June 2014

Sen McCaskill eyes measure to combat TV bills

Sen Claire McCaskill (D-MO) is working on legislation to ban misleading and unfair cable and satellite television bills, and she’s looking to consumers for the worst offenders.

Sen McCaskill asked consumers to visit her website and log their complaints if “they have experienced deceptive, or confusing billing practices” from cable and satellite companies.

"Consumers in every corner of the country share common experiences about fending for themselves against confusing, deceptive billing practices by cable, satellite and other pay-TV companies-and I want to hear their stories," Sen McCaskill, chairwoman of the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, said.

Making We the People More User-Friendly Than Ever

With more than 14 million users and 21 million signatures, We the People, the White House's online petition platform, has proved more popular than we ever thought possible.

In the nearly three years since launch, we've heard from you on a huge range of topics, and issued more than 225 responses. But we're not stopping there. We've been working to make it easier to sign a petition and we're now proud to announce the next iteration of We the People.

Since launch, we've heard from users who wanted a simpler, more streamlined way to sign petitions without creating an account and logging in every time. This latest update makes that a reality.

[Mechaber is Deputy Director of Email and Petitions, White House Office of Digital Strategy]

Sen Leahy: Cellphone ruling is ‘wake-up call’

The Supreme Court’s ruling that police need a warrant to search someone’s cellphone is a “wake-up call” for Congress to act on other kinds of digital privacy, Sen Patrick Leahy (D-VT) said.

“The Supreme Court’s decision in US v. Wurie and Riley v. California is a wake-up call that we need to update our laws to keep pace with technological advances,” he said shortly after the high court’s unanimous ruling. “Just as the government must now obtain a warrant to look through the contents of our cell phones, I believe the same standard should apply when the government wants to look through our emails.”

Sen Leahy’s bill “updates our digital privacy laws to keep pace with new technologies, protect civil liberties, and provide guidance to law enforcers,” he said. “Congress should act swiftly to pass this bill and bring our privacy laws into the 21st Century.”

With cellphone search ruling, Supreme Court draws a stark line between digital and physical searches

Privacy advocates scored a huge win as the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that searching the cellphone of an arrested individual requires a warrant in most circumstances.

“The fact that technology now allows an individual to carry such information in his hand does not make the information any less worthy of the protection for which the Founders fought," the court said. "Our answer to the question of what police must do before searching a cell phone seized incident to an arrest is accordingly simple -- get a warrant.”

While this may have been obvious to the average person, the Supreme Court ruling is an "incredibly important new development in the law," Kevin Bankston, policy director at the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute, argues -- one that suggests "the Fourth Amendment of the 21st century may be much more protective than that of the last century."

Searching the vast amount of data on your cellphone is different from searching your backpack, just as tracking your car with a GPS device is different from having the police follow you, and the government seizing all of the e-mail you store in the cloud is different from seizing your file cabinet." The court drew a clear distinction between digital and physical searches in the opinion, at one point saying it was the difference between horseback riding and space travel.

What the Aereo decision means for TV watchers

The Supreme Court's ruling against Aereo is a huge deal — not because it'll upend the TV industry, as some may have hoped, but because of the disruption it won't cause. What is (was?) Aereo, and what does the decision mean for the way we watch TV?

What is Aereo? Based in New York City, Aereo was founded by chief executive Chet Kanojia in 2012. The company uses tiny antennas to grab TV signals out of the air. Those antennas feed the broadcast programming to a DVR, which then plays the programming back to you on your PC, tablet or phone on demand.

Why is it so controversial? At issue was whether Aereo should have to pay money to TV broadcasters for their content. Right now, Aereo pays nothing -- it gets the TV signals for free just as you or I might with our own televisions grabbing signals over public airwaves. But unlike us, Aereo gets to make money off of relaying those transmissions over the Web.
What did the Supreme Court decide? The court held in a 6-to-3 vote that Aereo wasn't simply providing equipment for consumers to watch their own taped shows later, as the company claimed. Instead, Aereo was found to have violated copyright law.

Does this reading of the situation actually make sense? Well, the majority of the justices believe Aereo is really no different from a cable company, which also pays for content and transmits broadcast signals to the public. Three conservative justices disagreed. They argued in a dissent that Aereo doesn't transmit anything, publicly or privately. It's simply facilitating what customers would do on their own if they had the equipment.

Is Aereo dead? Not immediately, but pretty much. Even top Aereo investor Barry Diller admits as much.
What does this mean for the way I watch TV? The justices' decision makes life a lot harder for cord-cutters. To continue watching broadcast TV, you'll need to grab a digital antenna and hook it up to your TV. Or, you'll have to pay your cable company for those channels.

