Copyright law specifically identifies “educational uses as being potentially being considered fair use,” said House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., in remarks prepared for a House Judiciary IP Subcommittee hearing Wednesday. Although copyrighted works used for educational purposes are likely to come under fair use, the “use of an entire work may, and often does, require the copyright owner to be compensated for his or her effort,” Goodlatte said. The subcommittee needs to examine the Technology, Education and Copyright Harmonization (TEACH) Act (S-487), said subcommittee ranking member Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., in prepared remarks. “I understand that many educators now say that the TEACH Act is extremely complex,” he said. “It is also often difficult to provide reliable guidance to teachers and educators, and this has been a major criticism of fair use law,” Nadler said. “For educational publishers, the most important copyright issue is need for greater clarity and predictability in the application of fair use to the use of copyrighted works for educational purposes -- especially in higher education,” said Allan Adler, Association of American Publishers general counsel, in prepared remarks.
Communications Subcommittee members spoke up on net neutrality on the Senate floor Wednesday. “People are trying to send a message here,” said Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., reflecting on the recent midterm elections that featured many GOP seat gains. “It’d be a good idea if the White House would get on receive and try to figure out what that message is and what is wrong with those policies the American people don’t like.” Voters are “concerned about the president’s recent overreach” on net neutrality “where even the chairman of the FCC, nominated by the president, confirmed by this Senate, even the chairman of the FCC says, no, I think the president’s headed in the wrong direction there and we need to do something different than that,” Blunt said. President Barack Obama recently backed Communications Act Title II reclassification of broadband, and FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has not publicly disagreed with that proposal (see 1411190039). Wheeler is widely seen as having worked on a hybrid proposal, drawing on Title II and Section 706. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., defended net neutrality. She called for strong rules to prevent blocking, throttling, paid prioritization deals and to promote transparency, for wired and wireless networks. She worries about ISPs “cutting backroom deals,” she said, flanked by a large sign displaying the words net neutrality. “We face a pivotal moment,” Cantwell said. “I’m calling on the FCC to take forceful action that adopts the strongest rules possible to provide maximum protection for consumers, maximum flexibility to promote the Internet economy.” She called net neutrality “one of the most important economic issues before us.”
Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., stills sees a pay-TV industry billing practices hearing in the cards for this year, despite some doubts industry lobbyists have voiced in recent days. “We’re trying to pull it together right now,” McCaskill told us at the Capitol Tuesday. She is attempting to pull together a hearing for December now, she said. McCaskill is chairwoman of the Senate Commerce Consumer Protection Subcommittee, and Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said in September that McCaskill should chair such a hearing.
Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., asked Attorney General Eric Holder several questions about a recent report about the U.S. government collecting consumer cellphone information by attaching devices to airplanes to mimic cellphone towers. “What types of information (e.g., phone metadata, location, emails, files, and photos) are collected from phones?” Franken asked in the Tuesday letter. “What types of data are retained by the government using this program, both from phones of targets and innocent Americans? What is the effectiveness of this program? Please be specific about the number of fugitives who have been detained as a direct result of this technology.” Franken chairs the Judiciary Privacy Subcommittee.
House members and Commerce Department officials criticized alleged abuse by some employees within the Patent and Trademark Office’s telework program and its hiring practices (see 1411100040), in a joint House Judiciary and Oversight committees hearing Tuesday. The PTO employees who allegedly abused the telework program already should’ve been fired, said House Appropriations Committee member Frank Wolf, R-Va., in prepared testimony. Wolf said he’s a “huge advocate” of telework programs, but that the PTO needs stronger enforcement policies for those programs. Commerce’s 2014 investigation uncovered that a PTO “senior official intervened in the hiring process to ensure that a nonselected candidate, who was the fiancé of a close relative of the official, was ultimately selected for a position as a trademark examiner,” said Todd Zinser, Commerce inspector general, in prepared remarks. Ninety-five percent of PTO paralegals who participated in the Patent Hoteling Program had “insufficient work assigned to them over a four-year period despite a significant and growing backlog of appeals,” he said. The PTO received four “whistleblower” complaints in 2012 alleging abuse of the telework program, said Margaret Focarino, PTO commissioner for patents, in prepared testimony. “The USPTO investigated the claims, immediately took action to address issues raised during the investigation, and subsequently submitted a report to the Department of Commerce Office of the Inspector General." That report posited eight recommendations to improve the telework program, said Focarino. “We began implementing these recommendations and taking other actions even before submitting the report.”
Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., rebuffed Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, for attacking President Barack Obama’s net neutrality position in support of Communications Act Title II reclassification. Cruz had slammed Obama and called it “Obamacare for the Internet” last week (see 1411100033). Cruz is a member of the Communications Subcommittee, and Franken chairs the Judiciary Privacy Subcommittee. Cruz is “completely wrong and he just doesn’t understand what his issue is,” Franken said Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union. “We’ve had net neutrality the entire history of the Internet … this is about reclassifying something so it stays the same.” Franken said pricing happens by value. “The Internet service providers have gotten bigger -- they essentially have an oligopoly and they have been talking about a fast lane,” Franken said. Several of the large ISPs recently told Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., that they have no interest in paid prioritization deals to create such fast lanes (see 1410290053). Cruz dug in on his net neutrality concerns Monday, posting three YouTube videos about his concerns with Internet regulation (see here, here and here). One clip featured Franken’s remarks and a Cruz rebuttal. “What happens when government starts regulating a service as a public utility?” Cruz said, delivering remarks in Austin Friday, according to the video. “It calcifies everything, it freezes it in place.” In one video, Cruz walks along a stage holding a rotary phone. “This is regulated by Title II,” he said, pointing to the old black phone model. “This is not,” he added, holding up a smartphone. “We want a whole lot more of this and a whole lot less of this.”
A Senate Commerce Committee aide confirmed that the committee wasn't planning to consider Republican FCC Commissioner Michael O’Rielly’s renomination at its postponed Tuesday nominations hearing. Commerce never revealed which nominees it planned to consider and called off the Tuesday hearing in a notice issued Friday (see 1411140053). The White House nominated O’Rielly for a full five-year term in October (see 1411130051), and spokespeople for Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., have declined to say whether O’Rielly was on the agenda for this initially scheduled hearing and whether the chairman plans to advance O’Rielly in the lame-duck session. Commerce Committee ranking member John Thune, R-S.D., “believes that Mike O'Rielly's re-nomination should be approved before the end of the year because the Committee has already vetted him and he is more than capable to carry our his duties at the FCC,” the aide told us this weekend.
The Senate Commerce Committee postponed this week’s nominations hearing. The committee declined to explain why or say when it would be rescheduled, though a committee aide told us Commerce’s hearing schedule is always subject to change. The hearing had initially been slated for Tuesday at 2:30 p.m. and may have included FCC Commissioner Michael O’Rielly, whom the White House nominated for a full term last month, a nomination committee Republicans hope to advance before year’s end (see 1411130051).
"If the Internet sales tax becomes law, small online retailers would have to comply with over 9,600 tax jurisdictions," said Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, in a video Friday. Cruz was referring to the Marketplace Fairness Act (HR-684), which would let states tax remote sellers with annual revenue exceeding $1 million. “The corporate lobbyists who want Internet taxes to crush their competition see a chance to make it law during the lame duck session of Congress,” Cruz said. Ten senators who helped pass the MFA in the Senate last year are leaving office at the end of this congressional term, he said. “This may be their last, best chance to pass it,” said Cruz. “We must say 'no.'” Congress shouldn’t try to combine the MFA with the Internet Tax Fairness Act, which would ban Internet access taxes, said Bartlett Cleland, Institute for Policy Innovation resident scholar-tax and innovation policy, in a news release Friday. If that happens, the “recent protests in Hungary opposing similar attempts will look mild compared to the anger of an electorate full of online consumers that deserves much better,” he said. A spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, has reportedly said that Boehner will block the MFA in the lame duck (see 1411120016).
Senate Republicans on Thursday re-elected Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., as chairman of the Republican Conference. Thune has been ranking member of the Commerce Committee, which he's expected to chair in the next Congress. The Republican Conference chair is the third-highest position in GOP leadership, Thune's office said in a news release.