Cablevision Loses Remote DV-R Fight with Studios
US cable service provider Cablevision Systems was handed a defeat yesterday in its defense against a lawsuit by three broadcast TV networks, two cable TV networks, and four TV production studios. Cablevision had announced its intention in March 2006 to roll out a kind of off-site DV-R service to subscribers, allowing them to record up to 45 hours of programming for a limited time onto storage devices that are housed at the Cablevision headend instead of households.
Cablevision had planned for a test deployment of what it called Remote Storage Digital Video Recorder (RS-DVR) service to two million charter subscribers on Long Island, New York last spring. But in May, the lawsuit brought by 20th Century-Fox, Paramount, Disney, and Universal; by CBS, ABC, and NBC; and by Cartoon Network and CNN, put that rollout on hold.
Viewpoint: The Parent as Human Firewall
In his decision yesterday which struck down the Child Online Protection Act of 1998, Judge Lowell Reed, Jr., agreed with the American Civil Liberties Union's contention that technological measures can do a better job of protecting children from access to content that any "average" person might deem harmful to them, than some regulation that threatens a $50,000 fine and six months in jail.
While I agree wholeheartedly with that assessment, I would suggest that Judge Reed's opinion, removed from the local context of the ACLU v. Gonzales case and applied to the broader context of our everyday lives, omits mention of an extremely important fact: While the US government could not possibly protect the nation's youngsters from the dangers of communicating on the Internet, and should not be expected to, the burden now shifts to the parent. And in recent days, parents have not fared much better.
Google PageRank Lawsuit Dismissed a Second Time
The San Jose Mercury News this afternoon reports that a US district judge in San Jose has dismissed a case against Google originally filed in March 2006, that alleged its page rankings that pertain to relative placement in search results unfairly rated a particular provider of parenting information lower than other sites in the same category.
This is the second time the case has been dismissed, although Judge Jeremy Fogel has given plaintiff Kinderstart another opportunity to amend and re-file its case yet again.
Internet Child User 'Protection' Law Struck Down
A controversial 1998 law that set a minimum federal penalty of $50,000 in fines and six months' imprisonment for anyone providing minors with access to "harmful" material via the Internet, was soundly struck down this morning in US District Court in Philadelphia. Judge Lowell Reed, Jr., affirmed in his decision today that Web filtering programs may do a better job of protecting minors from objectionable content than federal regulations.
"[The government's] own study shows that all but the worst performing filters are far more effective than COPA would be at protecting children from sexually explicit material on the Web," wrote Judge Reed in his decision this morning.
Google Exec Quashes Mobile Phone Rumors
In rather emphatic and unmistakable terms, a managing director for Google's Southeast Asia operations flatly denied his company is building a cell phone of its own, in a statement for The Australian Financial Review, despite reports from major press services over the past 48 hours that the company had actually confirmed those rumors.
BetaNews had been seeking confirmation of the "confirmation," but had received none from either Google itself or from reputable analysts with whom we've communicated in the past. On Tuesday, Nomura mobile phone industry analyst Richard Windsor said he was told at the CeBIT trade show in Hannover, writing in an official note circulated through press sources, "Google has come out of the closet at the CeBIT trade fair admitting that it is working on a mobile phone of its own."
News Corp., NBCU Form Video Distribution Partnership
Thursday morning, executives from the parent companies of NBC and Fox announced they have reached agreement on a deal to create a single Web site for the distribution of what they're calling "premium content," implying that non-advertising supplemented programs may carry a streaming fee. NBC Universal and News Corp. will form a joint entity with its own management team, supplied by NBCU during a transitional period before permanent managers are selected.
There are several surprises in this deal, the first of which is that the Fox Interactive Media division of News Corp. does not appear to be a direct part of the partnership. Instead, to stave off attempts by individuals who may try to "share" clips of Fox or NBC content on their own initiative, the new company - as yet unnamed - has already struck redistribution agreements with MySpace, placing FIM in a subsidiary role, along with AOL, Yahoo, and MSN.
Campaign Consultant Fired for Making Anti-Hillary '1984' Video
An employee of a political campaign consulting firm in Washington, D.C., whose clients include presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama (D - IL), has confessed to having created the heavily-circulated remix video of the classic 1983 Macintosh introduction ad produced and directed by Ridley Scott, which was altered to substitute Sen. Hillary Clinton (D - NY) in place of Big Brother, and Obama's campaign logo in...a strategic location on the classic hammer thrower's outfit.
Phil de Vellis, the former campaign communications director for newly minted Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown and an employee of consulting firm Blue State Digital - which works exclusively with Democratic candidates - confessed to being YouTube user "ParkRidge47" (a reference to Sen. Clinton's birth place and year). In keeping with his employer's policy against doing any work for candidates on the side, de Vellis was terminated today.
States Seek $1 Billion Down-Payment for Real ID
Earlier this month, US Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff extended the proposed deadlines for states to comply with the new Real ID regulations, which would require uniform ID card codes among states, and connectivity to a national database. At the time, he estimated states may incur up to $14 billion in expenses over the next ten years to comply with his department's directives.
