August 2012

Hulu Faces Privacy Test in Court

Can a privacy law passed in the era of videotape rentals be applied in the era of Internet streaming? Hulu, the online video content provider, is about to face the test.

A lawsuit filed in a federal court in California says Hulu violated its users’ privacy by sharing their viewing history with companies that could in turn offer them tailored advertisements. The case rests on a 1988 law, the Video Privacy Protection Act, intended to protect the privacy of video rental records. It was passed by Congress after a newspaper obtained records of what movies the conservative Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork had rented, and published an article based on them. Hulu sought to have the case dismissed, noting that it is not a video rental business. Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler concluded that the law did not preclude application to “new technologies for prerecorded video content” and allowed the case to go ahead. Next comes the discovery of evidence and arguments. The judge has not yet ruled on the merits of the case.

Appeals court okays warrantless tracking

A federal appeals court ruled that police do not need a warrant to track the location of a suspect's phone.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled that the Drug Enforcement Administration did not violate the constitutional rights of Melvin Skinner when they collected his phone's GPS data. Skinner's lawyers argued that the police violated his Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches by collecting his phone's GPS data without first obtaining a warrant. But the appeals court ruled that Skinner has no reasonable expectation of privacy for his cellphone's location data. "When criminals use modern technological devices to carry out criminal acts and to reduce the possibility of detection, they can hardly complain when the police take advantage of the inherent characteristics of those very devices to catch them," Judge John Rogers wrote in his opinion for the panel.

Smartphone campaigning has its pitfalls, privacy group says

Smartphones may be the coolest new tool for Election 2012, but users should think twice before taking advantage of the technology, privacy advocates say.

A report from the Electronic Privacy Information Center said that campaigns and voters should be aware of the security and privacy issues that can accompany the next generation of political campaigning. One thing voters should be careful of when interacting with political campaigns, the group said, is keeping a clear line of separation between their work and personal devices. While voters may feel comfortable sharing certain information with the campaign of their choice, they may not feel as comfortable seeing the information posted somewhere else, or in an easier-to-access format.

GOP senators slam Democrats on cybersecurity stall

A group of Republican senators hit back against Senate Democrats' claims that Republicans put national security at risk by blocking a sweeping cybersecurity bill earlier this month. Nine Republican senators -- including Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX -- issued a statement that pointed fingers at Democrats for holding the Senate back from moving on legislation aimed at boosting the security of computer systems and networks of critical infrastructure.

They also took a swipe at Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's (D-NV) commitment to national security for not bringing the defense authorization bill up for consideration before the August recess. The nine senators are co-sponsors of a rival cybersecurity measure — the Secure IT Act — to the legislation championed by Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) that the Senate took up earlier this month. Their comments signal that the partisan war over cybersecurity legislation is still fuming, and it's unclear whether the two sides will be able to reach a compromise on the issue before the end of recess.

Public Knowledge Hires Chris Lewis and Bartees Cox to Fill VP and Communication Roles

Public Knowledge announced two additions to its staff. Christopher Lewis will join the organization as Vice President of Government Affairs, overseeing Public Knowledge's government affairs and outreach strategy through constituency building, event organizing, strategizing and relationship building. He will start on August 20. Bartees Cox will take on the role of Communications Associate, planning and implementing Public Knowledge's media strategy through social media, blogs and traditional media. He started on August 7. In addition, the organization announced that its former Vice President of Government Affairs, Ernesto Falcon, will remain with the organization as Special Advisor.

Christopher Lewis comes to Public Knowledge after three and a half years at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) where he most recently served as Deputy Director of the Office of Legislative Affairs and advised the FCC Chairman on legislative and political strategy. While at the FCC, Chris worked on a variety of communications and technology issues including the national digital television transition, the National Broadband Plan, network neutrality, privacy, and spectrum policy; Lewis also served as staff for the FCC’s Technological Advisory Council. Prior to joining the FCC, Chris was the North Carolina Field Director for Barack Obama’s Presidential Campaign and worked for the campaign in several primary states. Chris graduated from Harvard University with a Bachelors degree in Government.

Bartees Cox joins Public Knowledge as a Communications Associate after interning with Free Press as a Communications and Policy Assistant. While at Free Press he worked on media ownership, spectrum policy and municipal broadband issues. Prior to joining Free Press, Cox was public relations intern at Crosby-Volmer International Communications, The Urban League and the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation. His passion for intellectual property and media reform stem from watching minority communities’ ability to succeed lessen due to lack of broadband-based technologies and services in minority areas. Bartees received a B.A. in Public Relations from the University of Oklahoma where he was a Gaylord College fellow.

