Twitter Q4 revenue more than doubled to $243 million, from the year-ago quarter, said the company in a news release Wednesday (http://bit.ly/1fIpRoe). The net loss for Q4 was $511 million, compared to a $8.7 million loss in Q4 of 2012, it said. Monthly active users averaged 241 million, a 30 percent increase. Advertising revenue per thousand “timeline” views was $1.49 in Q4, a 76 percent increase, said the company. The stock closed down 24 percent to $50.03 Thursday.
The FCC and Chairman Tom Wheeler need to do nothing immediately in the wake of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit’s Jan. 14 decision rejecting the agency’s 2010 net neutrality rules, said Institute for Policy Innovation President Tom Giovanetti Thursday in a blog post. “Putting innovation at risk should be reason enough to stay the FCC’s hand, but there’s a more basic reason why the FCC should forebear from setting network neutrality policy for the nation: The FCC was never charged with setting broad policy goals -- those come from Congress in the form of legislation, and there is no network neutrality directive from Congress,” Giovanetti said (http://bit.ly/NagG6e). “The FCC was designed to be an administrative and technical agency that manages public spectrum and distributes licenses. It was never intended to specialize in consumer protection."
Amazon Studios announced Thursday 10 new pilot shows available on Prime Instant Video in the U.S. and LOVEFiLM in the U.K. Amazon will use viewer feedback as one factor in deciding which series move on to full-season production for exclusive viewing by Amazon Prime members, it said. Drama pilots include hourlong shows from creators Chris Carter (The X-Files), Eric Overmyer (The Wire, Treme) and Michael Connelly (Harry Bosch). Half-hour comedy pilots were created by writer and producer Roman Coppola (Moonrise Kingdom), actor and musician Jason Schwartzman (Saving Mr. Banks), writer and director Alex Timbers, filmmaker Paul Weitz, writer Jill Soloway (Six Feet Under) and executive producers Ice Cube and Michael Strahan, Amazon said. Kids shows on the pilot list come from creators Duane Capizzi (Transformers Prime), Josh Selig (Wonder Pets), Angela Santomero (Blue’s Clues), Arland DiGirolamo (Sketchy) and Geoff Barbanell (Kickin’ It), it said. With previous pilots, Amazon customers submitted “thousands” of reviews within the first few days of launch, and more than 80 percent of reviews received 4 and 5 stars, said Roy Price, director-Amazon Studios.
Standard operational procedures (SOPs) for managing multinational cybercrises were finalized by European Union and European Free Trade Association countries, working with the European Network and Information Security Agency, ENISA said Wednesday. The SOPs give guidance on how to deal with major cyberincidents that could escalate into crises, it said. In particular, they stress that successful management of such incidents requires direct links to decisionmakers and political leaders, it said. The SOPs help increase understanding of the causes and impacts of multinational cyberevents and speed mitigation efforts, ENISA said. The combination of contact points, guidelines, workflows, templates, tools and good practices will give crisis managers the ability to use internationally shared technical and non-technical information to come up with integrated operational pictures and effective action plans, it said. The SOPs are a “handbook for predefined, commonly agreed upon and exercised operational contacts, procedures and processes,” said ENISA Executive Director Udo Helmbrecht.
Legislation allowing cross-border licensing of music for online uses won enthusiastic backing (640-18 votes) from the European Parliament Tuesday, and now moves to formal approval by EU governments. The directive on collective management of copyright and related rights and multi-territorial licensing of rights in musical works for online uses in the internal market (FAQ here: http://bit.ly/1nMP44F) is a “cornerstone for the digital single market,” said Internal Market and Services Commissioner Michel Barnier during the European Parliament’s plenary debate. It will make it easier for smaller, innovative services to offer music-streaming services, he said. Parliament’s response to the European Commission-proposed measure was supported across party lines, said its author, Marielle Gallo, of the European People’s Party and France. The measure also sets EU-wide rules on collective management societies (CMOs), some of which have been accused of non-transparent accounting, embezzlement, failure to pay royalties within a reasonable time and other “unfortunate lacks in efficiency,” said Gallo and other Parliament members (MEPs). CMOs will now play a role in the single digital market by requiring online music providers and platforms to deal with only a limited number of rights organizations, Gallo said. Debate on the draft was “lively” but everyone from the U.K Conservative Party to Sweden’s Pirate Party agreed on it, she said. All MEPs who spoke at the plenary debate praised the Gallo report, and only a few raised concerns. One issue is that the legislation leaves it up to EU governments to decide whether large American music platforms and providers are covered, said MEP Helmut Scholz, of the Confederal Group of the European United Left-Nordic Green Left and Germany. If U.S. companies don’t have to follow the same rules as European firms, music services could end up being offshored, he said. The EC is taking additional steps to modernize European copyright, Barnier said. There’s an ongoing dialogue on “licensing Europe,” and the EC is making an in-depth study of EU copyright law. Its extensive consultation has sparked so much interest from all stakeholders that the comment period was extended to March 5, said Barnier. The outcome of the inquiry will feed into a potential revamp of EU copyright law, with a discussion paper possible in June, he said. The issue of modernizing copyright will be for the next European Parliament and commission to move forward, he said. The next commission may also delve into notice and take-down of pirated content, he said. Such content must be removed, but there must be a transparent, balanced procedure for doing so, he said. It’s a “sensitive subject matter” that has to do with fundamental rights, so it’s important that Parliament is on board, he said. Separately, the Independent Music Companies Association (IMPALA) Tuesday urged the “whole music sector to speak up on copyright in Europe.” With four weeks to go on the EC consultation on copyright reform in the digital age, Europe must “reinforce creators’ fundamental freedoms, instead of seeking to unpick copyright as requested by powerful lobby groups,” IMPALA said. U.K. collecting society PRS for Music said it supported the principles and objectives of the directive all along, because it will deliver high standards for governance and transparency, along with a voluntary framework for aggregation of repertoire for online multi-territory licensing underpinned by agreed-upon standards. It said this will help CMOs “play a role in a more integrated, efficient and valuable single market in Europe.”
