Lawyers for Ford and General Motors and their respective suppliers Clarion and Denso got a 14-day deadline extension to Oct. 10 to answer recording industry allegations they violated the Audio Home Recording Act (AHRA) by shipping car infotainment systems with CD-copying hard drives without building the Serial Copy Management System into the devices (WID Aug 1 p2). Lawyers for the Alliance of Artists and Recording Companies, which filed the complaint July 25 in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, did not oppose the deadline-extension motion, which was filed Monday and granted Tuesday by U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, court documents said (http://1.usa.gov/1pdd3Iu). “Good causes exist to grant this motion,” the documents said. They said more time was needed because Ford, Clarion, Denso and GM are trying to “coordinate in an effort to streamline their responses” to the complaint. The complaint “involves potentially complex issues of law” arising under the AHRA, and several lawyers for the defendants have only recently joined the case “and thus have been working to familiarize themselves with the claims and defenses in the action,” the motion said. It was the second time Jackson has granted the defendants more time to answer the complaint.
The administration should revise its plans to relocate and consolidate the Department of Homeland Security headquarters, and Congress may want to consider making future funding for the project contingent on DHS and General Services Administration progress, said a GAO report. Completion of the $4.5 billion construction project at the St. Elizabeths campus in Washington is now estimated at 2026. The location is slated to eventually house senior DHS officials and Customs and Border Protection headquarters. DHS and GSA officials said the project has received $1.5 billion less than requested for FY 2009-14, GAO said Friday (http://1.usa.gov/1uH3g0F). “According to these officials, this gap has escalated estimated costs by over $1 billion -- from $3.3 billion to the current $4.5 billion -- and delayed scheduled completion by over 10 years,” said a report summary. It’s “disappointing that we don’t yet have a detailed and viable plan for the consolidation,” said Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee ranking member Tom Coburn, R-Okla., in a Monday news release (http://1.usa.gov/1wLAC04).
The Senate shouldn’t attach the Marketplace Fairness Act (MFA) (HR-684) to a bill extending the ban on Internet access taxes during the upcoming lame-duck session, said Executive Director Phil Bond of the Web Enabled Retailers Helping Expand Retail Employment, a retail association for small businesses, in a statement Wednesday. “Sadly, it appears” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., will “ask the Senate to do exactly that in December,” said Bond. Such a bill is likely to be Republican Wyoming Sen. Mike Enzi’s Marketplace and Internet Tax Fairness Act (MITFA), opponents and supporters of the MFA told us (WID Sept 23 p1). MITFA (S-2609) combines the principles of the MFA, which would let states tax remote sellers with annual revenue topping $1 million, and the Internet Tax Freedom Act (ITFA), which would extend the moratorium on Internet access taxes through Nov. 1, 2024. “Rather than desperately trying to push the onerous and business-killing MFA at the behest of the mega-retailers like Wal-Mart and Amazon,” Enzi, Reid and Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., should vote only to extend ITFA, Bond said. Durbin is among 14 Senate co-sponsors of MITFA (http://1.usa.gov/1vhgPo8). Amazon and Wal-Mart didn’t comment.
The total cost of the Apple Watch’s plastic AMOLED display “is highly dependent on yield rates throughout the manufacturing and assembly process,” DisplaySearch said Wednesday in an emailed sales pitch for its Flexible Displays Technology and Market Forecast Report (http://bit.ly/1msRbgB). “Producing a high resolution AMOLED display alone is challenging,” the company said. “Add the processes for coating the flexible substrate on carrier glass, encapsulation, and laser-lift off and the module process becomes even more complicated.” Assuming a 60 percent yield rate, DisplaySearch estimates the Apple Watch’s display costs more than $27 on bill of materials terms, “depending on the costs of the module, touch panel interface, and cover lens.” For the Apple Watch, Apple is sourcing 1.3- and 1.5-inch AMOLEDs on plastic substrates from LG Display, a DisplaySearch blogger said last month, saying a big benefit of AMOLED on plastic is that it can be extremely thin, light and rugged (WID Aug 26 p11). DisplaySearch has estimated average yield rates above 60 percent would allow LG Display to produce more than 10 million AMOLED-on-plastic panels in 2014. Apple hasn’t given a precise release date on the Apple Watch, but has said it would become available in early 2015 at $349 (WID Sept 10 p9).
The Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General’s (OIG) structure, policies and procedures are consistent with standards in the Inspector General Act of 1978, but there are areas for improvement, said the GAO Wednesday. It recommended that the DHS OIG establish additional automated and supervisory controls to protect the identities of DHS employees who file complaints, having found that existing procedures involve manual recording and are thus subject to “human error.” GAO recommended the OIG develop a policy for obtaining legal advice from counsel, having found that OIG doesn’t have such a policy in place. Twenty-eight reports dealt with IT management, while two dealt with infrastructure protection, GAO said (http://1.usa.gov/1ruR8RV). OIG told GAO it’s revising its online complaint forms to protect employee confidentiality.
Entone and ZTE are integrating their products for service operators to quickly start providing IPTV and over-the-top (OTT) services, they said Wednesday. Entone’s hybrid devices will work with ZTE’s IPTV platform to combine live TV, multiscreen applications, OTT, VOD and whole-home DVR, said a news release (http://bit.ly/1ruKyel). It said ZTE’s IPTV platform has almost 50 deployments serving 20 million subscribers total while Entone makes devices enabled for MoCA (Multimedia over Coax Alliance).
Opportunity in the smart home market is being challenged by a host of factors including pace of new product introductions, lack of interoperability, increasing product complexity and business objectives that “aren’t aligned,” said Tom Kerber, analyst at Parks Associates, during a webcast. Kerber said there’s swelling interest in the category as participants on the manufacturer, service provider and retailer sides all look for ways to profit from the nascent, but growing, category. As the number of smart home devices grows “exponentially,” companies in the market are challenged to “scale to keep pace” with the number and breadth of smart devices available, Kerber said. Consumers increasingly want those products to be interoperable, but most aren’t because interoperability “is rather difficult to accomplish,” he said. Another hurdle to smart device interoperability is the “growing number” of home network standards, Kerber said. “It seems like every month there are announcements of new groups that are working together to expand interoperability,” he said, citing Open Interconnect Consortium, Thread Group and ULE on the home network side and Allseen, DLNA and UPnP on the peer-to-peer side. Interoperability also is occurring in the cloud where services and business data are exchanged between partners to create new value-added services, he said. “The challenge is bridging between the multiple protocols and communications standards.”
Stanford University pushed back Wednesday in a blog post against reports it had decided to stop using Google funding for privacy research at the Center for Internet and Society (CIS) (http://stanford.io/Y47dBR). ProPublica said Tuesday that a document filed in a Stanford legal proceeding (http://bit.ly/1rngkJU) contained this sentence: “Since 2013, Google funding is specifically designated not be used for CIS’s privacy work.” In the blog post, CIS Director-Civil Liberties Jennifer Granick said the sentence meant CIS had other funding sources for its privacy work that year, and its decision not to use Google’s funding on privacy was not a comment on Google. “Funding sources impose no restrictions on CIS researchers. Period,” Granick said. “All donors to the Center -- and to Stanford more generally -- agree to give their funds as unrestricted gifts, for which there is no contractual agreement and no promised products, results, or deliverables.” Stanford could in the future designate Google money for privacy research, she said. In 2012, Jonathan Mayer, a Ph.D. candidate at CIS, found Google was circumventing the Apple Safari browser’s cookie blocking feature, which led to a $22.5 million settlement with the FTC (http://1.usa.gov/19VRGcD).
The FTC has received many complaints about two bitcoin miner manufacturers since January 2013, said documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by technology news website Ars Technica (http://bit.ly/1unGtdP). The documents showed 80 complaints about CoinTerra and HashFast, which make bitcoin mining hardware. The FTC as a rule doesn’t confirm the validity of documents obtained through FOIAs, a spokesman told us. On Tuesday, the commission revealed a lawsuit against Butterfly Labs, a bitcoin mining hardware manufacturer about which the commission received over 300 consumer complaints, the FTC said (WID Sept 24 p3).
Low-quality software patents and certain copyright laws have hurt competition and suppressed small-business growth, said the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in comments filed Tuesday to the White House (http://bit.ly/1rndK6q) in connection with the administration’s efforts to update its Strategy for American Innovation (http://1.usa.gov/1quuBz3). A June Supreme Court decision heightened the criteria for software patents (WID June 20 p1), but legislation like the House-passed Innovation Act (HR-3309) is needed, EFF said. The digital privacy advocate also pointed to Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), “ostensibly intended to stop copyright infringers from defeating anti-piracy protections added to copyrighted works,” EFF said. “In practice, however, these provisions have been used to stifle a wide array of legitimate activities.” Several markets suffered as a result -- laser printer toner cartridges, videogame console accessories and mobile phones. The organization pressed the White House to support the Unlocking Technology Act (HR-1892), which hasn’t moved out of committee (http://1.usa.gov/1rnf6Ox).