April 2013

Hollywood’s content rights back on DC stage

Hollywood galloped into Washington before this weekend’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner with its usual message: protecting content.

Popular film producer Harvey Weinstein reintroduced the message April 26, lunging at companies that push open access and spinning a relatively lighthearted event into a political one. “You can start by paying the artists, paying the newspapers, paying the magazines,” Weinstein said to heavy applause at the first Creativity Conference, sponsored partly by the Motion Picture Association of America and held at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. “When you are starving, you are starving. It’s hard to be creative in that situation. Let’s even up the score.” The conference, which spanned more than four hours, encompassed several panels and delved into a wide swath of issues related to technology and innovation. But the content controversy — who owns what in a fast-moving digital age — remains one of the most unresolved.

FCC Names Universal Service Board Members

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski appoints the following persons to serve on the Board of Directors of the Universal Service Administrative Company (USAC):

Representative for incumbent local exchange carriers (ILECs) (other than Bell Operating Companies) with annual operating revenues in excess of $40 million: Kenneth F. Mason
Representative for ILECs (other than Bell Operating Companies) with annual operating revenues less than $40 million: Geoffrey A. Feiss
Interexchange carriers with annual operating revenues of $3 billion or less : Rochelle D. Jones
Representative for competitive local exchange carriers: Joseph Gillan
Representatives for schools that are eligible to receive discounts pursuant to section 54.501 of the Commission’s rules: Daniel A. Domenech, Ph.D., Brian L. Talbott, Ph.D., and Julie Tritt Schell
Representative for low income consumers: Ellis Jacobs
Representatives for rural health care providers that are eligible to receive supported services pursuant to section 54.601 of the Commission’s rules: Eric Brown and Katharine Hsu Wibberly, Ph.D.
Representative for state telecommunications regulators: Ronald A. Brisé
Representatives from the telecommunications industry: Raquel R. Noriega and Olivia Wein
The FCC also released an order waiving portions of its own rules on the composition of the USAC board.

Shelanski Nominated for Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs

President Barack Obama announced his intent to nominate Howard A. Shelanski to be Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Office of Management and Budget.

Shelanski is the Director of the Bureau of Economics at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), a position he has held since 2012. Mr. Shelanski is currently on leave from the Georgetown University Law Center, where he has been a professor since 2011. From 2011 to 2012, he was also Of Counsel to the law firm Davis, Polk & Wardwell. Prior to this, he was the Deputy Director for Antitrust in the FTC's Bureau of Economics from 2009 to 2011. Before joining the FTC, Mr. Shelanski was on the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley from 1997 to 2009. He served as Chief Economist of the Federal Communications Commission from 1999 to 2000 and as Senior Economist for the President's Council of Economic Advisers at the White House from 1998 to 1999. He was an associate with Kellogg, Huber, Hansen, Todd & Evans from 1995 to 1997. He served as a clerk for Justice Antonin G. Scalia of the United States Supreme Court, for Judge Louis H. Pollak of the U.S. District Court in Philadelphia, and for Judge Stephen F. Williams of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Mr. Shelanski received a B.A. from Haverford College, and a J.D. and Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley.

Nelsen Tapped for CPB Board

President Barack Obama announced his intent to nominate Brent F. Nelsen for the Board of Directors of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Nelsen is a Professor of Political Science at Furman University, a position he has held since 2002. He has served as Chair of the South Carolina Educational Television Commission since 2011. From 2003 to 2009, he served as Chair of the Department of Political Science at Furman University, and has held various teaching positions there since 1990. He was President of the South Carolina Political Science Association from 2009 to 2010, and is a member of the American Political Science Association. Dr. Nelsen received a B.A. from Wheaton College, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Health Information Technology Policy Committee Appointment

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) established the Health Information Technology Policy Committee to make recommendations on the implementation of a nationwide health information technology infrastructure to the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. There is an opening on the committee for a member from the research community. Candidates considered for this appointment will be required to complete a financial disclosure form. For this appointment the Comptroller General of the United States is announcing the following: Letters of nomination and resumes should be submitted through May 18, 2013 to ensure adequate opportunity for review and consideration of nominees.

Google Fiber and the Next Stage In The Evolution of T. GOOG

[Commentary] Without owning a network, Google is now happily embedded within the mobile world. And all the mobile companies, that swore in 2007 they would fight to the death to keep their platforms closed and that disruptive Google out, plan a good portion of their lifecycle around Google’s Android operating system and Google mobile applications.

