May 2010

President Barack Obama offered a subtle nod this week to an expansive international copyright treaty that has riled some activists and federal lawmakers.

That draft accord -- called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) -- would essentially require Internet-service providers to take a greater role in finding and disabling access to pirated content online, or risk legal liability. The president displayed brief support for that draft document in a joint statement Wednesday with Mexican President Felipe Caldron, who is visiting Washington this week for the White House's second state dinner. Toward the end of the release Wednesday summarizing the two presidents' discussions, they said they had "reaffirmed their commitment to the negotiation of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement and charged their administrations to conclude these negotiations soon."

Facebook has found itself facing some tough choices when it comes to the direction of the company, specifically revolving around user privacy.

As most Netizens know, Facebook has faced harsh criticism in recent months—which may be coming to a head after having built up slowly over the years—regarding how it handles user information. Now, the company is left deciding whether it wants to revert to its old principles and go against founder Mark Zuckerberg's policy of forging ahead, privacy be damned. Facebook public policy head Tim Sparapani said in a radio interview Tuesday that the company was working on simplifying its privacy controls because of user complaints about their complexity. "I think we are going to work on that. We are going to be providing options for users who want simplistic bands of privacy that they can choose from and I think we will see that in the next couple of weeks," he said. Sparapani's utterances come on the heels of Facebook working to fix a privacy bug, discovered by Alert Logic earlier this week, one that allowed attackers to expose private information on a user's profile. The flaw was as simple as sending users a specially crafted link which, when clicked, would modify the user's privacy settings. But despite these fixes and potential tweaks to Facebook's settings, users have found themselves on a very different site than the one they used even a year ago.

Cablevision wants the Federal Communications Commission to require broadcasters to negotiate only cash payments for their signals. That would be a 180-degree turn-around from the early days of retrans, when most cable operators didn't want to pay cash and instead made deals that involved some form of non-cash compensation, often carriage of additional, co-owned cable channels.

Cox Enterprises, which has both major TV station and cable MSO holdings, says the FCC needs to consider adopting a last-ditch, fail-safe, when-all-else-fails system to prevent the kind of retrans stalemates that result in cable subscribers losing wired access to TV stations. Cox also takes aim at the major networks' avowed interest in getting a cut of their affiliates' retrans bucks, and even their participation in their own stations' negotiations when they involve linking on-air and online content.

Sinclair Broadcasting said there were relatively few examples of negotiations "taking place in the public eye," Sinclair having been one of them, and even fewer of those where signals are pulled--less than 1% by Sinclair's reckoning. Sinclair conceded that those interruptions are not good, both costly for broadcasters and "inconvenient" for viewers. But it was not ready to take the fall for pulling the signals when a contract has expired.

Verizon took a targeted approach to asking the FCC for changes to the retransmission consent regime. In its comments to the FCC on a petition it co-sponsored along with satellite companies and cable operators large and small, it said, ideally, the commission would get rid of rules like network nonduplication and syndicated exclusivity that prevent it from negotiating with out-of-market TV station operators. But rather than push those points, it said the FCC should at the very least require a standstill agreement that keeps signals from being pulled so long as both sides are bargaining in good faith.
Cablevision Proposes Cash and Carry Retrans Regime (B&C - Cablevision)

Computer-based testing, online high school courses, instructional data systems, and a dropout reengagement program that uses a blended model of instruction are just some of the uses of federal education technology funding that are occurring in states, a group of state leaders told Congress in lobbying for further ed-tech support.

Education leaders gathered on Capitol Hill May 17 to share stories about successful federally funded programs in an effort to urge lawmakers to continue to fund the Enhancing Education Through Technology (EETT) program in FY2011. President Obama's budget proposal would fold EETT -- the largest single source of federal funding for school technology equipment, support, and professional development—into a new competitive grant program that aims to promote effective teaching and learning by making technology an integral part of education. But many advocates of education technology are wary of this approach.