May 2016

[Commentary] Ten years ago, there were two web browsers that anyone cared about: Netscape and Internet Explorer. Skip to 2016 and the web is a very different place. The World Wide Web Consortium, the not-for-profit organization that creates the web’s open technology standards, made a brave effort to tame the web’s lunatic proprietary HTML extensions that paid off, making those “Best viewed with” badges on websites a relic of the past. All the browsers have changed, too: Netscape vanished, Mozilla begat Firefox, Internet Explorer morphed into Edge, and Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome grew from obscure side projects to two of the dominant forces on the web. Ten years is an eternity in web years, and in a decade, everything can change. However, that change might be coming to an end thanks to the existing web browser vendors and the World Wide Web Consortium.

Since 2013 they’ve been working with Netflix, the cable industry, and the MPAA to create a standard to limit which browsers can display W3C-standardised data. It could mean goodbye to “just works” and hello again to “best viewed with”. The world has entered the age of giants: giant media companies, giant banks, giant tech companies. Where giants tread, mere mortals tremble, and hope for a day when they will be cut down to size. With the W3C acting like they’re a permanent fact of life, that day may never come.

[Cory Doctorow is an activist, science fiction author and co-editor of the blog Boing Boing]

[Commentary] The Supreme Court’s recent decision to deny review of the Authors Guild v. Google, Inc. ruling was a blow not just to the suit’s plaintiffs in the book industry but to all of us in the business of writing and publishing content. Here’s why: The lower court’s decision in favor of Google ruled that its project to digitize millions of books and create a searchable library did not violate the authors’ copyrights and did not require permission or monetization. In allowing this ruling to stand, the Supreme Court has created a remarkably expansive view of the Fair Use Doctrine - which is, ironically, now unfair to the content creators themselves.

The copyright law is intended to protect authors and creators, not allow another company to commercially benefit from their work. Yet, recently, the “fair use” defense, codified into law in 1976 to allow reproduction for purposes of public knowledge - such as research, criticism and reporting - has been used to the benefit of the technology companies that publish others’ valuable content on new platforms. We can’t allow technology companies to leverage and sell content - books, news stories, or other written works - on new platforms without giving the original content creator any of the benefit.

[David Chavern is the President & CEO, Newspaper Association of America]

In Amazon’s Appstore, many apps geared toward kids prompted them to use fictitious currency, like a “boatload of doughnuts” or a “can of stars,” as part of game play. But a federal district court recently agreed with the FTC that Amazon’s practice of charging cold, hard cash for those imaginary items and billing parents and account holders without their express informed consent violates Section 5 of the FTC Act. The Court granted summary judgment on the FTC’s claim that Amazon unfairly billed consumers for unauthorized in-app charges incurred by children. You’ll want to take a look at the 23-page opinion, portions of which remain redacted, but here are some sentences we marked with a yellow highlighter on our initial read-through.