Every time Google starts to look at a new business, such as wireless, or television, or broadband fiber networks, analysts shake their heads and babble on endlessly about how said new business is so totally different from what Google does and lacks basic symmetries so Google is bound to fail. This is because the analysts in question are looking at the MVPD business, or the wireless business, or the application business through the model of a traditional company. These analysts imagine that Google wants to be the next Comcast, or the next Verizon Wireless, or the next Samsung. And, looking at how hard it is to break into the respective industry, they predict Google will lack the ability to wipe out the incumbents, who will fight back with every competition repressing mechanism they have. Analysts do not understand toxoplasma gondii (or T. GOOG, for our purposes) and how it works.

Google Spent $291 Million on Acquisitions First Quarter

Google spent $291 million on acquisitions and assets during the first quarter as the company looked to bolster revenue and user growth.

Among the eight deals last quarter, $150 million was for patents and developed technology. In February, the company announced it agreed to buy Channel Intelligence Inc. for $125 million, adding online- marketing tools used by retailers to bolster Internet sales. Google is stepping up purchases of companies and technology to expand beyond its core search-based advertising business. Last year, the company completed its largest acquisition, buying Motorola Mobility Holdings for $12.5 billion, adding patents and a smartphone and tablet business.

Does anyone know why Google bought Motorola?

Why did Google spend $12.5 billion to purchase Motorola Mobility? It's been nearly two years since the deal was announced and close to a full year since it closed, and the questions keep piling up while the answers keep getting worse.

The biggest problem is that Motorola's patent portfolio doesn't appear to be worth anything close to what either company assumed: the judge in the Microsoft v. Motorola patent case ruled yesterday that Redmond owes a paltry $1.7 million in annual royalties for using Motorola's standards-related Wi-Fi and video-encoding patents in every Xbox 360 and Windows 7 PC sold, rather than the $4 billion Motorola had originally demanded. To put that in perspective, it would take 3,235 years for Microsoft's royalties to pay off Google's $5.5 billion valuation of Motorola's patent portfolio. That's a significant blow to Google's interest in using Motorola's patent portfolio as a defensive measure against an increasingly-litigious Apple. With the value of Motorola's patents now coming into focus, the complete implosion of a previous suit against Apple, and increasing domestic and international pressure against using standards-related patents to block competitive products, it's not unreasonable to say that any patent-related benefits to the purchase have vanished. Google may have wanted to buy a bulwark against future Apple lawsuits, but it ended up with a fairly anemic patent-licensing business instead. That's a significant blow to Google's interest in using Motorola's patent portfolio as a defensive measure against an increasingly-litigious Apple.

With the value of Motorola's patents now coming into focus, the complete implosion of a previous suit against Apple, and increasing domestic and international pressure against using standards-related patents to block competitive products, it's not unreasonable to say that any patent-related benefits to the purchase have vanished. Google may have wanted to buy a bulwark against future Apple lawsuits, but it ended up with a fairly anemic patent-licensing business instead. And that patent-licensing business certainly isn't enough to offset quarter after quarter of losses as Motorola's current products fail to compete against strong devices from Apple, Samsung, and HTC. Google has repeatedly said that it inherited an 18-month pipeline of products from the company that it needs to flush out.

Looking at Facebook’s Friend and Relationship Status Through Big Data

Wolfram Alpha, a computational search engine, released a detailed report about people’s friendships and relationship habits on Facebook.

The research is corralled from the details of more than one million people who have signed up for a free feature on the Wolfram Alpha Web site, Personal Analytics for Facebook, that uses complex algorithms to answer questions and generate reports about the social network. The research found that the median user has 342 friends on Facebook. This has continued to grow rapidly in recent years. But that number does not include everyone on the service, as “there are significantly more people who have almost no Facebook friends.” The differentiating factor between people who are ultra-popular on the site, and those who are Facebook loners, seems to come down to age. “After a rapid rise, the number of friends peaks for people in their late teenage years, and then declines thereafter,” wrote Stephen Wolfram, a scientist and entrepreneur. “Why is this? I suspect it’s partly a reflection of people’s intrinsic behavior, and partly a reflection of the fact that Facebook hasn’t yet been around very long.” The report also showed the relationship status of people across Facebook. People begin to change their relationship status to “in a relationship” in their early 20s, and then at around 27 begin to tag themselves as “engaged.” The next step, of course, is letting the world know they are married. The marriage relationships status continues to grow slowly for people in the late 20s all the way to age 60.

Researchers Call Out Twitter Celebrities With Suspicious Followings

Security researchers recently shed a bright light on the multimillion-dollar underground market for fake Twitter followers. Now, they are highlighting what they believe to be some of the market’s high-profile clientele.

In a follow-up to their earlier report, two Italian security researchers, Andrea Stroppa and Carlo De Micheli, call out Twitter accounts that added or lost a large number of followers in one day. Their list includes brands like Pepsi, Mercedes-Benz and Louis Vuitton; politicians like Newt Gingrich, Representative Jared Polis and Dmitri Medvedev, the Russian prime minister; and the rappers 50 Cent and Sean Combs, known as Diddy.

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