Winners and losers in Aereo decision

[Commentary] Fans of streaming prime-time network TV live will have to wait a bit longer. In a 6-3 decision, the US Supreme Court ruled that Aereo, a start-up backed by media mogul Barry Diller, violated the copyrighted work of major TV networks by streaming their content to paid subscribers. Who are the winners? Primarily, the major TV network owners -- Disney, CBS, Comcast and 21st Century Fox -- that have argued in court that Aereo is stealing their content. They also have plans to stream TV over the Internet and don't want to see start-up technology companies get in the way. Pay-TV providers are also breathing a sigh of relief. Aereo would have given consumers one more reason to "cut the cord" by getting rid of cable. Who loses the most? Obviously, those associated with Aereo, including employees and primary investor Diller. But consumers are also complaining loudly on Twitter and other social media channels, as they saw Aereo as a David charging up the hill against the Goliaths of the pay-TV business.

Why Aereo’s Loss Hurts the TV Industrial Complex in the Long Run

[Commentary] So it looks like Aereo will have to fold up the tent. What else will happen in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision? Nothing. Which is a problem, both for consumers and for the media companies celebrating their victory.

Aereo’s legalized presence would have certainly given the networks and providers a reason to move much faster to provide their own specialized packages. Not “a la carte” TV, where a TV subscriber can sign up for Disney and Comedy Central, but not ESPN and MTV. But at least a slimmed-down offering with a range of options and prices.

Now we’re back to a world where the only incentive the TV guys have to move faster is the nagging fear that their growth has permanently stalled, and that their subscription rolls will decline as new generations of video-watchers enter a world where paying for TV seems ridiculous. That group of “cord-nevers” hasn’t grown big enough to show up on the TV Industrial Complex’s books yet. But it’s hard to imagine it won’t get there.

The Supreme Court's Aereo decision could endanger cloud storage services

A lot of people expected Aereo to lose its Supreme Court case. The real question has always been whether a ruling against Aereo would have implications for other online services.

Many of the arguments broadcasters made against Aereo could just as easily be made against conventional cloud storage services such as Google Music and Dropbox, which also transmit copyrighted content to consumers.

A legal scholar whose work was heavily cited by Justice Antonin Scalia's dissenting opinion says that the case will have cloud storage and consumer electronics companies "looking over their shoulders." "The court is sending a very clear signal that you can't design a system to be the functional equivalent of cable," says James Grimmelmann, a legal scholar at the University of Maryland. "The court also emphasizes very strongly that cloud services are different. But when asked how, it says, 'They're just different, trust us.'"

Cloud storage services have relied on this "volitional conduct" principle to avoid copyright liability. If you upload a pirated movie to your Dropbox account or fill your Google Music account with pirated music, you might be guilty of copyright infringement.

But Dropbox and Google don't have to worry. It's probably not a coincidence that cloud music services blossomed a couple of years after the 2008 decision by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals to protect Cablevision from copyright liability, letting it rest on the customer when storing selected programs on a remote DVR cloud storage system. Now, Grimmelmann says, "the reasoning of Cablevision is dead."

Aereo's Supreme Court Smackdown Won't Harm Apple iCloud Or Others In The Cloud Computing Industry

The cloud computing industry is breathing a sigh of relief. Although the US Supreme Court has declared Internet streaming startup Aereo illegal, this decision will not harm cloud computing technology, as many in that industry feared it would.

That's because SCOTUS specifically said that the ruling doesn't apply to other technologies "not before them" such as cloud computing.

The fear among other companies was that if Aereo lost, it could have unintended consequences for similar technology, such as cloud storage for songs and movies. But not only did the court say that cloud computing was not covered, it also said that there's a difference between storing files in the cloud that a consumer has already "lawfully acquired" and paying Aereo to watch broadcast TV on the Internet.

Sen Thune sets stage for Senate communications law overhaul

The top Republican on the Senate Commerce Committee is pushing for Congress to overhaul the law governing the Internet, television and phone service. Sen John Thune (R-SD) said that the Senate would likely begin work to update the law in 2015, and seemed to shine on the notion that Republicans would have taken control of the upper chamber.

The Telecommunications Act outlines the authority of the Federal Communications Commission and sets the path for regulating phone, Internet and TV service. But it was written back in 1996, when dialup Internet allowing access to just a few thousand websites was still a luxury. “Back then, you had to pay for Internet by the hour and going online meant tying up your home phone line,” Sen Thune said.

Critics have said that the law created inefficient silos for different types of communications services such as television and the Web, which have posed problems for regulators dealing with modern technologies like broadband Internet. Some Democrats have urged the FCC to regulate the Web like phone service, but Republicans have rejected that view, which they warn would impose strict rules for Internet service providers and would limit its growth.

To settle the issue, Sen Thune said that Congress should make itself clear in a new law.

Benton

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