September 2009

Since it's so fashionable these days to question whether government can do anything right -- whether it's regulating banks, bolstering the economy or overseeing healthcare -- it's worth noting that we're about to celebrate the 40th anniversary of one of the most important federal initiatives of our time. The event was the launch of the Internet, which we date from Oct. 29, 1969, when a refrigerator-sized special-purpose computer in Leonard Kleinrock's engineering lab at UCLA transmitted its first message to a twin machine in Menlo Park, Calif. (The message was the first two letters of the command "Login.") That was the first exchange over what was then known as the ARPAnet, which evolved, after many intermediate steps, into what we know today as the Internet. Former-Pentagon research official Robert W. Taylor believes that, despite the Web's successful commercialization, it may be time for the government to play a stronger role. The corporations making billions of dollars from the Web haven't done their part to build up its capacity, so a shortage looms as customers increasingly use the network for bandwidth-hogging tasks like downloading movies. Instead, service providers are plotting to profiteer from the bandwidth scarcity by hiking user fees. "The telecommunications industry has promised us for years that if we only let them raise prices and do mergers, they'd increase bandwidth," Taylor said this week. "They haven't kept their promise." He thinks the proper model for the Internet, given its critical role in our lives today, is as a taxpayer-supported service available to everybody, rich or poor, at no charge. Both notions spring from his experience witnessing the interaction of government and private enterprise. What he learned then he still believes. "The idea that private industry can always do something better than the government is false and sad and divisive," Taylor observed at the University of Texas event. "People should know better."

Despite some tentative optimism from Washington, Wall Street and Madison Avenue, people who monitor the newspaper business for a living say it has not yet hit bottom. But in what passes for good news these days, the free fall in newspaper advertising may be slowing, and specialists predict it will ease through 2009 and into 2010. With 10 days left in the third quarter, analysts, publishers and ad buyers say that ad revenue will be down about 25 percent industrywide from the third quarter last year, possibly a little less. They predict that the decline will be smaller in the fourth quarter. Several of them say the usual back-to-school uptick in newspaper advertising seems to have been a little better than in most years, if only because July and August were so weak. Ordinarily, such numbers would be seen as catastrophic, but these times are not ordinary. The drop in combined print and digital ad revenue last year, 16.6 percent, according to the Newspaper Association of America, was the worst since the Depression. But it looks rosy next to 2009, when revenue fell 28.3 percent in the first quarter and 29 percent in the second.

Walt Disney Co. may not get full ownership of many of Marvel Entertainment's most famous superheroes if new copyright claims by the family of the late artist Jack Kirby have merit. Four children of Kirby, who co-created a number of Marvel's best-known superheroes in the 1960s including the X-Men, Fantastic Four, Thor and the Hulk, have served 45 "notices of termination" to Marvel, Disney, Sony Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures and Universal Pictures. The notices seek to regain copyright control of certain characters. Disney this month agreed to buy Marvel for $4 billion. Sony owns the movie rights to Spider-Man, Fox to the Fantastic Four and X-Men; Paramount and Universal have distribution rights for certain Marvel-produced films. The children of Kirby, who died in 1994, are being represented by Los Angeles law firm Toberoff & Associates, which has represented the heirs of Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel in a similar claim against Warner Bros. Kirby served as artist and co-plotter with writer Stan Lee on most of the characters in question. Whereas Lee has been a public face of the company for decades, Kirby is less known. That's in part because Kirby left to work for competitor DC Comics in 1970. Under copyright law, creators can seek to regain copyrights they previously assigned to a company 56 years after first publication and can give notice of their intentions up to 10 years before that. Kirby's children would be eligible to claim their father's portion of the copyright of the Fantastic Four in 2017; the Hulk would come up in 2018 and X-Men in 2019. The copyrights would then run for 39 more years.

Google and Apple can't seem to agree on why the new Google Voice application for the iPhone doesn't appear in Apple's App Store. The Federal Communications Commission posted a previously confidential letter today by Google that said the Google Voice app was rejected. "Apple's representatives informed Google that the Google Voice application was rejected because Apple believed the application duplicated the core dialer functionality of the iPhone," the letter said. In the letter, Google says that Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, told Google's senior vice president, Alan Eustace, that Apple declined the application during a July 7 phone conversation. But Apple maintains that it never rejected Google Voice for the iPhone and that the two Silicon Valley companies are still in talks about the service. Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris said Apple was studying Google Voice and, as of today, it hasn't been approved for the App Store. "We do not agree with all of the statements made by Google in their FCC letter," Kerris said in a statement. "Apple has not rejected the Google Voice application and we continue to discuss it with Google."