So on Monday, the National Governors' Association petitioned the House Budget Committee to set aside an initial $1 billion from federal revenues, to handle the states' up-front costs.
Microsoft, Google Join OpenAjax Alliance
What is fast becoming one of the computing industry's most diverse consortiums of competitors will meet tomorrow at IBM's offices in New York, for the first time with Microsoft as a contributing member. The OpenAjax Alliance is seeking to develop a standard specification for Asynchronous JavaScript, which can now also count Google among its ranks, after having co-founded the Alliance but having held out on its decision to officially join...for reasons some speculate may have had to do with Microsoft.
For all intents and purposes, Google and Microsoft are AJAX, with Google having led the way in promoting the concept of JavaScript code that isn't bound to browser-based events. The freely distributed Google Web Toolkit (GWT) provided most Web developers' first introduction to document object models that could be amended on the fly. Microsoft came along not long afterward with its betas of "Atlas," which have since been pulled in under the ASP.NET umbrella.
Google AdSense Beta to Apply Direct Sales Model to Advertising
In Dell Computer's revolutionary direct sales model, which altered the evolution of American business, component parts for building customer orders were purchased at or near the time of the order, reducing to near-zero inventory on hand and accelerating the company's rise to profitability. Google is already pretty profitable in its own business, but today it confirmed rumors that it will experiment with an approach to advertising sales that Michael Dell might appreciate: a cost-per-action model where the advertiser pays when the sale is made.
While similar systems have been tried by Internet advertisers before, they've been on a far smaller scale. Google's upcoming AdSense beta will give selected participants in the US the option of determining the value of a user's action - such as paying for a download or signing up for a newsletter - triggered by an ad supplied through the Google AdSense network.
Nearly $1 BN Set-Top Box Subsidy May Not Be Enough
With the US Congress having approved a plan just eight days ago to provide households with as many as two coupons, each good toward $40 off the purchase of a converter set-top box enabling existing television sets to receive digital programming over the airwaves after February 17, 2009, LG - expected to be a major producer of STBs - predicted that its models would end up selling for $60 apiece.
The comment came from John Taylor, LG's vice president of US government relations, in a public statement that was cited this morning by Reuters.
John W. Backus (1924 - 2007)
The man who for all practical purposes invented the modern concept of the interpreted programming language, and who gave us the first principles upon which the software industry was formed, died over the weekend at age 82. John W. Backus led the Applied Science Division of IBM's Programming Research Group, which in 1954 set about to develop a more sensible language that the IBM 704 could translate into its own machine language.
FORTRAN was not the first programming language; indeed, there were symbolic constructs prior to FORTRAN whose purpose was to represent machine instructions with more tangible, teachable concepts. Backus himself had developed one such precursor: the so-called "Speedcoding System" for the IBM 701, whose project was launched and completed in 1953.
Streaming Music Providers Unite to Combat Proposed Royalties
Attorneys for National Public Radio filed a motion in federal court yesterday for a re-hearing concerning the Copyright Royalty Board's decision to impose significantly higher "per-performance" royalty fees upon Internet streaming music providers, which include the online services of public radio stations.
But the hearing itself would be just the first step, NPR's motion itself states, as the broadcaster intends to appeal the CRB's proposal to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, on the grounds that the decision of the CRB's judges "was arbitrary and capricious, an abuse of discretion and/or unsupported by sufficient evidence." Just the minimum fee alone, NPR contends, would be quintupled to $500 per channel; and from there, the inflation rate for performance royalties would rise by an even higher factor, rendering the whole business of Internet streaming unsustainable.
Qualcomm / Broadcom Battle Near Its End; Nokia Fills the Gap
A stalemate was declared in the tangle of copyright claims between wireless technology providers Qualcomm and Broadcom last Friday. After both sides watched their initial claims dismissed, Qualcomm agreed to dismiss its six remaining charges against Broadcom, and Broadcom withdrew three of its claims thereafter, thus removing a sizable barrier to the evolution of wireless standards.
But seizing the opportunity, Nokia responded by filing suit against Qualcomm in the EU, claiming it no longer holds exclusive rights to technology it licensed to Texas Instruments in 2000, for chips TI sells in Europe.
Adobe Formally Enters Runtime Environment Market with 'Apollo'
Since the advent of the Web, network applications designers have been using HTTP to create a viable Internet applications platform. The relative success of these projects has varied, from the historic missteps of Microsoft's ActiveX, to Sun's incrementally more satisfactory Java, to Macromedia's resplendent - though often unresolved - Flash, to the more hopeful and practical AJAX, to Microsoft's more ambitious - and far more sensible - XAML. But through it all, the general consensus over whether the browser should play an active role has been on again-off again, drifting like a sine wave.
With Adobe's move today to evolve the Flash platform it acquired in the Macromedia takeover, the company is gambling on "off again." Still code-named "Apollo" (its final brand name has yet to be announced), the new Adobe runtime environment was made available to the general public this morning.
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