June 2010

The Senate will work to combine a number of cybersecurity bills with an eye toward meeting the goal of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) of passing comprehensive cybersecurity legislation sometime this year, Senate staffers said June 23.

There is broad agreement between key Senate committees in terms of key elements that need to be included in any comprehensive legislation, Eric Hopkins, professional staff member for the federal financial management subcommittee of the Senate committee on homeland security and government affairs, said at the Symantec Government Symposium, but many details need to be worked out. There's a number of themes common in both the Senate homeland security committee bill sponsored by Sens Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) and the Senate Commerce Committee bill sponsored by Sens. John Rockefeller (D-WV) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), the two most prominent and comprehensive bills currently circulating. Included in that list are reforms of the Federal Information Security Management Act, clarification of the role of the federal government in preventing cyber-attacks against privately-owned critical infrastructure, delineation of the proper roles of the White House and other agencies in managing cybersecurity within government, and measures to grown and improve the cybersecurity workforce.

Mayor Richard M. Daley and a broad cross-section of Chicago officials, business groups and community organizations told federal regulators they support Comcast Corp.'s proposed acquisition of NBC Universal.

"They have been good corporate citizens," the mayor said in comments filed with the Federal Communications Commission this week. "I strongly support the partnership between NBC Universal and Comcast."

But lots of Illinois residents disagree. Perhaps more than a thousand expressed opposition to the deal, in many cases sending the FCC what appears to be a form letter.

U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton has given Google a big win in its long-standing litigation with Viacom. In a decision, embedded after the jump, Judge Stanton grants Google's request for summary judgment, saying that YouTube can't be held liable for copyright infringement because it is protected by provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which essentially say that a provider of online services can't be held liable for content uploaded by its users, with a few exceptions. The judge says that the "burden is on the (copyright) owner to identify infringement," so even if YouTube did have "general knowledge" that users were uploading illegal clips, as Viacom asserted, it wasn't obligated to seek out those videos and take them down. The judge also notes that whenever YouTube was notified that a clip on its site infringed on a copyright, it responded appropriately by quickly removing the video. Viacom is appealing the ruling.

Sherwin Siy, deputy legal director of Public Knowledge, said, ""We are very pleased with the outcome of this case. It shows that the current structure of copyright law works well for even the largest of content-hosting sites. As we have continually said, the burden to point out allegations of infringement is with the content provider, and the burden of taking down material lies with the service provider. Had Viacom won this case, that burden would have shifted dramatically. As the law now stands, prompt compliance with take-down notices shields an online service provider from liability. We hope those policymakers who look continually to make our copyright law more draconian and unbalanced will take this ruling to heart, and note that the current law is working quite well to protect content creators while taking into account the responsibilities of online service providers."