March 2013

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-MI) said he is aiming to wrap up talks with the White House and privacy advocates about measures in his information-sharing cybersecurity bill by April so it can move to a markup.

"We're still negotiating a lot of little pieces of the bill with privacy groups and the White House, and we're having great conversations with both Democrat and Republican senators now, so I'm hoping to have that wrapped up by April, where we can actually move a product in April," Chairman Rogers said in an interview with The Hill at the RSA cybersecurity conference in San Francisco. Chairman Rogers said the recent talks with the White House have been encouraging and that the release of President Obama's cybersecurity executive order this month is a positive political development for the information-sharing bill. "We're negotiating, we're talking, which is better than what happened last year, and I'm encouraged by that," he said. "Here's the good news, everybody agrees that we need an information-sharing [measure] now. The executive order, I think, takes pressure off the Senate from having to pass a infrastructure standards mandate or bill. That's great. That means the one thing we can get bipartisan agreement on is this cyber sharing portion. I think it actually increases our chances of getting a product to the President's desk for signature."

NBCUniversal is in talks with several Internet video providers to license a full lineup of programming comparable to what it offers traditional pay TV providers, Comcast disclosed in its annual report to the Federal Communications Commission.

In the past year, “NBCUniversal received and is negotiating several 'full freight' requests,” Comcast said in its second annual compliance report filed with the FCC. The report is required under the FCC's 2011 approval of Comcast/NBCU transaction. Comcast declined to provide additional details on the negotiations. Aside from those seeking such “full freight” deals, Comcast noted that content-licensing agreements with OVDs have become a regular part of NBCU’s business. In the past year, NBCUniversal entered into new agreements with Internet video distributors, including Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Flixster, Google, MediaNavi, Target, Toys ‘R’ Us and Vd.io.

Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John D. (Jay) Rockefeller IV (D-WV) sent letters to four US wireless telephone companies sharing his concerns that the practice of “cramming” unauthorized third-party charges is migrating to consumers’ wireless telephone bills.

Consumers have already lost billions of dollars to cramming on their wireline telephone bills. Chairman Rockefeller wrote the same wireless companies – AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Sprint, and T-Mobile – in June 2012 about the growing incidence of cramming on wireless telephone bills. Since then, studies and reviews of consumer complaint websites call into question the effectiveness of many protections that wireless companies have put in place to protect consumers from unauthorized third-party charges. The Committee completed a year-long investigation into cramming on wireline telephone bills in 2011, which showed that cramming has cost American consumers and businesses billions of dollars over the past decade. In response to the Committee’s investigation, wireline telephone companies took a number of positive steps last year to eliminate cramming on wireline bills. However, millions of American consumers and businesses now use wireless telephones. Rockefeller is concerned that wireless companies have not acted aggressively enough to ensure cramming does not migrate from wireline to wireless bills.

The Authors Guild is asking an appeals court to revive its lawsuit against five universities that worked with Google to digitize books.

The authors' organization is asking the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals to rule that the digitization initiative is not protected by fair use principles. "The Libraries’ actions subvert the fundamental premises of copyright law and, unless enjoined, threaten to decimate existing and developing markets for literary works," the Authors Guild argues in its legal papers. Last year, U.S. District Court Harold Baer in New York rejected that argument, ruling that the project was "transformative," and therefore met the criteria for fair use. He characterized the project as an "invaluable contribution to the progress of science and cultivation of the arts," in a ruling granting summary judgment to the HathiTrust.