The major U.S. wireless carriers have kept a commitment to adopt policies within a year allowing customers to switch networks while keeping their existing devices, two FCC officials said in a Wednesday blog post. “We congratulate CTIA and the participating wireless providers for reaching this important milestone,” wrote Roger Sherman, chief of the Wireless Bureau, and Kris Monteith, acting chief of the Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau. The rules require carriers to unlock devices “no later than one year after initial activation, consistent with reasonable time and usage requirements,” they said. Participating carriers also have agreed to notify subscribers when their devices are eligible for unlocking, if they're not automatically unlocked, and to post unlocking information on their websites, they said. “Full implementation of the unlocking principles is a positive development for both consumers and wireless providers, as it increases competition to innovate,” the FCC officials said. CTIA is pleased the FCC recognized that carriers met the deadline, said Scott Bergmann, vice president-regulatory affairs. “We also remind consumers that an unlocked device does not necessarily mean an interoperable one since different carriers use different technologies and spectrum bands.” Also this week, the Copyright Office released comments from wireless and other interests asking it to allow consumers to unlock, or jailbreak, cellphones under exemptions to Digital Millennium Copyright Act Section 1201 (see 1502110062).
It’s “time for a Republican-controlled Congress to “unleash the pent-up energy of pro-innovation policies,” and address tech priorities such as patent reform, data privacy, high-skilled immigration reform and Internet governance, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said during a keynote speech at Lincoln Labs’ Reboot Congress event Thursday. As chairman of the Senate Republican High-Tech Task Force, Hatch said he has developed an innovation policy agenda for the 114th Congress to “protect legitimate intellectual property rights from abusive patent litigation.” Patent trolls “bring thousands of frivolous patent infringement lawsuits each year in attempts to extort settlements from conscientious, hard-working technology innovators,” costing the U.S. economy about $60 billion each year, Hatch said. Current law fails to combat patent trolls, he said. He said it’s time to reform the America Invents Act, which Hatch introduced in 2005 with Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. Patent reform legislation has been proposed, but Hatch said he will “oppose any bill that fails to prevent patent trolls from litigating-and-dashing.” Hatch encouraged continuing bipartisan support for updating U.S. privacy laws, encouraging action so “privacy laws correspond to present realities and keep up with technological advances.” The Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) should be updated immediately “to safeguard data stored abroad from improper government access,” he said. “Congress has not adequately updated the law since its enactment, and technological developments have resulted in disparate treatment between online and offline communications.” Though Hatch said he agrees with the premise of the ECPA reform bills (see 1501280044) that were recently introduced in the House and Senate, they don’t establish a “framework for how the U.S. government can access data stored abroad,” he said. Americans' privacy would not be protected by foreign governments, he said. “If the federal officials can obtain emails stored outside the United States simply by serving a warrant on a provider subject to U.S. process, nothing stops governments in other countries -- including China and Russia -- from seeking e-mails of Americans stored in the U.S. from providers subject to Chinese and Russian process.” Hatch said he plans to reintroduce the Law Enforcement Access to Data Stored Abroad Act, or LEADS, in the coming weeks to ensure Americans' privacy is protected by all governments. “We must strengthen privacy in the digital age and promote trust in U.S. technologies worldwide by safeguarding data stored abroad,” Hatch said, “while still enabling law enforcement to fulfill its important public safety mission.”
Major advertising associations launched the Brand Integrity Program Against Piracy to help keep ads off sites that cater to piracy and the sale of counterfeit goods, a Trustworthy Accountability Group news release said Tuesday. TAG is an initiative backed by the Association of National Advertisers, the American Association of Advertising Agencies and the Interactive Advertising Bureau. The co-chairmen of the International Creativity and Theft-Prevention Caucus applauded the announcement Tuesday. “With the adoption of validated tools to keep ads off pirate sites, it's incumbent upon advertisers and others in the supply chain to follow through and make use of these new technologies to cut off funding to sites that use online theft as their business model,” said Sens. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., and Reps. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., and Adam Schiff, D-Calif., in a caucus joint release. The new program is also backed by the International AntiCounterfeiting Coalition, MPAA, RIAA, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other groups, the TAG release said.
