In an April 6, 2011 speech, Michael Taylor, Deputy Commissioner for Foods, provided an update on the Food and Drug Administration’s implementation of the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA). Among other things, FDA has prioritized some of the requirements it must implement, established six implementation teams, and created a new webpage dedicated to the FSMA.

The FCC lowered CLECs’ pole attachment rates to match cable companies’ rates, while setting deadlines to complete attachments, giving wireless carriers the right to attach to the top of poles and giving ILECs a chance to lower their rates under an FCC complaint process that previously was only open to CLECs and cable companies. The commission also issued a notice of inquiry Thursday asking a broad array of questions about rights of way and wireless siting. The commission acted without dissent, with all five commissioners saying their action would accelerate broadband deployment.

The International Trade Commission announces that a section 337 patent-based complaint has been filed regarding certain motion-sensitive sound effects devices and image display devices and components and products containing same.

Recent events in North Africa and with WikiLeaks show how easily access to Internet content and services can be disrupted, and raise the question of whether governments have a duty to preserve the Internet, the Council of Europe said Wednesday. It said an April 18-19 CoE conference on Internet freedom will consider whether there should be a global treaty, rather than principles, to safeguard online free speech. Up for discussion are draft governance principles and recommendations for protecting and promoting Internet universality, integrity and openness. The proposed governance principles call for protection of fundamental human rights and democracy. They recommend that governance arrangements ensure full participation of governments, the private sector, civil society and the technical sector, and that countries refrain from acting in ways that might directly or indirectly harm someone outside their jurisdiction. Internet-related policies should aim toward universal access, and stability and resilience should be key objectives of Internet governance, the draft said. It also urged CoE members to maintain the decentralized nature of day-to-day management of the Internet, its open architecture and network neutrality. The proposal for protecting Internet integrity sets out general principles: (1) Governments should do “no harm” to Internet access and use. (2) They should cooperate in good faith to develop Internet-related public policies to avoid adverse cross-border impacts on access and use. (3) Countries should take steps to prevent and respond to significant transborder Internet disruptions, and jointly develop emergency plans for responding to interferences with Internet infrastructure. (4) CoE members should notify potentially affected countries of significant risks of cross-border disruptions, share information with them, cooperate with each other on responses, and, if appropriate, help affected nations resolve the problems. (5) Governments should craft “reasonable legislative, administrative or other measures,” including suitable monitoring mechanisms, to ensure they meet their commitments to the principles. The draft also recommended that CoE members discuss the possibility of developing international law on responsibility and liability for damage, its assessment and compensation, and settlement of related disputes. The documents must be approved by the Committee of Ministers, the CoE said. Panelists at the forum include representatives from the U.S. State Department, ITU, ICANN, Verizon, AT&T, NATO and the European Broadcasting Union, it said.

Recent events in North Africa and with WikiLeaks show how easily access to Internet content and services can be disrupted, and raise the question of whether governments have a duty to preserve the Internet, the Council of Europe said Wednesday. It said an April 18-19 CoE conference on Internet freedom will consider whether there should be a global treaty, rather than principles, to safeguard online free speech. Up for discussion are draft governance principles and recommendations for protecting and promoting Internet universality, integrity and openness. The proposed governance principles call for protection of fundamental human rights and democracy. They recommend that governance arrangements ensure full participation of governments, the private sector, civil society and the technical sector, and that countries refrain from acting in ways that might directly or indirectly harm someone outside their jurisdiction. Internet-related policies should aim toward universal access, and stability and resilience should be key objectives of Internet governance, the draft said. It also urged CoE members to maintain the decentralized nature of day-to-day management of the Internet, its open architecture and network neutrality. The proposal for protecting Internet integrity sets out general principles: (1) Governments should do “no harm” to Internet access and use. (2) They should cooperate in good faith to develop Internet-related public policies to avoid adverse cross-border impacts on access and use. (3) Countries should take steps to prevent and respond to significant transborder Internet disruptions, and jointly develop emergency plans for responding to interferences with Internet infrastructure. (4) CoE members should notify potentially affected countries of significant risks of cross-border disruptions, share information with them, cooperate with each other on responses, and, if appropriate, help affected nations resolve the problems. (5) Governments should craft “reasonable legislative, administrative or other measures,” including suitable monitoring mechanisms, to ensure they meet their commitments to the principles. The draft also recommended that CoE members discuss the possibility of developing international law on responsibility and liability for damage, its assessment and compensation, and settlement of related disputes. The documents must be approved by the Committee of Ministers, the CoE said. Panelists at the forum include representatives from the U.S. State Department, ITU, ICANN, Verizon, AT&T, NATO and the European Broadcasting Union, it said.

