Google’s I/O News: A Reminder Of How Apps Don’t Just Write Themselves

by Rob Pegoraro on May 17, 2013

SAN FRANCISCO–The second most-important company at Google’s I/O developer conference wasn’t there: Apple.

The competition between Android and iOS often gets played out as a battle between different phones and tablets, operating systems, and shipments and installations of each. But it’s also built on apps, and those programs don’t just write themselves.

The keynote that opened Google’s I/O developer conference here Wednesday shed some light on how that contest has been not as even as device sale and activation numbers might suggest.

Beyond a raft of announcements covering changes to Google’s search, social-media, music and mapping products–much of which involved a level of anticipating a user’s needs and concerns that not everybody may be ready to sign on to–it was remarkable to see how much time Google spent on patching some long-standing issues with the construction and marketing of Android apps.

For example, the company is shipping a new development toolkit to build phone and tablet apps, Android Studio, that streamlines writing for different screen sizes, resolutions and aspect ratios. That might not seem a big deal, but then look up how many coders hate the predominant development environment, Eclipse; Google based this new software on a competing option, Intellij, that’s drawn better reviews.

A similar overdue upgrade is coming to the Play Store: It will finally break out apps that have been optimized for Android tablets (my thought on hearing this was “they’re only fixing this now?”) and provide personalized recommendations.

On the developer side of the Play Store, a revised management interface will allow detailed tracking of revenue, country by country, as well as of which ads worked best to encourage users to download an app. It will also offer professional translation of apps into other languages and help developers conduct beta tests with selected groups of users with, presumably, a greater willingness to file bug reports if things go wrong.

And some new framework code, such as the gaming and location services Google announced and a Bluetooth wireless rewrite it did not highlight, ought to yield more reliable, less battery-intensive apps that are less likely to yield bug reports.

The unspoken context to all this was one thing that hasn’t changed even as Android devices now outnumber the iOS population: Developers make more money in iOS.

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Class Certification Denial in Premier League v. YouTube Is Further Evidence that IP Isn’t Property

by Matt Schruers on May 16, 2013

District Court Judge Louis Stanton denied certification of the plaintiff class yesterday in the Premier League’s copyright infringement case against YouTube.  The plaintiffs’ counsel had requested that the court include “every person and entity in the world who own infringed copyrighted works,” who have or will register them with Copyright Office as required, uploaded to YouTube.

Characterizing the case as “a Frankenstein monster posing as a class action,” Judge Stanton refused to allow this unwieldy definition to go forward.  At present, this means the case cannot proceed as a class action.

Interestingly, the order points out that copyright claims are, generally speaking, poorly suited for resolution by class.  “Each claim presents particular factual issues of copyright ownership, infringement, fair use, and damages, among others.”  This is not to say that no copyright dispute can be disposed by class action.  Indeed, a few unique examples exist, like Tasini and Muchnick, but these are the exceptions that demonstrate the rule.  Generally speaking, intellectual property is simply less conducive to class disposition since it less frequently satisfies the Federal Rules requirements such as commonality and typicality.

How can this be?  Class actions are frequently used to resolve property damage disputes.  Examples including ground contamination and polybutylene piping come to mind.

But real property ownership is easily proven, because we mandate recordation of land ownership.  By contrast, copyright registration is optional (and non-existent in most countries), and most IP transactions are not publicly recorded.  Real property defenses are generally narrower, because there are fewer countervailing policy considerations regarding restricting access to property than there are to regulating access to information.  IP, after all, is a utilitarian apparatus, designed to improve social welfare.  The notion of real property, on the other hand, is not subject to the sort of cost-benefit analysis implicit in the constitutional imperative to “promote progress.”  Damage to a real property interest is more easily determined, due to the rivalrous nature of real property usage.  Registered copyright owners, Judge Stanton points out, don’t have to worry about proving damages: they have statutory damages, which “is designed to give litigation value to each individual case.”  Real property owners have no such luxury.

Ultimately, real property is more amenable to class certification because of how it behaves.  Intellectual property doesn’t behave like real property; it behaves like regulation.

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Aereo Launches in Boston, with 21 Other Cities Planned, as Litigation Continues

by Ali Sternburg on May 15, 2013

Aereo, the television streaming service that recently won in the Second Circuit, is no longer confined to New York.  Today, Aereo launched in Boston, and 21 other cities are planned for 2013, including Atlanta launching as Aereo’s third city on June 17.

