Cable and CE interests used replies this week in the FCC’s rulemaking into how to level the playing field for retail-based CableCARD devices (CED April 22 p3) by rehashing familiar arguments in the years-old CableCARD debate. Cable and other pay-TV providers renewed their call for an FCC waiver from CableCARD rules for digital tuning adapters (DTAs). CE companies urged the commission to reject a “blanket waiver” on DTAs and to go slow on any such exemptions until the “true cost” of CableCARD “alternatives” can be established.
Paul Gluckman
Paul Gluckman, Executive Senior Editor, is a 30-year Warren Communications News veteran having joined the company in May 1989 to launch its Audio Week publication. In his long career, Paul has chronicled the rise and fall of physical entertainment media like the CD, DVD and Blu-ray and the advent of ATSC 3.0 broadcast technology from its rudimentary standardization roots to its anticipated 2020 commercial launch.
Though CEA and the ITI Council made peace with New York City and green groups in settling their lawsuit to stop the now-moot city e-waste program from taking effect (CED June 29 p1), both sides in the dispute couldn’t resist taking parting shots late Monday even as they hailed the settlement agreement.
The “machine-or-transformation” test is not the only one determining patent eligibility, ruled the U.S. Supreme Court Monday in its long-awaited Bilski vs. Kappos ruling. Courts must remain open to other standards in patents of the Information Age, wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy for the majority. The high court declined to set specific rules lower courts could follow. The court also declined to set specific parameters for determining the patentability of business methods, saying the patent before it should be rejected as “an unpatentable abstract idea,” without defining what that means.
A month to the day after New York Gov. David Paterson signed his state’s e-waste measure into law, CEA and the ITI Council said Monday they settled their e-waste lawsuit against New York City and its co-defendant, the Natural Resources Defense Council. CEA and ITI filed their lawsuit last July 24 seeking a preliminary injunction blocking the New York City e-waste program from taking effect and a declaration from the court that the program’s direct collection requirement was unconstitutional.
For Best Buy, “the connected world is not a strategy to simply sell more stuff,” but an effort to capitalize on “a fundamental shift in human behavior” by capturing significant share of a $325 billion market for connectivity products and services, CEO Brian Dunn told the shareholder meeting Thursday. “People across the world have an almost insatiable desire to stay connected to the things they care about.” In Q-and-A, one shareholder challenged Dunn to explain why he should hold on to his Best Buy stock despite it having lost 20 percent of its value since he bought it 15 years ago. “If you think innovation around us is slowing, then I don’t think we're a great bet,” Dunn responded. “But if you believe as we do that innovations are going to keep coming and accelerate … we're a great bet.” He thinks Best Buy shares are “significantly undervalued,” he said. Another shareholder asked Dunn what Best Buy had done to “eradicate” the threat of again being defrauded as it was in a case she said had recently dominated Minneapolis newspapers. Dunn identified the case as that involving a company called Chip Factory, which supplied computer replacement parts. A federal jury earlier this month convicted an Illinois couple for conspiring with a former Best Buy employee to defraud the chain of more than $41 million through its online “reverse auction system” called the “parts procurement network,” according to a July 2009 indictment. “We were making purchases from a fraudulent vendor supplier,” Dunn said. “The company unfortunately was defrauded and it cost us some money.” As a result, “we have had a deep scrub over the last 18 months of all the processes and the personnel around this business,” Dunn said. “We are not very proud of” the Chip Factory case, he said. “We have audited, sort of unilaterally, our vendor relationships in that category, and we're very confident that we have repaired what was a broken system.” He accused some newspapers of sensationalizing the story, but conceded the $41 million was “a significant amount of money.” Still, “if you put that through the context of $50 billion going through our P&L, there’s never an excuse for it, but essentially there was a breakdown in the checks and balances around that piece of our business. We have made the appropriate personnel decisions and the appropriate systems and processes updates, and we're very confident we won’t [again] be defrauded in that space in that way.”
