[Commentary] Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake recently spoke the plain truth: "You can't grow jobs with slow Internet." This simple statement is the best explanation for why Baltimore is examining how it can use existing city assets and smart investments in the near future to expand access to fast, affordable, and reliable Internet access. It is also a slap across Comcast's face.
The big cable and telephone companies have insisted for years that they already deliver the services residents and businesses need. But they also claim to offer reasonable prices that just happen to increase year after year with few customers having other options to choose from. Baltimore's reality is that Comcast does indeed offer speeds that are faster than many those in rural Maryland can access. But they are not even in the same league as cities like Chattanooga (TN), where every address in the community has access to the fastest speeds available anywhere in the nation, and at some of the lowest prices. There, as in hundreds of communities across the country, the local government built its own next-generation network. The overwhelming majority of community owned networks are doing exactly what they intended -- breaking even financially while providing a valuable public service. Big cable companies argue that these networks have failed if they aren't making big profits each year, a misunderstanding of public accounting. Community owned networks aim to break even, not make a profit.
The National Security Agency uses its authority under a 1981 executive order signed by President Ronald Reagan to collect cellphone location data around the world, the agency said.
Congress never authorized the program, but an NSA spokeswoman argued that the collection does not violate the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which outlines certain NSA powers. The NSA collects nearly five billion records every day on the locations of cellphones in other countries. The NSA issued a new statement providing more details about the program. It said the program is operated under Executive Order 12333, which was issued by President Reagan and governs surveillance in other countries. The NSA spokeswoman said the agency "tries to avoid" collecting Americans' cellphone location information. "Again, the Agency's EO 12333 collection is outward-facing. We are not intentionally acquiring domestic information through this capability," the spokeswoman said. She said that if the agency does incidentally collect the location information of an American, analysts apply "minimization procedures," and in some cases, destroy the records.
[Commentary] Impossible as it sounds, Judge Denise Cote has found a way to make the Justice Department's antitrust assault on Apple even more abusive. Because it presumed to enter the e-books market, the court is forcing the company to pay for a special prosecutor to investigate itself -- and shredding the separation of constitutional powers too.
In July, Judge Cote of the New York federal district court convicted the iPad of being a conspiracy to increase digital book prices, though the tablet's 2010 introduction increased competition and consumer choice and, er, lowered digital book prices. She then appointed her friend Michael Bromwich as an external monitor to review antitrust at Apple, which he has interpreted as carte blanche to act as the inquisitor of all things Cupertino. That may be what Judge Cote wants. Before her bench trial began she pre-declared her "tentative view" that Apple was an antitrust violator and indulged Justice Department arguments that have no precedent in antitrust jurisprudence. She essentially ruled before hearing the evidence. Judge Cote's injunction gave Apple until January 14, 2014 to overhaul its antitrust compliance and training procedures, a process that is underway. But in late October Bromwich began an open-ended, roving investigation of Apple. He demanded immediate interviews starting in November with every top Apple executive and board member, including CEO Tim Cook, lead designer Jony Ive and Al Gore. Does he want to disinter Steve Jobs too?
[Commentary] The House of Representatives just approved patent legislation called the Innovation Act. Supporters have portrayed it as an historic blow against patent trolling. But while the legislation will discourage some litigation tactics favored by trolls, it does nothing to fix the patent system's fundamental problem: the proliferation of low-quality software patents that have turned the system into an impediment to innovation.
New developments in how trolls operate have transformed the political dynamics of the patent debate. By targeting brick-and-mortar businesses, the new generation of trolls has dramatically expanded the political constituency for anti-troll legislation. But at the same time, technology companies' growing patent portfolios have made many of them leery of any reforms that could lead to some of their hard-won patents being invalidated. The result is a patent bill that focuses narrowly on the particular tactics favored by trolls -- like vague infringement accusations and targeting end users rather than technology vendors -- but does nothing to address the more fundamental problem that there are too many low-quality patents. If the Innovation Act is enacted into law, it will provide some relief to main street businesses who are ill-equipped to deal with patent litigation. But it will do nothing to reverse the patent system's detrimental effects on high-tech innovation. The unseemly tactics targeted by the Innovation Act are not the only way trolls can profit from overly broad patents.
Microsoft storage patent that was used to get a sales ban on products from Motorola Mobility in Germany has been invalidated by the German Federal Patent Court.