In addition to increasing its markets, Aereo has also increased its lawsuits.  Previously, Aereo had been sued by broadcasters, who argued that when individuals watch shows in their homes they are unauthorized ‘public performances’ that infringe copyright.  The Second Circuit agreed that Aereo’s conduct was legal under the 2008 Cablevision case.  Last week, Aereo brought suit against broadcasters, by filing a declaratory judgment against CBS and some of its affiliates.  A declaratory judgment is a suit brought with the intent that the court clarify the ambiguity around the potential impact of a law or legal obligation on the plaintiff.  Here, Aereo has requested that the court confirm that its technology does not infringe CBS’s copyrights or violate the Copyright Act, and requests costs, attorneys’ fees, and any other relief the court deems just and proper.  The complaint cites May 1 comments from CBS President and CEO Leslie Moonves that “we’ll sue,” and April 23 tweets from CBS Corporation Communications Exec Dana McClintock, which are embedded below:

These remarks from CBS demonstrate what Aereo investor Barry Diller recently explained; broadcasting is a challenging business for competitors: “No incumbent wants anyone in. That is an unbreakable rule.”  But Aereo’s decisions to continue to enter new markets, and to bring this declaratory judgment, show that they are up to the challenge.

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European Commission Planning GIPO, a Global Participatory Internet Policy Database

by Ali Sternburg on May 14, 2013

The European Commission announced plans yesterday with several other nations and NGOs to launch a platform called the Global Internet Policy Observatory (GIPO), development of which is likely to start in 2014, for increasing participation and engagement around Internet policy debates and decision making.  This initiative is encouraging “participation of all stakeholders across the world,” and intends to supplement existing fora, providing additional information and expertise.

GIPO plans to follow developments in policy, regulations, and technology, by:

  • “automatically monitor[ing] Internet-related policy developments at the global level, making full use of ‘big data’ technologies

  • identify[ing] links between different fora and discussions, with the objective to overcome ‘policy silos’

  • help[ing] contextualise information, for example by collecting existing academic information on a specific topic, highlighting the historical and current position of the main actors on a particular issue, identifying the interests of different actors in various policy fields

  • identify[ing] policy trends, via quantitative and qualitative methods such as semantic and sentiment analysis

  • provid[ing] easy-to-use briefings and reports by incorporating modern visualisation techniques”

The EC announcement demonstrates a commitment to Internet freedom, citing a February speech from Neelie Kroes, the Vice-President of the European Commission responsible for the Digital Agenda, entitled “Stopping a Digital Cold War.”  (The Obama Administration has similarly spoken out in support of Internet freedom, such as its statement during the controversial WCIT negotiations.)  As DisCo has previously covered, the proposals being put forth at WCIT would have threatened the Internet’s disruptive potential, and we remain committed to fighting to keep the Internet open.  In contrast with the closed WCIT talks, the Commission emphasizes the intent to involve all stakeholders in GIPO, including the developing world and “groups which may have so far been marginalised in Internet debates and decisions.”

The headline of the announcement refers to the current state of affairs as a “global Internet policy labyrinth,” a word which conjures a complicated and confusing maze.  GIPO’s crowd-sourced knowledge base intends to provide some much-needed guidance for navigating Internet policy.

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Obama Administration Signs an Executive Order Making More Raw Data Available to Entrepreneurs

by Daniel O'Connor on May 13, 2013

Last Thursday, the President Obama signed an Executive Order requiring that “the default state of new and modernized Government information resources shall be open and machine readable.”  In a memo elaborating on the President’s order, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) advised federal agencies and executive departments:

Specifically, this Memorandum requires agencies to collect or create information in a way that supports downstream information processing and dissemination activities. This includes using machine­ readable and open formats, data standards, and common core and extensible metadata for all new information creation and collection efforts. It also includes agencies ensuring information stewardship through the use of open licenses and review of information for privacy, confidentiality, security, or other restrictions to release. Additionally, it involves agencies building or modernizing information systems in a way that maximizes interoperability and information accessibility, maintains internal and external data asset inventories, enhances information safeguards, and clarifies information management responsibilities.

This step by the Obama Administration goes beyond the Open Government Directive of the President’s first term, that focused on the release specific datasets.  Now, CIOs of government agencies must consider public accessibility and use of government data from square one.  This sets a new default position of U.S. government data: open, machine readable and accessible to to public (with a key exception: “wherever possible and legally permissible”).

