Content owners in nearly every country have tried various strategies to get compensation for losses due to piracy. But copyright owners in Belgium have a bold new tactic: go after Internet service providers in court, demanding 3.4 percent of the fees their customers pay for Internet service.
The lawsuit has been brought by the Belgian Society of Authors, Composers, and Publishers, known as Sabam. The group's claim is similar to the blank-media levy that exists in Canada. It seems to be based on the assumption that a particular medium is used to break copyright law, and therefore all the users of that media should rightly be required to pay a tax. However, Canada's blank media tax was approved by its legislature. To get their 3.4 percent cut, Belgian authors, composers, and publishers are hoping to bypass the legislature with a lawsuit.
On May 1, President Barack Obama announced his intention to nominate Tom Wheeler to be the chairman of the Federal Commutations Commission. President Obama also named, current FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn the Interim Chair of the FCC. The following statement can be attributed to Benton Foundation Chairman Charles Benton:
Home entertainment spending on movies and television shows rose about 5 percent in the first quarter, to $4.69 billion, compared with the same period a year ago, according to figures released by the Digital Entertainment Group, an industry consortium. Sales in digital formats, including video-on-demand, rose more than 26 percent to about $1.6 billion, from about $1.2 billion a year earlier.
T-Mobile has finalized its acquisition of MetroPCS. With the deal done, the company will turn to the task of rapidly integrating the prepaid carrier into its existing business and technology roadmap.
The company has been working on integration plans for months and aims to hit the ground running. T-Mobile plans to keep MetroPCS as a separate brand targeting different demographics. That means operating separate stores and maintaining both brands. Plus, T-Mobile has the opportunity to now expand the brand into markets that MetroPCS had missed out on due to a lack of spectrum. However, T-Mobile hopes to quickly start selling new and renewing MetroPCS customers on a new crop of devices that run on T-Mobile’s spectrum. Meanwhile, T-Mobile has made a number of big moves separate from the MetroPCS deal. Last month it announced a plan to scrap phone subsidies, eliminate long-term contracts and, at long last add the iPhone to its lineup. And the company has spent $4 billion modernizing its network, moving to more widely adopted spectrum and adopting LTE.
A week after hackers broke into The Associated Press' Twitter feed and roiled financial markets, federal regulators say they need to find ways to deal with the impact of social media. Members of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission didn't outline immediate action. CFTC Commissioner Bart Chilton suggested they consider imposing tougher cybersecurity rules for investment firms and others that trade. Firms could be held accountable and sanctioned if their security systems were inadequate to prevent a breech.
Over the last decade, intrusion threats have evolved to encompass everything from teenagers in their basements trying to breach networks for fun, to professional criminals stealing credit card information. But today’s threats have escalated to theft of corporate and government intellectual capital, said Christopher Ling, senior vice president of Booz Allen Hamilton.
“Advanced, persistent threats created by nation states have leaked out onto the black market, and bad actors can buy them,” Ling added. “It is a great concern, because traditional cybersecurity weapons are being outgunned.” The conventional approach of perimeter defense involves making lists of suspicious signatures and then telling systems: “When you see this signature, stop it.” But that approach is failing in an era of zero-day attacks (a term that means anti-virus developers have had zero days to address and patch the vulnerability). The Stuxnet worm that damaged Iran’s nuclear complex is an example of an attack that wasn’t discovered until the damage was already done. Local and state government offices that may not see themselves as prime targets for theft of intellectual property or financial information can be used as the weak link to get at financial institutions, Ling said. “Banks use government websites all the time for things like title searches. Attackers can spot a weakness in a county government website and attack the bank from there.”
Search engine optimization (SEO) will change dramatically within the next few years as a result of the Internet transitioning from 23 top-level domain names (TLD) to more than 1,409 strings.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a nonprofit corporation that oversees the use of Internet domain names, will send internationalized domain names (IDNs) live this summer. The generic names bought by companies like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and others will start rolling out by the end of 2013. Jennifer Wolfe, president of Wolfe Domain, speaking at the MediaPost Search Insider Summit, understands it may seem like a potential threat to search experts, but she said marketers need to look at the millions of dollar companies invested and assume they're not doing it without a plan.
Federal agencies are making progress not only to make the workplace more flexible for employees but also to continue operations in the event of an emergency.
So what tools and devices are federal employees using for telework? According to a survey of Telework Week participants by Mobile Work Exchange, laptops remain the tool of choice among teleworkers, with more than 90 percent of Telework Week participants saying they use a laptop. Sixty percent of teleworkers said they used a VPN connection for telework, while nearly 30 percent said they used a smartphone. Other tools, like virtual desktops, collaboration tools, video conferencing, desktop PCs and tablets were less popular among Telework Week participants, though collaboration tools, video conferencing and tablets were more popular among participants this year than in 2012.
[Commentary] I want to tackle the current "Tom Wheeler would have approved the AT&T/T-Mo merger in 2011."
It's easy to say, "oh, all that lobbying for the cable and wireless industry was long ago when they were scrappy upstarts. Why, that was so long ago that the cable industry were battling the broadcasters and the wireless industry were battling the telcos (as opposed to these days when the cable industry battles the telcos and the wireless industry battles the broadcasters)!" But if Wheeler was actually a supporter of AT&T/T-Mobile, then it would seem to prove he still has sympathies to his old industry incumbent comrades. I confess I don't see the same enthusiasm for a combined AT&T/T-Mobile that some have seen. Mind you, perhaps I am unduly charmed by Wheeler's embrace of unlicensed spectrum, Wi-Fi and federal spectrum sharing back in October 2011 – well before his supposed cable masters embraced it and while his supposed wireless masters at AT&T and Verizon still rejected this as a "distraction" from clearing and auctioning. Or perhaps as a fellow who writes long-winded blogs on complex telecom policy I'm unduly sympathetic to complaints that one's blog posts get misinterpreted.
But in any event, it’s worth looking at what Wheeler actually said.
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) is allowing EAGLE-Net Alliance to resume the buildout of a taxpayer-funded high-speed Internet network aiming to connect the majority of Colorado's school districts, many of them in dire need of additional bandwidth.
EAGLE-Net, the much-criticized organization awarded a $100.6 million grant in 2010 as part of the broadband stimulus program, has been suspended since December after altering its rollout plans without first obtaining the required environmental approvals. Initially scheduled for completion by the end of August, EAGLE-Net will now need an additional year and about $10 million to $15 million in private financing to finish its network. "NTIA has been working closely with EAGLE-Net over the past few months to address the environmental requirements needed to get the project back on track, and it has met those requirements," said NTIA Associate Administrator Anthony Wilhelm. "We'll continue to vigorously oversee the project to protect taxpayers' investment." He added that lifting the suspension now "will allow the organization to take advantage of the spring construction season and focus on helping western Colorado school districts get access to high capacity broadband."
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