September 2013

ESPN vs. NFL: A Win for the NFL Is a Loss for the Players and Fans

[Commentary] The "bounty-gate" stories of 2012’s "shocking" revelations of players' calculated violent attacks showing the National Football League (NFL) working very hard to avoid questions about its commitment to players' health and safety came to mind as I read about ESPN's sudden decision to withdraw from a partnership with PBS to present a documentary report about concussions in football.

With more than 4,500 former football players suing the NFL over claims that it hid known risks of life changing head trauma, the ESPN decision is puzzling. That is until one considers the consequences of displeasing the NFL. The NFL has the power to protect its brand by limiting questions about its commitment to protecting the health of the players and fans. But for the premier sports network, however, it is evidently more important to retain the favor of the rich and powerful men who might withhold access to televising the games that promise the largest audiences and hence, command the highest advertising revenue.

[Leslie Gerwin is the Associate Director of the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University and Adjunct Professor of Law, who teaches Public Health Law and Policy, at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University]

E-Books Could Be the Future Of Social Media

[Commentary] In the future, e-books will act just like social networks. We’ll use them on our phones, share and comment right inside e-reader apps, and publishers will use our data to help them make better marketing decisions. If you think digital reading is exploding now, just wait.

Latest Broadband Numbers Highlight Persistent Problems

[Commentary] A look at Pew’s findings in terms of broadband usage in the United States. Pew finds that 85% of American adults ages 18 and older use the Internet and 70% of American adults have a high-speed broadband connection at home, and 80% have a broadband connection, a smartphone or both. That means that 20% of Americans have neither a home broadband connection nor a smartphone. The demographic factors most correlated with home broadband adoption continue to be educational attainment, age, and household income. Including smartphones in Pew’s broadband definition actually exacerbates differences in broadband adoption rates between young and old. “It is dangerous to call everything ‘broadband,’” former White House aide to President Barack Obama Susan Crawford wrote in Wired, “because it allows us to pretend there’s a vibrant marketplace for high-speed Internet access, with satellite duking it out with cable modem access, mobile wireless supplanting the need for a wire at home, and no need for oversight or a change in industrial policy.” Pew does not include smartphones in its definition of what constitutes a “broadband user” – mainly because there is no widespread consensus as to whether 3G or 4G smartphones qualify as “broadband” speed, and many would question whether they offer the same utility to users as a dedicated home Internet connection.

At Library of Congress, changes are afoot in technology as well as in physical space

The Library of Congress no longer needs the computer room that visitors once used to search its electronic card catalogue. These days the entire library has a wireless Internet connection, so workers this summer put a collection of old microfilm machines in that room instead. Meanwhile, the library’s old-school physical catalogues, the kind filled with carefully penned index cards, have long since been relegated to cool basement hallways where schoolchildren marvel at their obscurity.

“I told them, ‘Before Google, this is what we used to do,’” said Fenella France, the library’s chief of preservation research. “They had never seen [card catalogues] before.” As libraries adapt to an increasingly networked and digital world, leading institutions are rethinking their use of physical spaces as well. At the Library of Congress, that means consolidating multiple reading rooms and making the experience of in-person researching more like the kind of one-stop shop we’ve come to expect online. Bill Kellum, who oversees Web and mobile initiatives at the library, is leading an effort to centralize online resources by reining in the sprawl of countless Web sites that sprang up independently from various divisions of the library in the 1990s. Something similar is happening offline as the library weighs a plan to merge several existing reading rooms into the Main Reading Room. Kellum and his team can imagine such Internet-connected appliances serving up Library of Congress resources such as Thomas Jefferson’s 200-year-old recipe for vanilla ice cream.

Egypt moves closer to Al-Jazeera TV affiliate ban

Egypt's interim government called an Al-Jazeera local affiliate that broadcasts in Arabic a national threat, moving closer to banning its broadcasts beamed from Qatar after the affiliate aired recordings of declarations by fugitive leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Qatar-based television network said four journalists working for its English service were arrested in Cairo. Three government ministers issued a statement saying that Al-Jazeera Mubashir Misr is operating "illegally, in violation to the profession's standards and without a permit to work in Egypt." The ministers also said the channel used satellite transmission without a license and spread "rumors and claims which are harmful to Egyptian national security and threaten the country's unity," without referring specifically to the broadcasts of the fugitives' declarations.

