act largely useless, and to a great extent an impediment to progress. “The laws we have … do not address the reality of this new force,” Diller said, referring to the Internet. “We do not have a 'first rate broadband infrastructure in this country,'” he said in response to a question from Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) on the readiness of nation's communications infrastructure to handle new online video offerings. “We are slower and less deployed than 15-18 countries,” he said. “[W]e need as good a system as any in the world … and right now, we don't [have one].”

Diller also said he thinks the same rules and obligations that apply to traditional video distributors should be applied to online video services, though he also said he believed that should be light-touch regulation. Diller's point was that a level playing field was crucial.

Diller got a grilling from Sen Jim DeMint (R-SC) about Aereo TV. After Diller pitched the service to the committee as a technological innovation that gives viewers access to "perfect" HD pictures using their own personal remote antenna to view online programming they do not have to pay for, Sen DeMint probed his explanation. The senator suggested Aereo TV was intercepting signals and retransmitting them, charging viewers for distributing a network while not paying content providers. Diller countered that the service was not retransmitting or distributing content and was not a network. He said that if RadioShack was considered a distributor for selling an antenna to a consumer, then so was Aereo TV because it was analogous. As to the broadcasters' fighting Aereo, Diller suggested it went with the territory.

Nonprofit Group Highlights Privacy Issues in Mobile Payments

Some mobile payment methods are so convenient that you can walk into a store and buy something without even taking your smartphone out of your pocket. But at what cost?

The Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit organization that focuses on technology laws, thinks privacy is the major tradeoff with mobile payments. Mobile payments can expose payments data to more parties than traditional credit cards do. In the case of Google Wallet, for example, you expose your data to Google, which serves as the mobile payments provider, in addition to credit card issuers and payment processors, the nonprofit group said. Third-party apps can potentially gain access to data, too, it said. Once all the small bits are combined, like the customer’s e-mail addresses, phone numbers and purchase histories, merchants have a pretty detailed customer profile.

Apple Crushes Estimates Again

Apple obliterated recent worries that have dragged down its stock price over the past few weeks.

The company posted net income of $11.6 billion on revenue of $39.19 billion. Earnings per share were $12.30, far more than the $10.06 per share analysts had been expecting. Apple said it sold 35.1 million iPhones for the quarter, up more than 88 percent from the year prior; 11.8 million iPads, up 151 percent; 4 million Macs, up 7 percent; and nearly 7.7 million iPods, down 15 percent. Big numbers — all of them. And save for lower than expected iPad sales, they beat estimates.

NCTA Backs House Cybersecurity Bills

The National Cable & Telecommunications Association joined with US Telecom and CTIA: The Wireless Association to push for cybersecurity legislation that emphasizes info sharing, liability protections for industry, and more R&D over government-enforced security guidelines.

The same groups got together last week to outline their basic cybersecurity principles, which generally dovetail with Republican-backed House bills that emphasize self-regulation. In a letter to House leaders in advance of scheduled House floor votes later this week on cybersecurity legislation, NCTA and company again asked Congress to pass H.R. 3523, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), adding their support for three other related bills -- H.R. 3834, Advancing America's Networking and Information Technology Research and Development Act; H.R. 2096, the Cybersecurity Enhancement Act of 2011; and H.R. 4257, the Federal Information Security Amendments Act. Together, the cable and phone trade associations argue the bills will provide a "flexible and adaptable" cybersecurity policy that relies on industry best practices rather than prescriptive government rules they say will be outdated before they can be enforced.

Groups Ask FCC to Stop Clock on Verizon/Cable Spectrum Deal

Sprint/Nextel, DirecTV, and public advocacy groups critical of the proposed sale of cable spectrum to Verizon have joined with the Communications Workers of America to ask the Federal Communications Commission to stop the clock on its merger review, citing software problems with opening some of the documents filed by Verizon and cable operators.

"The Commission has taken significant steps toward making its process transparent by allowing authorized personnel to review and analyze the documentation that it has required from the Applicants," they say in a letter to the commission dated April 24. "Now, considering the delays in receiving data and the technical challenges involved, the Commission should take the further step of giving reviewers the additional time that is necessary to study the documents and data and respond to the Commission with cogent analysis." They say that some files can't be opened with software "commonly used by law firms" while the charges the applicants are levying for, paper copies and electronic media make it hard for some organizations representing the public interest to review the documents.

Comcast to FCC: Bloomberg Claim of Channel Relocations Is Wrong

Comcast told the Federal Communications Commission that Bloomberg's claims it had relocated channels in violation of a non-networking condition in the NBCU deal is "demonstrably false." That came in a response to Bloomberg's April 10 comments on Comcast's annual report Feb. 28 on compliance with deal conditions. Bloomberg filed a separate complaint against Comcast over the no news neighborhooding condition, which it says Comcast has violated.

US eyes broader cyber-threat pact with companies

The US government is close to completing rules for a long-awaited expansion of the number of defense contractors with which it swaps data on cyber threats, the Defense Department's chief information officer said.

The number of companies would jump from 37 currently to 200, said Teri Takai, the chief information officer. She said she hoped that a federal rule-making process under way would wrap up within the next 60 days amid what she and other Pentagon officials describe as mounting cyber threats to US high-tech companies. The companies will have to agree on a protocol for information-sharing among themselves and with the Defense Department, which will act as coordinator for the Defense Industrial Base Cyber Security and Information Assurance program.

Benton

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