January 2015

Justice Department issues new guidelines for seeking media records during leak investigations

The Justice Department announced revised guidelines for obtaining records from the news media during leak investigations, removing language that news organizations said was ambiguous and requiring additional levels of review before a journalist can be subpoenaed.

"These revised guidelines strike an appropriate balance between law enforcement's need to protect the American people and the news media's role in ensuring the free flow of information," Attorney General Eric Holder said. Associated Press General Counsel Karen Kaiser praised the changes for eliminating "potential ambiguity of what constitutes newsgathering and help provide consistency in how the guidelines are interpreted across investigations and administrations."

President Obama wants Congress to increase prison sentences for hackers

The Obama Administration is calling on Congress to increase prison sentences for hackers and to expand the definition of hacking.

During the upcoming 2015 State of the Union address, President Barack Obama is set to publicly urge increased prison time and other changes to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act -- the statute that was used to prosecute Internet activist Aaron Swartz before he committed suicide in 2013. President Obama said, "We want cybercriminals to feel the full force of American justice, because they are doing as much damage -- if not more, these days -- as folks who are involved in more conventional crime.” Penalties under President Obama's plan would increase from a maximum five-year penalty to 10 years for pure hacking acts, like circumventing a technological barrier. What's more, the law would expand the definition of what "exceeds authorized access" means. A hacker would exceed authorization when accessing information "for a purpose that the accesser knows is not authorized by the computer owner."

The media revolution that isn’t being televised

[Commentary] Millennials are driving transformation of the paid video market, accelerating a wave of disruptive innovation that pre-dates the Internet. The more the programmers dig in in an effort to protect the income they get from traditional pay-tv providers (MVPDs), ironically, the faster they are assuring the eventual collapse of the old model. But the programmers’ strategy is isn’t as schizophrenic as it looks.

Their hope is that Internet-only services will only attract those who don’t already subscribe to an MVPD service and who aren’t likely to in the future. While MVPDs have lost millions of subscribers in the last few years, content providers have placed severe restrictions on their licenses with over-the-top alternatives. MVPDs need to react quickly to the changing dynamics of the emerging video ecosystem, freed from both their protections and restrictions if they have any hope of creating new services that can compete for the next generation of video consumers.

[Larry Downes is a project director at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy]

Bigger Settlement Said to Be Reached in Silicon Valley Antitrust Case

Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe are offering a joint payment of $415 million to settle the case of a class-action antitrust suit that accuses them of conspiring against their own employees. The new payment is up from the $324.5 million they offered in the spring 2014.

Lawyers for the 64,000 software engineers who are the class-action plaintiffs have already agreed to the new figure, but that does not automatically end the case. The earlier amount was acceptable to the plaintiffs’ lawyers, but it was rejected by the judge overseeing the case as inadequate.

Intel could spend more than $300 million on diversity

Intel CEO Brian Krzanich announced his plans to spend $300 million to achieve a fully diverse workforce by 2020. Krzanich said the company's $300 million budget to increase diversity is just a start.

"It may end up being even more than that when we really get into this," he said. Intel also intends to increase diversity on its 11-member board of directors, which currently has two women on the board.

Silicon Valley absent from list of top 40 diverse firms

Black Enterprise magazine released a list of the 40 best companies for diversity -- and not a single Silicon Valley company made the cut. The list names the 40 companies that display workplace diversity, with an emphasis on African-American representation. Companies that failed in African-American representation didn't make the cut, regardless of strength in other areas. Winners include AT&T, FedEx, Marriott International, and JPMorgan Chase.

Apple and Ericsson go to court over LTE patents

Apple sued Ericsson in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, after a license agreement for Apple‘s use of Ericsson cellular technology expired, and two years of negotiations failed.

Apple seems to be taking two approaches. On the one hand, it’s claiming that Ericsson is wrong to say the relevant LTE patents (covering things like bandwidth efficiency and signal management) are “standards-essential” -- something that would mean Apple is automatically infringing by including LTE/4G functionality in its devices. On the other, Apple is saying that if these are standards-essential patents (SEPs), Ericsson is demanding too much because SEPs are supposed to be licensed on “fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory” (FRAND) terms. Apple said in its complaint that Ericsson is trying to calculate royalties based on the total phone price, rather than the price of the LTE chip. Sweden’s Ericsson said that it launched a complaint with the District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, asking the court to determine whether the royalties Ericsson wants to levy in its “global license offer” comply with its FRAND commitments.

Straight talk about Internet privacy and security

[Commentary] The Internet is inherently insecure by design. Privacy is an illusion on the Internet.

President Barack Obama's basic mistake was to give Internet users a false sense of security. Instead of passively relying on laws and regulations to keep sensitive personal information safe, we’d do a lot better to cultivate a healthy and realistic sense of the dangers posed by leaving credit card numbers and other personal data on web sites protected by nothing more than a static password that’s easy to remember. If the government wants to take steps to help safeguard our data online, the most sensible plan is to work with the private sector on a rating system like the one the MPAA has for movies. This is necessary for banks, but not for most sites. At the other extreme, sites that don’t store any user data beyond passwords shouldn’t need to be involved in reporting hacks.

[Richard Bennett has is a coinventor of Wi-Fi and the modern Ethernet architecture]

Happy 2nd anniversary to the “new” COPPA Rule

The Federal Trade Commission adopted final amendments to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule on December 19, 2012, just over two years ago. Here's what happened since the amended Rule took effect on July 1, 2013:

Safe Harbors and Verifiable Parental Consent Methods: All told, FTC-approved Safe Harbors have over 140 members with more than 1100 sites and apps.
Guidance: Companies asked for more guidance on implementing the amendments to COPPA and we followed through by providing FAQs, initiating a COPPA Hotline, responding with business education, and delivering speeches and webinars.
Law Enforcement: The FTC has demonstrated our commitment to challenging COPPA violations in several notable court cases.

We’ve done a lot since the FTC adopted the amended Rule two years ago, but an anniversary isn’t an end. We’re committed to continued cooperation with Safe Harbors, additional guidance to help businesses, and rigorous law enforcement.

Supreme Court Sides With T-Mobile on Tower Citing

The Supreme Court ruled in T-Mobile v. City of Roswell that the Telecommunications Act requires local governments to provide timely reasons for denying a tower-citing request, and that simply sending a letter and providing a transcript of the hearing 26 days later did not cut it.

T-Mobile had sued the city of Roswell (GA), arguing that the city council denial was not supported by substantial evidence in a written decision stating the reasons. A district court agreed, but the Eleventh Circuit US court of Appeals concluded that the denial letter and transcript were sufficient. T-Mobile took it to the Supreme Court, which reversed and remanded the Eleventh Circuit, saying localities need to provide their reasoning essentially contemporaneously and stated clearly enough for judicial review.

Benton

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