How “cell tower dumps” caught the High Country Bandits—and why it matters

[Commentary] How does one find a single cell phone user without knowing the cell phone number or the subscriber's name? Indeed, without knowing anything but the time and location? If you're the FBI, you ask a judge to approve a full "cell tower dump," in which wireless operators will turn over the records of every cell phone that registered with a particular tower at a particular time.

Retransmission: When antennas help and when they don't

When it comes to retransmission consent disputes, over-the-air antennas may not be the perfect solution, but they have gotten better.

In the days of analog TV, antennas generally were not a good solution for customers impacted by a blackout such as the CBS channel blackout for Time Warner Cable subscribers in select markets. The digital TV transition helped to solve some issues with bad or disrupted reception in places like New York City due to high-rise buildings, and helped alleviate some of the hassles with switching between cable video input and over-the-air (OTA) service. Of course, one risk of encouraging customers to use OTA antennas is that some viewers may opt to drop their pay TV subscription altogether. "Some people may come to realize that if they want good, quality HD ... then the best way to get it is over the air," said Merrill Weiss, head of the consulting firm Merrill Weiss Group. "The best quality you'll see is over the air. The broadcasters have to compress it to make it fit into their channels. The cable operators compress it even more to fit more programming into their cable systems. So every time it's compressed, it's degraded. So the best you can get normally is over-the-air, the next best is satellite or cable, and then after that is probably what comes over the Internet." Moreover, customers that drop their pay TV service and become OTA households would not have to worry about switching inputs or future retransmission consent battles. "Unfortunately, a lot of people don't realize you can get television for free," said National Association of Broadcasters spokesman Dennis Wharton. But by encouraging customers to use antennas, Time Warner Cable is actually helping to get the word out.

Phone Users Have 'Duty' Not to Text Drivers

The New Jersey Superior Court found that a girl is not responsible for an accident that occurred after she texted a friend who was driving, but concluded that residents do have a "duty" not to text someone they know is behind the wheel.

We conclude that a person sending text messages has a duty not to text someone who is driving if the texter knows, or has special reason to know, the recipient will view the text while driving,” the Superior Court found. On the "duty not to text someone who is driving" part of the ruling, the court pointed to a 2007 case that concluded that a "duty is an obligation imposed by law requiring one party 'to conform to a particular standard of conduct toward another.'" In determining whether someone is liable, the court must consider: the relationship of the parties, the nature of the attendant risk, the opportunity and ability to exercise care, and the public interest in the proposed solution.

The ACLU wages a long-shot legal battle against NSA surveillance

The American Civil Liberties (ACLU) moved forward with a lawsuit filed in June, asking a New York court to stop the National Security Agency from gathering any information from its phone lines while it attempts to end the agency’s mass metadata collection.

"Calling patterns can reveal when we are awake and asleep," wrote Princeton professor Edward Felten in a briefing. "Our religion, if a person regularly makes no calls on the Sabbath, or makes a large number of calls on Christmas Day; our work habits and our social aptitude; the number of friends we have; and even our civil and political affiliations." Felten and the ACLU are trying to revive a case that Amnesty International lost earlier this year, hoping that the evidence is stronger this time around. But while we now know much more about the government’s surveillance efforts, the odds of convincing a court that anything’s changed are still slim indeed. Civil liberties groups have been locked in a legal battle over the surveillance for years, but the ACLU is arguing that the leaked and declassified documents shed new light on a program that goes far beyond the letter of the law and the limits of the Constitution. The ACLU has an uphill battle to fight, but if it fails, future cases could do better.

FCC Acting Chairwoman Mignon Clyburn Names Mark Stephens Acting Managing Director; Dr. David A. Bray Chief Information Officer

Federal Communications Commission Acting Chairwoman Mignon Clyburn announced senior staff appointments, naming Mark Stephens Acting Managing Director and Dr. David A. Bray as the Commission’s Chief Information Officer (CIO).

As Acting Managing Director, Stephens will manage the Commission's budget and financial programs, human resources, contracts, purchasing, communications, computer services, physical space, security, and distribution of official FCC documents. In his role as CIO, Dr. Bray will implement a tech-forward strategy to equip workers with effective technology, cut costs, and shift the Commission’s IT trajectory towards more sustainable and secure cloud-based solutions. Mr. Stephens and Dr. Bray, along with other senior managers, will work in the Office of the Managing Director (OMD) to coordinate the administration and management of the Commission.

In addition, Acting Chairwoman Clyburn announced David Valdez as Special Counsel to her office. In that role, Valdez will oversee issues relating to regulatory reforms to facilitate innovation in government and assist in managing the FCC’s various Advisory Committees.

Benton

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