Patent reform is necessary, especially for software, because “juries and courts often fail to distinguish between patented code" and the end function of a software product, Heartland Institute Policy Adviser Steven Titch wrote in a Feb. 5 policy brief that was released Tuesday. “Frivolous patent litigation costs U.S. businesses $29 billion a year in direct costs and $80 billion in indirect costs,” Titch told us. Titch’s comments echoed President Barack Obama's 2014 State of the Union address, in which he encouraged Congress to “pass a patent reform bill that allows our businesses to stay focused on innovation, not costly and needless litigation.” Congress should confirm Michelle Lee as director of the Patent Office, and the FCC should “avoid heavy reliance on patented technology,” the paper said. In the past several years, there has been an increase in “patent stockpiling” or “aggregation” as an increasing number of companies and individuals file frivolous or “mostly” baseless lawsuits, it said. Especially in today’s high-tech environment, where one personal computer, smartphone, gaming console or TV can “incorporate dozens or even hundreds of patented products or processes,” patent reform needs to occur, the paper said. These patent assertion entities (PAEs) or “patent trolls” such as Soverain Software, exploit weaknesses in the patent system, such as when Soverain claimed that any website shopping cart function was an infringement of its patent, it said. Soverain had a $40 million settlement with Amazon and a multimillion-dollar settlement with both Avon and Victoria’s Secret, the paper said. Due to the profitability of patent trolling, companies such as Nokia are now using patent litigation to earn revenue, which Titch said has made companies more reluctant when it comes to innovation. U.S. patent laws aren't broken, but “need to be reformed to better recognize the way innovation happens in the twenty-first century,” the paper said. "Enterprises should be using the marketplace, not the courtroom, to evaluate investment and return opportunities,” Titch said. “Patent reform can help by changing the cost-benefit ratios of litigation so frivolous patents are deterred but plaintiffs with legitimate cases are still able to bring a case." Soverain had no immediate comment.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation partnered with several countries, including Russia and Vietnam, to “defend” against their being “unfairly bullied” by the U.S. Trade Representative’s annual Special 301 report, said an EFF blog post Monday. The USTR report reviews IP protections and other market practices in foreign countries, highlighting those nations with the most problematic IP standards (see 1502060043). Countries like Russia and Vietnam are being asked to “to adopt failed U.S.-style copyright, patent, trademark, and trade secret rules,” said EFF. “This would be absolutely fair enough, if the standards by which the other countries were assessed were globally-agreed standards, and if their adherence to those standards were assessed objectively, using a consistent and predictable methodology,” it said: “But they're not; rather, the USTR has free reign to castigate its trading partners for whatever reasons it can come up with.” The "mere listing of a country on the Priority Watch List has applied a heavy extra-legal influence on that country to amend its intellectual property laws and policies to accord with the USTR’s unilateral demand,” said EFF’s filing to the USTR.
Qualcomm said it reached a $975 million settlement with China’s National Development and Reform Commission to end NDRC’s investigation of the company under anti-monopoly law. The NDRC issued an administrative decision that Qualcomm violated the nation’s anti-monopoly law and the company agreed not to pursue further legal proceedings challenging the findings, Qualcomm said Monday. The company said it agreed to modify some of its business practices in China to satisfy Chinese law, including offering licenses to its 3G and 4G patents that don’t implement CDMA or WCDMA separately from its other patents, with royalties on 3G patents set at 5 percent and royalties on 4G patents set at 3.5 percent. “We are pleased that the investigation has concluded and believe that our licensing business is now well positioned to fully participate in China's rapidly accelerating adoption of our 3G/4G technology,” said Qualcomm President Derek Aberle.
RIAA CEO Cary Sherman endorsed the Copyright Office’s recommendations to apply federal laws to pre-1972 sound recordings, and for terrestrial broadcasters to pay public performance royalties. The CO released a 245-page music licensing study Thursday (see 1502050055). “The office recognizes a consensus within the industry that the current system for licensing musical compositions is broken,” Sherman said in a Thursday statement. “Artists and labels behind iconic recordings made before 1972 deserve to be compensated by digital radio outlets like Pandora and Sirius.” The study confirmed Broadcast Music Inc.’s “position that music licensing, and specifically the archaic rules under which BMI must operate, is in need of change,” said CEO Mike O’Neill in a statement. He was referring to the consent decrees that govern BMI and the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers.
Chile, China, India, Indonesia, Russia, Thailand and Vietnam should be added to the U.S. Trade Representative’s “priority watch list” in its annual Special 301 report, the International Intellectual Property Alliance said in a news release Friday. The USTR report reviews IP protections and other market practices in foreign countries, highlighting those nations with the most problematic IP standards. The Association of American Publishers, the Entertainment Software Association, the Independent Television & Film Alliance, MPAA and RIAA are IIPA members. Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Mexico, Switzerland, Taiwan and United Arab Emirates should be added to the 301 report’s general watch list, said IIPA. The USTR should have “special engagement” with Italy and Spain, it said. “No country, including the U.S., is immune from the harms posed by high levels of unfair practices on the Internet,” said RIAA Executive Vice President Neil Turkewitz in a separate release. But there are “distinctions to be made between the efforts of different countries, and today’s filing highlights practices in some of the countries that have been least responsive in addressing piracy.”
The U.S. had the highest IP protections rating in a report released Wednesday by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global IP Center. The report was done by Pugatch Consilium, a market research firm, and analyzed the IP economies of 30 countries that account for nearly 80 percent of global GDP, it said. Countries were measured against 30 IP indicators, which included protections for patents, copyrights, trade secrets and IP enforcement both online and according to international treaties. The highest possible score was 30. The U.S. (28.53), the U.K. (27.61), Germany (27.28), France (27.16) and Singapore (25.38) had the highest scores. Thailand (7.10), India (7.23) and Vietnam (7.84) had the lowest scores. “Although the United States has introduced several successful initiatives to shut down rogue websites -- such as the ‘In Our Sites’ operation -- for a top-tier economy, it scores poorly in the enforcement indicators due to ineffective border measures to seize counterfeit goods,” the report said.
The Media Institute asked the Supreme Court to review Kienitz v. Sconnie Nation, the organization said in a news release Tuesday. The institute filed a friend-of-the-court brief asking the court to review an “errant expansion of the fair use doctrine that is gaining traction among lower courts and eroding the rights of photographers,” it said. Photographer Michael Kienitz alleged that Sconnie Nation, a clothing company, infringed his copyrighted photo of a public official, said the institute. The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a district court ruling that the company’s use of the photo was fair use, it said.