Sunday’s Denver-Seattle Super Bowl match wasn’t just the most watched linear TV show (CD Feb 4 p17), said the owner of the broadcast network that aired it. It also was the U.S.’s most-viewed live stream of a single sports event, with the 528,000 average viewers a minute spending an average of 47.8 minutes watching online, said 21st Century Fox’s Fox Sports. The peak audience was 1.1 million concurrent users, at 9:11 p.m. Eastern, during the third quarter, said the company in a news release Monday (http://foxs.pt/1enQXSR).
Facebook Monday disclosed more detailed data on national security requests it received from the government (http://bit.ly/1dYVxkt). “With last week’s announcement that the U.S. government has relaxed its limitations on what we are allowed to disclose, we are now permitted to provide important new information that we believe will help foster an informed public debate about the government’s efforts to keep the public safe,” said Facebook General Counsel Colin Stretch in a blog post. The company received between zero and 999 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) content requests from January to June of 2013, the same range it had received in the six previous months. Those requests identified between 5,000 and 5,999 accounts during the first six months of 2013, up from the 4,000 to 4,999 accounts identified in those requests during the last six months of 2012. Facebook has also received between zero and 999 national security letters in both the first and last half of 2013, and the last half of 2012.
Twitter acquired more than 900 patents from IBM in December, the two companies revealed in a Friday release (http://ibm.co/1elUMq7). The price wasn’t disclosed. The companies also said they had entered into a patent cross-license agreement. “This acquisition of patents from IBM and licensing agreement provides us with greater intellectual property protection and gives us freedom of action to innovate on behalf of all those who use our service,” said Twitter Legal Director Ben Lee in a statement. The deal “illustrates the value of patented IBM inventions,” said IBM General Manager of Intellectual Property Ken King in a statement. IBM recently said it had received 6,809 patents in 2013, the most any company had ever received in one year (http://ibm.co/L02ZF6), adding the company had received the most U.S. patents each year for 21 straight years.
Security and compliance management firm Tripwire joined the Council on CyberSecurity as a founding member. The group’s advisory board includes Google Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf and Kaspersky Lab CEO Eugene Kaspersky. Tripwire said it believes it will be able to “support and amplify the council’s efforts to accelerate the widespread availability and adoption of effective cybersecurity measures, practice and policy.” Tripwire and the council “have a shared vision of a widely adopted framework of security controls and practices that allow business and technical executives to understand and quantify cybersecurity risks with the same level of clarity used for other types of business risk,” said CEO Jim Johnson in the company’s news release Thursday (http://bit.ly/1iQMHgK).
The U.S. had the highest-ranked overall intellectual property (IP) protections out of 25 countries, said a report (http://bit.ly/1cuElre) from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Intellectual Property Center (GIPC) released Wednesday. The U.K. placed second and France third, with China 17th and India 25th, it said. The rankings are based on 30 IP standards, including “protection and enforcement of patents, trademark, copyrights, trade secrets, and participation in relevant international treaties,” and said the U.S. had “fallen behind” in IP “enforcement,” said a GIPC news release (http://bit.ly/1byiVVZ). The federal government should strengthen “current enforcement programs and allocate dedicated resources throughout the government to effectively enforce IP rights and protect consumers,” said David Hirschmann, GIPC president. The analysis was done by Pugatch Consilium, an international research consultancy.