August 2011

Legislator Calls for Clarifying Copyright Law

Arguing that Congress has an obligation “to preserve fairness and justice for artists,” the senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee has called for a revision of United States copyright law to remove ambiguities in the current statute about who is eligible to reclaim ownership rights to songs and sound recordings. “For too long the work of musicians has been used to create enormous profits for record labels, radio stations and others, without fairly distributing these profits to the artists,” said Rep John Conyers Jr. (D-MI), who was chairman of the committee until January. Because “copyrights are a tool to be used by creators to earn a living from their work,” he added, it is important to ensure “a fair marketplace.”

Seeing 9/11 Through a Digital Prism

[Commentary] It is clear that the world changed on 9/11. It is less clear exactly how it did.

Ten years later the debate is still open on the wisdom of waging war in Afghanistan and Iraq, on laws that effectively rolled back civil liberties, on the West's relation to Islam, on America's place in the world. But in one respect, the way the world changed is utterly clear -- the manner in which we witness news events. In 2001, few could have foreseen the way the attacks would coincide with a phase change in how we observe and respond to key moments in public life, and therefore how society and culture go on to interpret history. Three technologies that found their footing in the 1990s -- digital photography, 24/7 television news, and Internet-supported citizen journalism -- came of age that day as some two billion people (a third of the species) watched the attacks unfold on TV and the World Wide Web. But what we couldn't foresee then is how the act of newsgathering would be turned on its head. Since 9/11, the documentation of conflict -- in the form of still photographs and moving pictures, often by civilians carrying camera-equipped mobile phones, whose footage can be viewed almost instantaneously across the globe -- actually takes precedent in the public mind over context and analysis. Often, "traditional" media coverage, no matter how well-funded, thorough and authoritative, is not considered credible or definitive unless accompanied by compelling visual evidence.

Smartphones Are Bridging the Digital Divide

[Commentary] Federal regulators weighing the proposed AT&T and T-Mobile merger must not ignore a significant but quietly unfolding revolution in how Americans connect to the Internet for information and products.

The changes began with the 2007-2008 launch of the iPhone and Android and have accelerated with the introduction of low-cost cellphone plans. What is most striking about this smartphone revolution is its democratic character. For years, government officials, as well as academics, worried that the rise of the Internet would create a digital divide between those who could connect and those who couldn't. They wrestled with how to bring broadband to rural communities and to poor urban residents who couldn't afford laptops or a broadband connection at home. Many decried the U.S.'s 12th place ranking -- behind South Korea, the United Kingdom, Canada and Germany -- in fixed-broadband connectivity. But no one metric can begin to capture the complexity of today's marketplace for Internet connectivity. Officials who still cling to such statistics as fixed-broadband access, and regulators who make policy around them, overlook the emerging reality brought about by rapid technological progress, business innovation and a dynamic wireless market. The smartphone revolution enables people to take matters into their own hands and find effective ways to narrow the digital divide.

[Hood is executive director of the Institute for Communication Technology Management at the Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California. The institute's 30 corporate sponsors include wireless and communications companies, among them AT&T, Verizon and US Cellular.]

Report shows more US farmers relying on Internet

Think of farms and images of tractors and combines come to mind. But what about laptops, smart phones and tablets? The number of farmers with Internet access on a variety of digital gadgets has dramatically increased, changing the way farms do business.

Farmers say they're increasingly using the Net to speed up their work flow, improve their farming techniques, market their crops, connect with customers and retailers, and fulfill a variety of regulatory requirements. Within the past decade, the number of farms with an Internet connection has increased by nearly 20 percentage points, according to a report issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture earlier this month. More than half of America's farms now have access to the Internet, with farmers in the West with the highest access.

FCC Gives Industry Nine Months to Implement Video Descriptions

The Federal Communications Commission will give broadcasters and cable operators nine months -- until July 1, 2012 -- to have their new video description regimes in place.

The FCC is under a deadline itself since Congress gave it until Oct. 8, 2011 to have the video description rules in place. The rules implement the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act, which requires the captioning of any online video that is closed-captioned on TV, and asks the FCC to study captioning of Web-original video. It also requires smartphones and other mobile devices to be accessible to the disabled, if that is achievable, and restores the FCC's video description rules thrown out by the courts in 2002. The FCC order addresses some of the concerns of small cable operators, providing technical exemptions and clarifying that only systems with at least 50,000 subs in a market will be required to pass through the video descriptions.

AT&T-Verizon-T Mobile Sets $100M for Mobile Payment Fight

Verizon Wireless, AT&T and T- Mobile USA plan to invest more than $100 million in their joint venture that lets consumers pay for goods with mobile phones.

The investment sets up a showdown between the venture, known as Isis, and rivals like a mobile-payment service from Google. The amount of funding depends on how successful Isis is at attracting banks and merchants. The carriers have created the alliance to grab a piece of the market for mobile commerce, which lets consumers buy things by tapping devices against a reader at checkout. The market may reach $670 billion by 2015, Juniper Research says. The carriers may invest hundreds of millions of dollars in the venture if it gains followers, one person said, helping it catch up with Google, which unveiled its own mobile-wallet service in May.

The Digital Revolution and Higher Education

As online college courses have become increasingly prevalent, the general public and college presidents offer different assessments of their educational value, according to a new Pew Research Center report.

Just three-in-ten American adults (29%) say a course taken online provides an equal educational value to one taken in a classroom. By contrast, about half of college presidents (51%) say online courses provide the same value. More than three-quarters of college presidents (77%) report that their institutions now offer online courses, and college presidents predict substantial growth in online learning: 15% say most of their current undergraduate students have taken a class online, 50% predict that ten years from now most of their students will take classes online.

65% of online adults use social networking sites

Fully 65% of adult Internet users now say they use a social networking site like MySpace, Facebook or LinkedIn, up from 61% one year ago. This marks the first time in Pew Internet surveys that 50% of all adults use social networking sites.

The frequency of social networking site usage among young adult Internet users under age 30 was stable over the last year – 61% of online Americans in that age cohort now use social networking sites on a typical day, compared with 60% one year ago. However, among the Boomer-aged segment of Internet users ages 50-64, social networking site usage on a typical day grew a significant 60% (from 20% to 32%).

Product Placement Rises in Networks’ Telenovelas

Coming off a strong upfront season — when advertisers buy commercial time before the season — the two major Spanish language television networks, Telemundo and Univision, are lining up more opportunities for advertisers wanting to incorporate their products into their telenovelas.

While the idea of product placement, or as marketers prefer to call it, branded entertainment, is far from new, the campaigns are becoming increasingly sophisticated with elements that take the products from the telenovela to the Web and mobile devices. Until January, Univision carried programming created by the Mexican TV giant Televisa, which limited options for brand integration since the shows were already filmed before being distributed through Univision. Because of the partnership with Televisa, Univision can now work on product placement in Televisa-produced content. In this year’s upfront presentation, Univision reported commercial sales between $1.7 billion and $1.8 billion. “There’s no question that our dollar-volume growth was largely due to some of these major branded entertainment sponsorships that we sold,” said David Lawenda, president of advertising sales and marketing for Univision.

Kleiner Plays Catch-Up

Venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers led the late-1990s dot-com frenzy with investments in Netscape, Amazon and, later, Google. But after spreading its bets to clean technology -- and missing out on early-stage investments in some of the hottest new Internet companies -- the firm is scrambling to grab a leadership role in the latest Web boom.

Benton

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