Collecting and storing a wealth of government data in both human and machine readable formats, with attention paid to ease of use and interoperability with common software tools has the potential to change how the federal government operates and promises to make available a wave of new, useful data for our nation’s entrepreneurs and programmers to manipulate and make more useful.  As U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park and Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel point out in a video accompanying the President’s announcement, releasing government information in the past — such as GPS and weather data — has sparked waves of private sector innovation that made government data more useful to everyday citizens.

Also of note, as part of this initiative, the White House has released a new suite of open source software tools (on Github) that federal agencies (or private citizens) can employ to better organize and use the raw data.

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Group-Playback Apps Let You Choose Your Own Copyright Adventure

by Rob Pegoraro on May 10, 2013

The play button is getting yet another upgrade from the Internet: the ability to function in sync across multiple devices. Instead of only being able to listen to a song on your own computers, a few apps can cue up that tune on other gadgets–in effect, turning them into Internet-connected speakers.

Is that legal? You’ve heard this before in copyright debates: It depends!

The best-known implementation of the concept is Samsung’s free Group Play app, which comes preinstalled on its Galaxy S 4 but also works on other recent Samsung phones and tablets.

It’s pretty straightforward to set up: Open the app and tap “Create group” on your device, choose a song and then a second phone within WiFi range can have the same tune streaming in sync–with its left and right channels sent separately to each device for a proper stereo effect.

The default setting requires you to set a numeric passcode for the group, with up to nine other devices allowed, but you can assign a single-digit passcode or make the group open. You can also share pictures and documents or play games this way.

Last weekend, I saw a similar concept at the Day of Fosterly startup conference: a Web app called Speaker Blast, which lets you upload a song to a server and then have it play through multiple Web browsers at a preset time.

Two tests of this app (still in private beta) did not work quite as smoothly. The desktop, laptop and iPad evidently did not have the exact same time, resulting in playback a tic out of phase–as if I were hearing “Radio Free Europe” played not by R.E.M., but by a cover band needing more rehearsal.

A third app, Seedio, offers similar group-playback features on iOS, but I haven’t tried that yet.

All of these products intersect with a core concept of copyright law: the restriction on the “public performance” of a copyrighted work without a proper license.

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MPAA, Spacey: Availability, Access, and Affordability Fight Piracy

by Ali Sternburg on May 8, 2013

The @MPAA Twitter account live-tweeted last night’s interview with Kevin Spacey, and they tweeted this quote from him:

This statement is consistent with what Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos recently said: “The best way to combat piracy isn’t legislatively or criminally but by giving good options.”  This may not be a coincidence, because Spacey stars in Netflix’s House of Cards.  All thirteen episodes of the first season of House of Cards were released on Netflix all at once, rather than the traditional distribution model, and as Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said, this ended up “reinforcing our brand attribute of giving consumers complete control over how and when they enjoy their entertainment.”

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Quote of the Day: Judge Sanctions Porn Troll Principals in Star Trek-reference Filled Opinion

by Matt Schruers on May 6, 2013

Plaintiffs have outmaneuvered the legal system.  They’ve discovered the nexus of antiquated copyright laws, paralyzing social stigma, and unaffordable defense costs. And they exploit this anomaly by accusing individuals of illegally downloading a single pornographic video. Then they offer to settle—for a sum calculated to be just below the cost of a bare-bones defense. For these individuals, resistance is futile; most reluctantly pay rather than have their names associated with illegally downloading porn.  So now, copyright laws originally designed to compensate starving artists, allow starving attorneys in this electronic-media era to plunder the citizenry.

– U.S. District Court Judge Otis D. Wright II, introducing a Star Trek reference-filled order, sanctioning the principals of the “Prenda Law” organization in relation to alleged fraud, identity theft, and copyright trolling. (Extensive coverage of the Prenda Law group is available via law blog Popehat and Techdirt.)

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Defamation, Autocomplete And Search Royalties: How Not To Govern the Internet

by Glenn Manishin on May 6, 2013

With the controversy surrounding the International Telecommunications Union (a UN treaty organization) just recently subsiding, it is time to take a look at Internet governance from a different perspective. We all know that laws and legal principles differ among countries. What many do not realize is that these laws — most completely non-tech oriented — are having a massive and negative impact on Internet innovation.