A new trial is set to open in a California state court the first week of December on DVD Copy Control Association allegations that Kaleidescape breached its CSS license agreement, DVD CCA spokesman Greg Larsen said Friday. “While a judge has not yet been assigned, it will be a different judge than the one in the first case,” Larsen said. DVD CCA sued in 2004 alleging Kaleidescape breached terms of the CSS license contained in a “general specifications” document that require the physical DVD disc to be present in a device during playback of a movie. The trial court sided with Kaleidescape, saying the general specifications document wasn’t part of the CSS license, but an appeals court reversed that decision last summer and remanded the case to the lower court for a new trial. Larsen said the dispute with Kaleidescape is a breach of contract, not a copyright, case, and it’s not accurate to say Kaleidescape has prevailed on fair-use grounds (CED June 17 p6). Though Kaleidescape’s new Blu-ray products require the presence of a physical disc for playing back a movie, unlike for DVD where a physical disc is not required, that’s for the benefit of consumers, Diana Cartwright, the company’s vice president of corporate marketing, told us in an e-mail. She didn’t address the DVD CCA’s lawsuit, but defended Kaleidescape products as “100 percent legal.” Importing a Blu-ray movie into a Kaleidescape system “has many benefits,” Cartwright said. “The movie then becomes part of your library and appears on the onscreen user interface,” she said. Doing so will activate “a host of great features,” including faster start times and multi-room playback, she said. Meanwhile, Kaleidescape hasn’t announced pricing on the high-capacity Blu-ray “disc vault” that the company expects to ship first half next year, she said. “Kaleidescape is developing the disc vault to enable the full Kaleidescape experience for Blu-ray,” she said. “This vault, which will keep a large number of discs present within the Kaleidescape system, will also provide bulk import, and make it easy to find and retrieve a disc. … When an imported Blu-ray movie is selected for playback, the vault does not need to spin around to insert the disc in the reader. The movie will be played from the server, not the disc in the loader.”
CEA and the ITI Council let lapse a Monday deadline for telling the U.S. District Court in Manhattan whether they want to reinstate their preliminary injunction motion to stop New York City’s e-waste law from taking effect or requesting another deadline extension. CEA spokeswoman Jennifer Bemisderfer sidestepped our questions whether that means CEA and ITI soon will withdraw their lawsuit or if U.S. District Judge William Pauley will dismiss it. Green groups have said New York state’s recent enactment of an e-waste law renders the city’s e-waste program and the lawsuit to stop it “moot,” but CEA and ITI officials haven’t directly answered our queries whether they agree. “There are some technical litigation-related issues we're working through right now, but we'll let you know as soon as there is something public,” Bemisderfer told us in an e-mail Tuesday. When CEA and ITI told Pauley earlier this year they had started settlement talks with the city and its co-defendant, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the judge gave the trade groups an April 15 deadline for asking the court to reinstate the preliminary injunction motion if the talks failed. At the trade groups’ request, he granted them one deadline extension to June 14. The case was still open Wednesday and oral argument remains scheduled for July 9.
The term, “certified electronics recycler,” is “generic” and shouldn’t be trademarked, the Basel Action Network (BAN) says in a lawsuit naming the International Association of Electronics Recyclers (IAER) and the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI) as defendants. BAN seeks a judgment ordering the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to cancel registration number 2,679,182 for the “certified electronics recycler” trademark issued to IAER in January 2003 and transferred to ISRI when it acquired IAER last year, says the complaint, filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Seattle.
ESPN 3D debuts Friday with the opening World Cup match between Mexico and South Africa, armed only with carriage agreements from Comcast and DirecTV. But ESPN 3D is satisfied with its position at launch, senior executives said in an interview. That’s because ESPN is well ahead of where it was, in terms of coverage of homes, when it began ESPN HD in March 2003, the executives said.
LOS ANGELES -- The Sustainability Consortium, a research group of retailers, tech companies and universities, is developing standards for “measuring and reporting consumer product sustainability across various categories,” including TVs and computers, Kevin Dooley, a senior adviser to the consortium, said at the Entertainment Supply Chain Academy’s Edge Conference. Formed in July 1990 at Wal-Mart’s urging and with its funding, the consortium has 60 members, including Best Buy, Disney, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Toshiba, said Dooley, a professor of supply chain management at Arizona State University.