Pandora will place users on a 40-hour-per-month limit for free mobile listening, it said. The company made the “very unusual” decision because of the rising royalty rates it has to pay; the rate has increased 25 percent over the past three years and is set to rise up to 16 percent over the next two years, Pandora Founder Tim Westergren said Wednesday in a blog post. “After a close look at our overall listening, a 40-hour-per-month mobile listening limit allows us to manage these escalating costs with minimal listener disruption,” he said. Pandora “will be sure” to alert listeners who near the 40-hour limit, Westergren said. The limit will affect less than 4 percent of Pandora’s more than 65 million customers -- the average customer uses the service only for 20 hours per month over all devices, Westergren said. Customers who hit the 40-hour limit can pay $0.99 for unlimited listening over the rest of the month, or can subscribe to the $36-a-year Pandora One service, which allows unlimited listening and features no advertising. Listeners will also continue to have unlimited access to Pandora on desktop and laptop computers, he said (http://bit.ly/Z0eu0l). Pandora’s decision is not surprising given that the company has been “consistently operating with yearly losses” under the compulsory license regime, Public Knowledge Staff Attorney Jodie Griffin told us. It’s not clear how the decision will impact Pandora and the webcasting business in general, but “if this becomes a trend for webcasters and leads to less online radio listening overall, it’s hard to see how that’s a victory for musicians or audiences,” she said.
Congress needs to institute further reforms to U.S. patent law to address the problems posed by patent litigation abuse, and particularly the rise of rogue non-practicing entities often referred to as “patent trolls,” said Senate Antitrust Subcommittee Ranking Member Mike Lee, R-Utah. “Ours should be a system in which true innovators do not bear the cost, or at least the full cost, of excessive and ultimately unsuccessful patent assertions,” he said at a Computer & Communications Industry Association event Thursday. “It ought, I think, to be a system characterized by transparency, providing notice both of the invention and the real-party-in-interest who owns it. And more broadly, we should seek to help ensure that our patents are of the highest quality so that opportunistic actors are not able to abuse the system and strategically assert vaguely-worded patents that should never have been issued in the first place.”
Congress needs to institute further reforms to U.S. patent law to address the problems posed by patent litigation abuse, and particularly the rise of rogue non-practicing entities often referred to as “patent trolls,” said Senate Antitrust Subcommittee Ranking Member Mike Lee, R-Utah.
Pandora will place users on a 40-hour-per-month limit for free mobile listening, it said. The company made the “very unusual” decision because of the rising royalty rates it has to pay; the rate has increased 25 percent over the past three years and is set to rise up to 16 percent over the next two years, Pandora Founder Tim Westergren said Wednesday in a blog post. “After a close look at our overall listening, a 40-hour-per-month mobile listening limit allows us to manage these escalating costs with minimal listener disruption,” he said. Pandora “will be sure” to alert listeners who near the 40-hour limit, Westergren said. The limit will affect less than 4 percent of Pandora’s more than 65 million customers -- the average customer uses the service only for 20 hours per month over all devices, Westergren said. Customers who hit the 40-hour limit can pay $0.99 for unlimited listening over the rest of the month, or can subscribe to the $36-a-year Pandora One service, which allows unlimited listening and features no advertising. Listeners will also continue to have unlimited access to Pandora on desktop and laptop computers, he said (http://bit.ly/Z0eu0l). Pandora’s decision is not surprising given that the company has been “consistently operating with yearly losses” under the compulsory license regime, Public Knowledge Staff Attorney Jodie Griffin told us. It’s not clear how the decision will impact Pandora and the webcasting business in general, but “if this becomes a trend for webcasters and leads to less online radio listening overall, it’s hard to see how that’s a victory for musicians or audiences,” she said.
Reforms are needed to improve the quality of software-related patents that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) grants, said Suzanne Michel, Google senior patent counsel, Wednesday during a PTO-led forum. PTO held the forum as part of its “Software Partnership,” an effort to gather industry input on ways to improve the quality of patents. Current patent examination practices and rules have resulted in “vague, overbroad and invalid” patents that have driven the boom in litigation abuse led by patent-assertion entities (PAEs), Michel said. Software and Internet-related patents are litigated eight times more often than others, and account for 85 percent of all PAE lawsuits, she said.
Reforms are needed to improve the quality of software-related patents that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) grants, said Suzanne Michel, Google senior patent counsel, Wednesday during a PTO-led forum. PTO held the forum as part of its “Software Partnership,” an effort to gather industry input on ways to improve the quality of patents. Current patent examination practices and rules have resulted in “vague, overbroad and invalid” patents that have driven the boom in litigation abuse led by patent-assertion entities (PAEs), Michel said. Software and Internet-related patents are litigated eight times more often than others, and account for 85 percent of all PAE lawsuits, she said.
Reforms are needed to improve the quality of software-related patents that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) grants, Suzanne Michel, Google senior patent counsel, said Wednesday during a PTO-led forum. PTO held the forum as part of its “Software Partnership,” an effort to gather industry input on ways to improve the quality of patents. Current patent examination practices and rules have resulted in “vague, overbroad and invalid” patents that have driven the boom in litigation abuse led by patent-assertion entities (PAEs), Michel said. Software and Internet-related patents are litigated eight times more often than others, and account for 85 percent of all PAE lawsuits, she said. The patent lawsuit abuse debate also returned to Capitol Hill Wednesday with the reintroduction of the Saving High-Tech Innovators from Egregious Legal Disputes (SHIELD) Act. (See the separate report in this issue.) The “patentability” of software is an important issue for the Obama administration, the Commerce Department and PTO, said PTO General Counsel Bernie Knight. PTO is using the Software Partnership to “potentially come up with new guidelines” for software patent examination and improve the training of patent examiners, he said. PTO asked the industry to consider “how to more effectively ensure that the boundaries of a claim are clear so that the public can understand what subject matter is protected by the patent claim and the patent examiner can identify and apply the most pertinent prior art.” PTO also asked for industry input in advance of a planned request for comment on possible changes to the process of preparing a patent application before examination, as well as input on other issues the industry feels need to be addressed. The public and industry will be able to submit additional written comments to the PTO through March 15 (http://1.usa.gov/VY3tdR).
Governments need to move away from blunt mechanisms like the “Great Firewall of China” as they consider how to regulate the international flow of data and other aspects of e-commerce, said Jonathan McHale, deputy assistant U.S. Trade Representative (USTR)-Telecom and Electronic Commerce Policy, during a Brookings Institution event Tuesday. Brookings published a report Monday that some governments are restricting the Internet “in ways that reduce the ability of businesses and entrepreneurs to use the Internet as a place for international commerce and limits the access of consumers to goods and services” (http://bit.ly/XW2mLH).
Governments need to move away from blunt mechanisms like the “Great Firewall of China” as they consider how to regulate the international flow of data and other aspects of e-commerce, said Jonathan McHale, deputy assistant U.S. Trade Representative (USTR)-Telecom and Electronic Commerce Policy, during a Brookings Institution event Tuesday. Brookings published a report Monday that some governments are restricting the Internet “in ways that reduce the ability of businesses and entrepreneurs to use the Internet as a place for international commerce and limits the access of consumers to goods and services” (http://bit.ly/XW2mLH).
The FTC said HTC America reached a tentative settlement over charges that the company’s failure, until at least November 2011 to take “reasonable steps” to secure the software used on its smartphones and tablets, constituted “unfair or deceptive acts or practices” (http://1.usa.gov/YHPOtt). The agency accused the maker of consumer electronics of not using “well-known and commonly-accepted secure programming practices ... which would have ensured that applications only had access to users’ information with their consent."