In America we proudly have the First Amendment, the fair use doctrine and the DMCA. The first limits the reach of liability for libel (defamation) at least to cases, for non-celebrities, where a publisher is at fault (i.e., negligent). Section 230 of the last allows ISPs, websites and Internet hosts a legal safe harbor from copyright and other legal offenses resulting from user-generated content or any other content that a customer, client or some third-party has published. These landmark legal regimes are hallowed in the U.S., for instance used to strike down overreaching Web censorship efforts by federal government. Fair use, in turn, permits non-commercial or transformative use of a portion of copyrighted content. Think Google image search thumbnails or blockquotes from a news source in someone’s blog or a movie clip in a televised review.

Things are very different elsewhere. Three cases in point.

  1. In Germany and perhaps soon other EU nations, search engines that display snippets of indexed Web pages in response to user queries are now by statute responsible for paying copyright royalties to the original publisher, regardless of whether the content owner charges for its stories with a paywall. 
  2. In France, Italy, Ireland,  Australia and now Japan, courts permit individuals to recover for libel based on autocomplete and search results that return incorrect or harmful personal information, but against the search provider, not the writer or content publisher.
  3. A Denmark court ruled deep linking illegal, as did Germany, leading some to believe that linking to a website other than the front page was illegal throughout Europe. While the German courts overturned that decision, it was Agence France Presse (AFP) which eventually sued Google News for brazenly daring to send search  traffic to the organization’s news articles.

These results are foreign, literally, to U.S. jurisprudence. But they also illustrate a vitally important point. Legal regimes that have nothing to do with the Web are being applied in ways which upset existing services users take for granted and that threaten to impede future innovation.  Linking is inherent in HTML and represents the essence of the Web. No one in America would argue seriously today that a hypertext URL link represents copyright violation. Search “autocomplete,” in turn, is not a creative activity, but a very useful technical advancement; it applies computer algorithms based on past searches to predict what the current user wants to see, speeding the retreival of information from the Web.

Permitting autocomplete defamation suits against Google or Bing because other Web users have searched for information that damages an individual’s reputation is alien to our American way of thinking. It’s censoring completely accurate factual information about stuff on the Web, although that stuff may itself be factually wrong.  The augmentation of liability is also just plain silly, because both autocomplete queries and search results themselves merely return an indexed link to something someone else has posted on the Web.

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SideCar Approaches A Regulatory On-Ramp

by Rob Pegoraro on May 6, 2013

Can SideCar get a lift from the District of Columbia, or is it only going to get taken for a ride?

The ride-sharing service, which matches passengers with drivers heading in about the same direction, launched in San Francisco last June and began limited operation in D.C. in late March.

The District of Columbia Taxicab Commission is not pleased by the development.

“The DC Taxicab Commission has determined that Sidecar offers a public vehicle for hire service and as a result their drivers must have licenses from the Commission and those drivers’ cars must have L tags,” wrote spokesman Neville Waters in an e-mail Wednesday.

DCTC has yet to take enforcement actions against SideCar. In New York, however, the Taxi & Limousine Commission had police briefly detain two drivers and impound one’s vehicle. In Philadelphia, the city fined three drivers and impounded their vehicles, then fined the company too.

Here’s how the app works: After you open an account in SideCar’s iOS or Android app, including storing a credit card for a “donation” covering each ride, you set pickup and destination addresses. The app suggests the right donation for that route, you confirm the ride, and a driver accepts and arrives. At your destination, you pay what you want, then you and the driver rate each other.

Or so I’m told: The service only runs on weekends for now in the District, and I’ve yet to have an opportunity to use it.

Co-founder and CEO Sunil Paul explained Thursday morning that the company provides a matching, not a dispatching service.

A driver need not accept a ride request, and a passenger can balk when a driver rolls up (Paul said he declined a ride when the car wasn’t the one pictured in the driver’s profile.) Drivers aren’t supposed to drive full-time or even go out of their way; a FAQ states “you share the rides you’re already taking.” And that voluntary payment can be zero.

(The suggested donations on a few sample itineraries are in the range of taxi fares–for instance, $11 to go from 15th and L Streets in downtown D.C. to the Rosslyn Metro stop in Arlington, less than three miles away.)

SideCar also aspires to be a friendlier ride than a taxi. “It’s social versus chauffeur,” Paul said. “Most people sit in the front.”

Passengers and drivers discussing SideCar on Quora have made the same point. As one driver wrote, “Money shouldn’t be your motivation, [….] meeting new people, discovering new places in the city & being a friend giving a ride to another friend should be.”

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