Hollywood tells lawmakers to back U.S. efforts in copyright trade talks

Hollywood tells lawmakers to back U.S. efforts in copyright trade talks
Hollywood urged key lawmakers Thursday to support trade negotiations that would set rules for policing copyright laws. The Motion Picture Association of America wrote a letter to several lawmakers including Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Va.) and House Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, asking them to support the Obama administration’s efforts in the trade talks, which are being conducted behind closed doors in Seoul. Other countries participating in the negotiations include the United States, Canada, Japan and South Korea, along with European Union members. In its letter, the MPAA said that new global rules are needed to protect films from Internet piracy. As more people illegally trade content online, the movie studios businesses suffer. “The ability to finance, create and distribute entertainment, and the livelihood of the talented and dedicated men and women who work in our industry are dependent upon our ability to protect the intellectual property


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AT&T’s top lobbyists tell FCC to punish Google Voice
CORRECTION: AT&T’s Cicconi met with FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s chief of staff, Edward Lazarus. Genachowski was not in the meeting. It’s been a few weeks since Google told the Federal Communcations Commission that its voice application is still blocking calls, just fewer of them. So what does the FCC plan to do? That’s what AT&T wants to know and the company sent its top lobbyists to the agency this week to talk to Edward Lazarus, chief of staff to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski about the apparent violation of phone calling rules. At the meeting, Cicconi also reiterated several objections from AT&T to an agency proposal for net neutrality rules that would prohibit the discrimination of content over the Web. (Here’s a letter submitted to the FCC describing the meeting). Specifically, Cicconi said one portion of the proposed open-Internet rules was too strict. By “imposing a non-discrimination standard that does not


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FCC takes on cable, satellite on television set-top boxes
The box on top of your television may be holding back broadband. That’s according to the small army of people at the Federal Communications Commission charged with figuring out how to roll out high-speed Internet to every home, make it affordable and get people to subscribe. Here’s why they think the television set-top box is hindering broadband use: there aren’t enough of them to choose from. The majority of users rent their boxes from their cable or satellite provider. And there isn’t enough innovation on the limited number of devices they get from their provider, nor are the providers adequately dealing with access to online video, the FCC’s national broadband planning task force said in an agency meeting Wednesday. “The marketplace is searching for better ways to connect the Internet more fully to television sets,” said Bill Lake, the FCC’s media bureau chief. The role of the set-top box was


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