FCC: Expanded Basic Cable TV Rates Climbed 5.4% In 2010

The average monthly price of expanded basic cable TV rose 5.4% in 2010, to $57.46, according to the Federal Communications Commission's annual report on cable industry rates -- while for the third consecutive year, the FCC found that cable rates in "competitive" markets were higher.

The FCC noted that the overall increase in cable rates was higher than the 1.6% in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for 2010. From 1995 to 2011, the price of expanded basic service increased at a compound average annual growth rate of 6.1% whereas the CPI increased at a CAGR of 2.4%. On a per-channel basis, however, the cost of cable TV has risen slower than the pace of inflation, according to the FCC. In fact, the price per channel for subscribers purchasing expanded basic service decreased by 2.1% for the 12 months ended Jan. 1, 2011, to 57 cents per channel. Over the past 16 years, the increase in price per channel was 0.9% annually.

The National Cable & Telecommunications Association declined to comment on the report. In the past, the trade group has called the FCC's cable rates survey findings "largely irrelevant."

Should we trust Google when it comes to piracy and search?

Google recently announced that it will start filtering its search results based in part on the number of copyright-takedown requests that have been filed against a site: according to a blog post from the search giant, it will tweak its algorithms to rank a website lower if it has a large number of “valid copyright-removal notices.”

And how does Google know whether a copyright-removal notice is valid or not? The short answer is that it doesn’t — which is part of the reason why YouTube in particular sees so many bogus takedowns. So how do we know that this filtering of search results won’t adversely affect some websites that are perfectly legitimate? Google’s response so far seems to be “trust us.” But should we? The search company says it decided to make the change because it will help users “find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily,” but some critics of the move have a different theory: they figure Google has essentially caved in to pressure from media and content companies — the same kind of pressure that led the U.S. government to push for legislation such as SOPA and PIPA, which would have allowed copyright holders to remove offending websites from the internet completely based on just an allegation of infringement. While Google’s changes won’t do this, being pushed down in the search results of the web’s dominant search player can have a serious impact.

XO fulfills its fiber fantasies with 100-gigabit long-haul network

Nationwide fiber backbone provider XO claims it is the first US operator to build an inter-city 100-gigabit fiber network — other carriers have performed the feats in the confines of big cities, but XO has gone coast to coast. The upgrade boosts XO’s capacity by a factor of 10.

XO sells transport and intra-city capacity to enterprises, cable companies, wireless and wireline carriers, and Internet companies looking to move massive amounts of traffic between point A and point B. For the upgrade, XO is using Nokia Siemens Networks’ latest-generation dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) technology to boost the bandwidth carried by a single wavelength of light from 10 Gbps to 100 Gbps. NSN’s platform can support 96 simultaneous wavelengths so the theoretical total capacity of the network is 9.6 Terabits per second.

US broadband growth slows to a trickle with only 260,000 new connections

US broadband is growing – albeit much more slowly according to data collected by Leichtman Research Group, a market research company. During the second quarter of 2012, US added 260,000 broadband subscribers, down sharply from 350,000 broadband subscribers added during the second quarter of 2011.

According to Leichtman, “the net broadband additions in the quarter were the fewest of any quarter in the eleven years LRG has been tracking the industry.”
Top cable companies added about 330,000 subscribers. In the second quarter of 2011, they had added 271,000 new subscribers.
The top telephone companies lost about 70,000 subscribers versus a gain of about 80,000 in 2Q 2011. AT&T and Verizon had fewer net broadband adds in Q2 2012 than in any previous quarter in the past eleven years
AT&T and Verizon added 669,000 fiber subscribers in the quarter (via U-verse and FiOS) and had a net loss of 763,000 DSL subscribers.
Comcast now has 18.74 million broadband subscribers, making it the biggest broadband provider in the US.

Google can appeal class certification in Books case

The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit allowed Google to appeal a May ruling that let the Authors Guild go forward with a copyright class action over Google’s unauthorized book scanning.

The significance of the 2nd Circuit’s order is that the current proceedings, which have been heating up, will likely be suspended while the appeals court decides whether the class action should have been allowed to go ahead in the first place. The appeal will go before a panel of two judges after Judge Denny Chin recused himself on the grounds that he is still involved in the original case. The decision to let Google appeal the certification order effectively takes the case out of the hands of Chin until the appeals court rules. Judge Chin has been skeptical of many of Google’s positions so far. The appeal will result in one of two outcomes. In one scenario, the Second Circuit could agree with Google that the class of authors shouldn’t have been certified in the first place. This would effectively put an end to the long-running case. In the alternative, the appeals court could uphold Chin’s decision to certify the class and return the case to him with additional guidance about what he should do next.

Benton

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