The Federal Trade Commission has announced that as long as certain conditions are met, it is delaying enforcement of the March 18 elimination of the fur-content labeling and disclosure exemption for apparel that contains small quantities or values of fur (“apparel with fur”). This forbearance should permit retailers to exhaust existing inventories and avoid substantial losses.

Emerging technologies are affecting how Congress considers revising the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), lawmakers and witnesses said Wednesday at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. Protecting consumer privacy, while allowing law enforcement to obtain information in investigations, is critical, they said.

The International Trade Commission has announced that a section 337 patent-based complaint has been filed regarding certain polyimide films, products containing the same, and related methods.

By putting YouTube in the same league as file-sharing services, Viacom and other plaintiffs in a long-running copyright infringement case would endanger the safe-harbor protections of federal law that protect all websites, the CEA said in a friend-of-the-court brief. It told the 2nd U.S. Court of Appeals in New York -- which heard from a broad swath of copyright owners and Microsoft in favor of Viacom (CD Dec 14 p5) -- that the copyright industries will be proven wrong again on the danger from new technology. “For example, when Britain’s Monty Python learned that fans were posting poor quality video clips of its films on YouTube, the Pythons posted better quality versions along with an amusing video asking viewers to buy their DVDs,” raising DVD sales “23,000 percent,” CEA said. YouTube is one in a long line of technology developments that copyright owners opposed at first, from the gramophone to cable TV and, most famously, the VCR, the brief said. It included what may the first legal citation of CEA President Gary Shapiro’s book on innovation, The Comeback, published this year. The feared technologies had one thing in common, CEA said: “substantial noninfringing uses.” The association encouraged the 2nd Circuit to follow the Supreme Court’s holding in the Grokster case that proof of “mere knowledge of infringing potential or of actual infringing uses” isn’t enough to show inducement to infringe. YouTube doesn’t fit the high court’s restriction of liability to “one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement,” CEA said. The group included a chart in its filing contrasting YouTube with P2P services: YouTube doesn’t let users download content, the streaming quality is often poor, the service has time and file-size limits, it promptly responds to takedown requests, and “almost none” of the content available infringes copyrights. The MPAA’s own figures demonstrate unprecedented box-office growth since YouTube’s founding, CEA said. “The music business continued to prosper,” as well, the brief said, citing a Nielsen SoundScan estimate of 1.5 billion digital music sales in 2008. Most of those were single track downloads, though, and record industry revenue remains in severe decline. “This case will set precedent that will determine the future of the Internet for decades,” CEA said. If Viacom succeeds on its theory that YouTube doesn’t qualify for a safe harbor under Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, “most if not all [user-generated content] sites, Internet links, and perhaps even the Internet generally would simply have to shut down” in the face of massive potential damages. Estimating that YouTube users upload 110 million videos a year, CEA said, “If only 1 percent of them infringe someone’s copyright, YouTube could be liable for 1,100,000 works per year. Assuming $10,000 in statutory damages for each of these would cost YouTube $11.1 billion per year.” A 1 percent infringement rate would put Facebook on the hook for $36 trillion a year, the brief said. “Almost all sites are at least partly” UGC sites, from Google search and newspaper sites to Amazon product reviews and Flickr photos, and all would be threatened. Holding YouTube liable for “general knowledge” of infringement on its site, as Advance Publications suggested in its brief in the case, “could result from a newspaper article, a random email, employee gossip, and the like,” CEA said. It would violate Section 512 requirements of specificity in takedown notices and could spur abuse by encouraging an online service to “entice” a content owner to send a general-knowledge takedown notice to a competitor of the instigator. Among the many problems with requiring websites to use content filtering would be “endless litigation over what is ‘commercially reasonable’ filtering” as proposed by Viacom, the brief said.

