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Verizon Communications agreed to pay more than $260 million to ActiveVideo Networks to end a patent-infringement lawsuit that targeted its video-on-demand feature for FiOS TV. The companies also agreed to a patent cross-license. The agreement was struck after a U.S. appeals court in August upheld a jury verdict that New York-based Verizon lost and an order that Verizon pay ActiveVideo $2.74 per month for each FiOS-TV subscriber.

[Commentary] As the traditional media business continues to flounder, a number of people seem to think that Guardian investigative editor David Leigh has come up with a smart new idea for saving journalism and newspapers in particular — namely, a tax on internet service providers that would be used to finance the leading periodicals in Britain. The only problem with this plan is that it is neither smart nor particularly new: as others have noted, the same idea has been floated in the past as a way of saving the music industry, and thankfully never became reality. While Leigh’s proposal seems appealing at first, it suffers from a host of flaws — including the fact that it would likely fail to accomplish what its supporters want it to.

[Commentary] A year after the White House launched its We the People petition website, it's time for a report card.

Fortunately, the White House has released a wealth of statistics touting the success of We the People, so we can make some educated guesses. A key finding is how remarkably difficult it is to create a petition with enough signatures to generate a White House response. The odds of creating a successful petition have dropped to one in a thousand. As of September 5, 2012, there were only 16 active petitions. Two factors help explain the dropoff. First, public officials don't like to explain their political positions clearly. As the saying goes, "ambiguity is the mother's milk of politics." Second, citizens don't like to waste their time. Although We the People was supposed to help unorganized interest groups find a voice, its 30 day signing limit and hoarding of names may have achieved the opposite result. Only well-organized interest groups could easily reach the 25,000 petition threshold within the allowed 30 days (and they presumably have other, more effective ways to get their voices heard). Meanwhile, unorganized interest groups may waste a huge amount of resources because the White House retains exclusive control of the names of those who sign a petition.

The government should provide two petition services. First, it should develop a system for verified petition signing. Politically, this is an extremely hard problem, analogous to the problem of developing a trusted online voting system. But if Estonia can solve the problem, the United States can, too. Second, it should develop a standardized data system, analogous to its election markup language (EML), to facilitate the exchange of petition data.

Lower-income TV homes continue to watch more TV that other income groups -- and those households are expected to climb. Nielsen says over the next 10 years, lower-income homes are expected to rise 17% -- with overall U.S. home growth climbing 8%.

Nielsen says these lower-income homes can be opportunities for retailers and manufacturers. The latest measure shows that lower-income TV homes -- those making under $30,000 watch almost 193 hours of TV per month; those making $30,000 to $100,000 watch about 149 hours; with those homes making over $100,000 tuning in 112 hours.