January 2014

Cable companies sue Apple-backed patent coalition

A handful of cable companies are suing a coalition of tech firms that controls the rights to more than 4,000 patents.

In a document filed with the US District Court for Delaware, Charter Communications, Suddenlink and other cable firms said that lawsuits and threats from the Rockstar coalition over patent rights it owns “have cast a cloud of uncertainty” over their operations. The cable companies’ complaints echo those of Google, which has accused Rockstar of an aggressive campaign to push its products out of the market. Apple, Microsoft and Research in Motion are part of the Rockstar coalition.

Why Would A Major Network Cut Back On Latino News

[Commentary] They turned off the lights and let go of four of the seven staffers at NBC Latino, reassigning the others. The site was an ambitious, award-winning English-language news site aimed at the Hispanic community. Chris Peña, used to say: “We’ve succeeded when we can shut down the website.” We’ve accomplished our mission, he meant, when identifying, covering, and advancing stories that impact the Latino community is a vibrant part of the company’s DNA. I don’t think anyone who follows mainstream media would say that’s close to being true today.

Nearly 300 TV Stations Sold In 2013

Television station transactions exploded in 2013 because the healthy TV environment in 2012 bolstered investor confidence, according to BIA/Kelsey's MEDIA Access Pro, a data service and analytical software that tracks the local television industry. Nearly 300 TV stations were sold in 2013. That number of transactions is up 205 percent from 2012. Likewise, the total sale valuation for television stations were up -- a 367 percent increase in 2013 from 2012 for over $8 billion.

As countries adopt LTE, mobile data use starts skyrocketing

In South Korea, one out of every two mobile subscribers now has an LTE device, according to new data from GSMA Intelligence. But what’s even more interesting is the difference in how 3G and 4G subscribers used their connections in that country. Since SK Telecom launched its first LTE network back in the second half of 2011, data usage on 4G phones has more than doubled, while data consumption on 3G devices has remained flat.

The conclusion may seem a bit obvious since people who buy newer, fancier smartphones tend to gravitate toward more data-intensive applications, but GSMA Intelligence lead analyst Calum Dewar thinks there’s more to the trend. South Korea has reached critical mass in both coverage (100 percent of the population is now under the 4G umbrella) and speed, leading to consumers changing their behavior. In particularly, Dewar pointed out that many Korean wireless users have stopped hunting for Wi-Fi connections, choosing instead to keep their connections on the LTE network.

Phone Companies Worry They'll Be Required To Store Customer Data For NSA

Privacy advocates are cautiously optimistic about a number of reforms that President Barack Obama promised to make to the National Security Agency. But President Obama punted on one critical issue that has privacy groups and the telecommunications industry worried: Will the government require phone companies to maintain vast databases of phone records?

The most controversial revelation from the leaks by Edward Snowden is that the NSA collects records on virtually all US phone calls. The records include phone numbers, call times and call durations -- but not the contents of any conversations. The telecommunications companies themselves have no interest in new regulatory requirements for data retention. Storing the vast amounts of data would be expensive and could open the companies up to new lawsuits. CTIA, a lobbying group representing the cellphone carriers, issued a statement emphasizing that the government can balance security and privacy "without the imposition of data retention mandates that obligate carriers to keep customer information any longer than necessary for legitimate business purposes." Verizon, AT&T and other telecommunications companies are some of the most powerful lobbying forces in Washington and would likely fight any proposal for data retention.

Time for an international convention on government access to data

The World Economic Forum will hold its annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland where issues of data privacy and reform of government surveillance will be on the agenda. We hope that these discussions will spur a focus on the international steps that governments can take together. While there is no substitute for American leadership and action on these issues, the time has come for a broader international discussion. We need an international legal framework -- an international convention -- to create surveillance and data-access rules across borders.

[Brad Smith is General Counsel & Executive Vice President, Legal & Corporate Affairs, Microsoft]

British broadband providers rebuff calls to act as online gambling police

The UK’s gambling regulator has asked the country’s big Internet service providers to warn their customers of the illegality of unlicensed gambling websites -- and the ISPs have refused, arguing that it’s up to the courts or Parliament to decide on such things. It’s nice to see the ISPs push back against the censorship and policing role that many in the British government think they should maintain, particularly after they rolled over with barely a whimper on the issue of implementing opt-out porn filters. The UK government is already preparing to force ISPs to block access to so-called “extremist” content.

This Google Glass user went to the movies. Then he got interrogated for about four hours.

Days after a California driver escaped a traffic conviction over wearing Google Glass behind the wheel, Google's augmented-reality device is once again testing the law.

An Ohio man was detained for several hours by federal agents who suspected him of recording "Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit" in his local movie theater using Glass's video function. “About an hour into the movie," Tiberiu Ungureanu said, "a guy comes near my seat, shoves a badge that had some sort of a shield on it, yanks the Google Glass off my face and says, 'follow me outside immediately.'" What followed was a lengthy interview that ended only when Ungureanu convinced an agent to search his device for evidence of the offending footage. There was none. While Ungureanu initially suspected his interrogators to be officers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, they later turned out to be agents from the Department of Homeland Security -- specifically, from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement department, which deals with international piracy cases in collaboration with the movie industry. In this case, officials from the Motion Picture Association of America, who were already at the theater, contacted Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) when they learned that someone was in the audience with a recording device. In an e-mailed statement, the MPAA tells me it doesn't find Google Glass objectionable -- yet.

Verizon bets on the future of television

[Commentary] Verizon's purchase of Intel's OnCue television service foreshadows a day when a paying television subscriber will be able to watch any channel on any device, whenever and wherever they want. It's been a long time coming. A television subscription is still mostly confined to the living room and tied to infrastructure like an underground cable pipe. For Verizon, the acquisition greatly broadens the company's ability to sell TV packages across the country. Its current FiOS service is well-regarded -- at least by the low standards of television distribution -- but it has been limited by the footprint of its fiber-optic network: it is available in only 15 million of the 115 million households in the United States.

What T-Mobile threat? Verizon keeps on growing

T-Mobile’s Un-carrier strategy is supposed to be shaking up the mobile industry, but judging from its fourth quarter results, Verizon Wireless doesn’t seem to have noticed.

Not only did the country’s largest carrier add another 1.7 million net subscribers in the quarter, but Verizon’s business model -- which T-Mobile has long criticized for being consumer unfriendly -- seems to be paying off handsomely. Of its 1.7 million net customer ads, 1.6 million were postpaid contract subscribers, and of those, 824,000 were new phone customers. The remaining 750,000 signed up for data-only devices, mainly tablets. Verizon had 625,000 net tablet activations in Q4, and it now has a 3.6 million overall connected slate customers. In total, Verizon now has 103 million subscribers.

Benton

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