By putting YouTube in the same league as file-sharing services, Viacom and other plaintiffs in a long-running copyright infringement case would endanger the safe-harbor protections of federal law that protect all websites, the Consumer Electronics Association said in a friend-of-the-court brief. The group told the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals -- which had heard from a broad swath of copyright owners and Microsoft in favor of Viacom (WID Dec 14 p5) -- that the copyright industries will be proven wrong again on the danger from new technology. “For example, when Britain’s Monty Python learned that fans were posting poor quality video clips of its films on YouTube, the Pythons posted better quality versions along with an amusing video asking viewers to buy their DVDs,” raising DVD sales “23,000 percent,” CEA said. YouTube is one in a long line of technology developments that copyright owners opposed at first, from the gramophone to cable TV and, most famously, the VCR, the brief said. It included what may the first legal citation of CEA President Gary Shapiro’s book on innovation, The Comeback, published this year. The feared technologies had one thing in common, CEA said: “substantial noninfringing uses.” The association encouraged the 2nd Circuit to follow the Supreme Court’s holding in the Grokster case that proof of “mere knowledge of infringing potential or of actual infringing uses” isn’t enough to show inducement to infringe. YouTube doesn’t fit the high court’s restriction of liability to “one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement,” CEA said. The group included a chart in its filing contrasting YouTube with P2P services: YouTube doesn’t let users download content, the streaming quality is often poor, the service has time and file-size limits, it promptly responds to takedown requests, and “almost none” of the content available infringes copyrights. The MPAA’s own figures demonstrate unprecedented box-office growth since YouTube’s founding, CEA said. “The music business continued to prosper,” as well, the brief said, citing a Nielsen SoundScan estimate of 1.5 billion digital music sales in 2008. Most of those were single track downloads, though, and record industry revenue remains in severe decline. “This case will set precedent that will determine the future of the Internet for decades,” CEA said. If Viacom succeeds on its theory that YouTube doesn’t qualify for a safe harbor under Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, “most if not all [user-generated content] sites, Internet links, and perhaps even the Internet generally would simply have to shut down” in the face of massive potential damages. Estimating that YouTube users upload 110 million videos a year, CEA said, “If only 1 percent of them infringe someone’s copyright, YouTube could be liable for 1,100,000 works per year. Assuming $10,000 in statutory damages for each of these would cost YouTube $11.1 billion per year.” A 1 percent infringement rate would put Facebook on the hook for $36 trillion a year, the brief said. “Almost all sites are at least partly” UGC sites, from Google search and newspaper sites to Amazon product reviews and Flickr photos, and all would be threatened. Holding YouTube liable for “general knowledge” of infringement on its site, as Advance Publications suggested in its brief in the case, “could result from a newspaper article, a random email, employee gossip, and the like,” CEA said. It would violate Section 512 requirements of specificity in takedown notices and could spur abuse by encouraging an online service to “entice” a content owner to send a general-knowledge takedown notice to a competitor of the instigator. Among the many problems with requiring websites to use content filtering would be “endless litigation over what is ‘commercially reasonable’ filtering” as proposed by Viacom, the brief said. “Courts would be required to perform technical and economic analyses of myriad protection technologies, including various forms of encryption, watermarking, fingerprinting, digital rights management, and others not yet invented,” for every copyright owner that complained its preferred filtering system wasn’t adopted, it said. Viacom’s interpretation of Section 512’s safe harbor as applying only to a “passive provider of storage space” would leave the entire cloud-computing industry at risk of litigation, CEA said. It said Amazon’s Simple Storage Service, known as S3, alone could be liable for $2 trillion in damages.