SAN FRANCISCO -- Some University of California campuses “go a little overboard” in cutting off a student’s Internet access over a single copyright takedown notice without investigating its validity, said a lawyer for the university system. But the lawyer, Mary MacDonald of the general counsel’s office, asked her audience Wednesday at a State Bar of California conference in San Francisco on intellectual property and the Internet for sympathy about the university’s position. “We're under tremendous political pressure, which is a different kind of pressure than a commercial ISP” confronts, she said.
American parents tend to be more forgiving of advertising than parents in other parts of the world, said Parry Aftab, executive director of WiredSafety.org. She spoke at an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development forum on protecting children online. The U.S. focuses most of its protective attention on young children, American University Prof. Kathryn Montgomery said. New research into brain development and hormonal phases indicates the U.S. should rethink its approach to teenagers, she said. “Adolescents are not as savvy as we might think they are."
White House tech officials got an earful Thursday from senators about the sprawling array of little-visited agency Web sites and differing systems for tracking federal spending. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., who chairs the Budget Committee’s newly created Task Force on Government Performance, said at a hearing he was especially irritated about high-profile mishaps with Recovery.gov, the government’s site for tracking spending under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Lawmakers have been griping for months about the site’s alleged problems with usability and uniformity (WID March 20 p9). But the Department of Veterans Affairs got rare kudos for its recent decision to halt 45 troubled IT projects, with senators suggesting it’s a model for other agencies.
By embracing the participative Web and posting user-generated content across the Internet, consumers have inadvertently taken on a new role with legal responsibilities of which they're unaware and for which they're unprepared, said Steven Metalitz, counsel to the International Intellectual Property Alliance, at an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development forum.
Social networking sites offer the possibility of a new model for providing government services, benefits and entitlements, said Tim Sparapani, director of public policy at Facebook, at the International Association of Privacy Professionals forum. Rather than require people to physically go to a government office with their paperwork, people could be authenticated with a high degree of confidence through their social networks, he said. Sparapani appeared the same day that Facebook rolled out an education campaign on its privacy features and added new tools.
The fight over net neutrality rules is being waged in a new lobbying arena, pitting traditional corporate lobbying tactics against the well-honed social networking that helped win the election for President Barack Obama. Free Press, Public Knowledge and the Open Internet Coalition are leading the way with grassroots outreach to build support for strong net neutrality rules. The phone and cable industry have a large and well-financed network of lobbyists on Capitol Hill and at the FCC, according to Senate lobbying records. Both sides of the neutrality debate supplement their lobbying with membership in more than two dozen coalitions, alliances and trade associations that share their opinions, according to our research based on tax filings, interviews and organizational disclosures on Web sites.
Lawmakers are more eager than federal officials to target individual file-swappers in the U.S. for copyright infringement, judging by the back-and-forth at a House Oversight Government Management Subcommittee hearing on intellectual property enforcement Wednesday. They quibbled over the balance between pursuing operators of illicit-content networks, which often requires the cooperation of foreign governments, and Internet users downloading from them, who can be spooked by a warning letter from their ISP. Officials defended the opportunities for reduction in piracy and counterfeiting from some of the worst IP offenders in the U.S. government’s view, such as China. But lawmakers seemed unimpressed with other countries’ efforts.
Broadcast TV networks will fare better if online video overtakes DVR playback as consumers’ preferred method of viewing time-shifted TV programming, CBS Chief Research Officer David Poltrack told an investor conference Wednesday. “What if they could get universal access to online video? Would they cancel their [$10 a month] DVR subscription?” Because networks don’t get paid when viewers watch programs more than three days after they've aired, and since viewers tend to skip about half the ads in a program when watching on a DVR, online video advertising can be more lucrative, he said.