As of June 15, the FCC had inspected nearly 600 stores and e-commerce sites, issuing over 250 citations to retailers alleged to have failed to put consumer alerts next to analog- only TV products as a new FCC new labeling order requires (CED April 26 p1), Chairman Kevin Martin said Monday in a letter to House Commerce Committee Chairman John Dingell, D- Mich., and Telecom Subcommittee Chairman Ed Markey, D-Mass.
Deep disparities between delegations remained after a second day of talks on a proposed World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) treaty to update broadcasting protections (WID June 19 p1). With Chairman Jukka Liedes away on personal business, the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights focussed Tuesday on the draft preamble, said Ville Oksanen, co-chairman of the European Digital Rights working group on intellectual property (IP). Cultural diversity, access to knowledge and competition law’s role remain stumbling blocks, he said. The U.S. will not accept a treaty including provisions on them as substantive clauses, but Brazil, Chile and others feel the opposite, and the European Union has yet to state a position, Oksanen said. The “conflict is quite profound,” and it will be interesting to see how Liedes resolves it, particularly with only two days of talks left, he said. Some nations want language on cultural diversity, public interest issues and competition in the draft (dubbed the “non-paper"), said an official from a developing country. Rights conferred, exclusive rights over retransmission and deferred transmission by any means to the public of fixed broadcasts benefit from strict technical protection measures and rights management provisions, the official said: “All this together makes for a very powerful treaty, unlike what is being claimed.” Even worse, the official said, the treaty covers works lacking substantive creativity, apart from investing to transmit. You can criminalize the act of stealing a signal without recognizing broadcast entities’ exclusive rights of a commercial nature, he said. It is unclear whether consensus will emerge sufficiently to warrant a diplomatic conference later this year, but the chairman of one non-governmental organization has said he remains optimistic. A treaty has “a good chance, much better than Arnold Schwarzenegger being elected Miss France this year,” Mihaly Ficsor, Central and Eastern European Copyright Alliance chairman and former WIPO assistant general director, told an April Fordham University property conference. Success hinges on the international IP atmosphere, complicating accord on new substantive terms, a difference from 1996, when the WIPO Internet treaties were devised, he told us. Ficsor sees a link between the Doha Round of trade talks and events at WIPO, he said. If World Trade Organization talks end with an appropriate compromise, “it would certainly improve the conditions for the necessary treaty-making activities in WIPO,” he said.
On June 15, 2007, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 2638, the fiscal year (FY) 2008 appropriations bill for the Department of Homeland Security, including U.S. Customs and Border Protection, by a vote of 268 to 150. (Congressional Record dated 06/15/07, available at http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/B?r110:@FIELD(FLD003d)@FIELD(DDATE20070615).
ATIS published an IPTV High Level Architecture standard, it said Thurs. The document provides a reference architecture for IPTV functional specifications being developed by the ATIS IPTV Interoperability Forum (IFF), it said. The standard considers architecture scaling from local to regional and national service offerings, identifying interfacing components that deliver IPTV, it said. “The High Level Architecture marks a major step in introducing IPTV into homes globally,” IFF Chmn, Daniel O'Callaghan said. ATIS said work is underway on specifications for linear/broadcast TV service, consumer-domain initialization and attachment, media protocols, consumer-domain device remote management and an IPTV emergency alert system.
Mandating cable and DBS a la carte pricing, as a new House bill would, is a bad idea, advocacy groups for TV programmers and public interests said. The bill, introduced Thurs. by Rep. Lipinski (D-Ill.) and cosponsored by Reps. Fortenberry (R-Neb.), Aderholt (R-Ala.) and Shuler (D-N.C.), would give cable 3 choices in offering cable pricing: (1) Follow the decency standards broadcasters do 6 a.m.-10 p.m. (2) Offer a compelling family tier with news, sports and children’s programming. (3) Let customers block channels they don’t want and refund them accordingly.
Digitized health records need tight security controls to fend off hackers -- and laws to keep legitimate entities from inappropriately selling or sharing data, the E-Gov Institute Health IT conference heard in Washington Thurs. Security pros can do “a pretty good job” safeguarding data “but I don’t think we can be perfect,” said John Richardson, Intel Digital Health Group dir.-privacy & security policy: “Technology can implement the policies we put in place, but unless we have those policies the technology is pretty useless.”
ATIS published an IPTV High Level Architecture standard, it said Thurs. The document provides a reference architecture for IPTV functional specifications being developed by the ATIS IPTV Interoperability Forum, it said. The standard considers architecture scaling from local to regional and national service offerings, identifying interfacing components that deliver IPTV, it said. “The High Level Architecture marks a major step in introducing IPTV into homes globally,” IIF Chmn, Daniel O'Callaghan said. ATIS said work is underway on specifications for linear/broadcast TV service, consumer-domain initialization and attachment, media protocols, consumer-domain device remote management and an IPTV emergency alert system.
The Senate Homeland Security Appropriations Committee set $1.81 billion in funding for first responders, including emergency communications. The move restores money President Bush cut in his FY 2008 budget request, the committee said, and also seeks $644 million over FY 2007 for state and local first responder grants. A committee statement scolded the Dept. of Homeland Security (DHS) for “attempting to justify” cuts by arguing that the $1 billion interoperability grant program sufficed. “The $1 billion mandatory grant program was enacted to supplement efforts to improve communications interoperability at the state and local level, not to supplant existing programs,” the committee said. Overall the bill would boost DHS funding 8%. Subcommittee Chmn. Byrd (D- W.Va.) said the President’s request claimed to offer an 8% increase but actually was up only 1.7% over last year. “The federal government has tried to fund homeland security on the cheap,” Byrd said: “That shoestring security leaves our nation vulnerable.”
On May 25, 2007, President Bush signed into law H.R. 2206, the "U.S. Troop Readiness, Veterans' Care, Katrina Recovery, and Iraq Accountability Appropriations Act, 2007," which makes emergency supplemental appropriations and additional supplemental appropriations for fiscal year (FY) 2007 (Public Law 110-28).
On May 25, 2007, President Bush signed into law H.R. 2206, the "U.S. Troop Readiness, Veterans' Care, Katrina Recovery, and Iraq Accountability Appropriations Act, 2007." H.R. 2206 makes emergency supplemental appropriations and additional supplemental appropriations for fiscal year (FY) 2007 (Public Law 110-28).