Microsoft's FAT (File Allocation Table) patent, which concerns a "common name space for long and short filenames" was invalidated, a spokeswoman for the Federal Patent Court. She could not give the exact reasons for the court's decision before the written judicial decision is released, which will take a few weeks. The File Allocation Table is a file system that traditionally only supports short file names in a rigid format, which makes it hard to give media files understandable and searchable names. Because that can be frustrating, Microsoft wanted to provide a system that supports a common name space for both long and short file names, so people can easily label and find their files, according to the patent in question. The dispute about this patent could continue. "The case can be appealed by Microsoft within a month after the formal notification of the judgment" with the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe, the court's spokeswoman said.
The European Commission said that, on December 3, it carried out unannounced inspections of electronics firms in several European Union countries, with the targets being companies that “may have put in place restrictions on online sales of consumer electronic products and small domestic appliances.”
Samsung and Philips said they were among those targeted in the raids. The companies said they were cooperating with the EU antitrust regulators. The Commission states that it was concerned that the companies involved “may have violated EU antitrust rules that prohibit anticompetitive agreements or concerted practices (Article 101 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union).”
2013 marks the 15th anniversary of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a 1998 law intended to encourage new forms of online expression while also giving content owners a way to protect their work. So far, the system has more or less worked: the online world is bursting with creative compositions while copyright owners have an easy way to take down unauthorized copies of the Hunger Games. Lately, though, DMCA’s great balancing act is under strain with an outburst of grumbling from all sides.
Rights owners, for instance, grouse that infringers upload new files faster than they can issue notices to take them down. As copyright scholar Bruce Boyden notes in a new policy paper, the legal system was designed at a time when online transmission rates were relatively slow, meaning that rights owners had a chance to prevent uploaded works from reaching a large audience. But now: “A tool that was originally designed as an emergency stopgap measure, to be used in isolated instances, is now expected to manage infringement on a persistent, ubiquitous, and gargantuan scale.” All this had led Boynton to suggest that infringers are getting the upper hand and that the DMCA no longer works. But that’s only half the story. The other half is about copyright owners who, in an overzealous attempt to stamp out “piracy,” blow off rules that require them to use the DMCA takedown process with care and good faith.
If there had been any doubt that the Video Division of the Federal Communication Commission's Media Bureau would check a television station's online public inspection file to confirm the truthfulness of certifications made by the licensee in a pending license renewal application, that doubt has been eliminated.
In a Notice of Apparent Liability for Forfeiture released December 3, the Video Division has proposed a $9,000 fine against the licensee of two Michigan televisions stations on the grounds that (i) each station had filed their Children's Television Programming Reports ("Kidvid Reports") late, and (ii) the stations failed to report those violations in responding to one of the certifications contained in their license renewal applications. According to the FCC, the licensee had filed each station's Kidvid Report late for three quarters during the license term in violation of Section 73.3526(e)(11)(iii) of the Commission's Rules. The Video Division of the FCC proposed that each station be assessed a fine of $3,000, the base forfeiture amount for failing to timely file Kidvid Reports, plus a fine of $1,500 for omitting from its renewal applications information regarding those violations. The Division suggested that it could have fined each station $3,000, rather than $1,500, for the reporting failure, but reduced the amount because each licensee "made a good faith effort to identify other deficiencies."
The lessons learned from the Video Division's action include: before signing off and filing a station license renewal application, (i) check the FCC's online database to make sure that it has a record of all documents that were required to be timely filed, (ii) check the station's paper (in the case of radio) and online (in the case of television) public inspection file to confirm (or not) that the file is complete and that the documents required to be in the file were placed there on a timely basis, and (iii) discuss with counsel what may need to be disclosed (or not disclosed) in response to certifications contained in a station's application for renewal of license.
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Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit, the legal and technical team that has driven the takedown of botnets such as Bamital and Nitol in 2013, announced that it has moved with Europol, industry partners, and the FBI to disrupt yet another search fraud botnet.
The ZeroAccess botnet, also known as ZAccess or Siref, has taken over approximately 2 million PCs worldwide; Microsoft estimates that it has cost search engine advertisers on Google, Bing, and Yahoo over $2.7 million each month. After identifying the IP addresses of 18 command-and-control servers involved in directing ZeroAccess, Microsoft filed civil lawsuits against the botnet operators in the US District Court for the Western District of Texas. The court gave Microsoft permission in court to block traffic between them and PCs in the US using technology provided by networking vendor A10 Networks. As Microsoft executed the traffic block, Europol's European Cybercrime Center in Germany coordinated law enforcement raids on the locations of those IP addresses, resulting in the seizure of the servers involved. Law enforcement in Latvia, Germany, Switzerland, and Luxembourg were involved in the seizures.
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