Intellectual Property
Appeals Court Sides With Grokster, Streamcast Services
     Companies that make music- and video-swapping software are not responsible for copyright infringement by their users if they do not engage in direct piracy and if the software enables other legal uses, an appeals court said this week. The unanimous decision by a three-judge panel on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is a significant but not unexpected victory for Grokster and Streamcast, the two software companies sued by a collection of major recording and movie companies. It affirmed a 2003 ruling. The two software companies are among the leading companies that permit Internet users to share digital music and video files through peer-to-peer (P2P) connections on the Internet. The judges relied heavily on the Supreme Court's precedent in Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios, the 1984 case declaring that manufacturers of videocassette recorders were not guilty of contributing to copyright infringement.

Intellectual Property
President's Council Urges China To Protect Rights
     A high-level White House advisory council, led by Commerce Secretary Donald Evans, said in a report that business opportunities in China are enormous but that intellectual property concerns are a key to lagging U.S. exports to the nation. Members of the President's Export Council, a decades-old advisory body that includes senior industry executives and 10 Cabinet-level government officials, traveled to China in June and met with most of the Chinese senior economic team. According to the team's report, China is now one of the largest U.S. trading partners, but the growing trade is "unbalanced and getting worse." Also this week, members of the high-tech community are preparing comments about China's failure to meet certain obligations it made when acceding to the World Trade Organization. Industry groups are gearing up for a September hearing on China's trade policies.

E-Commerce
French Effort To Curb Spam Could Affect U.S. Industry
     A French law against unsolicited commercial e-mail adopted in June and drastically amended in July takes effect this month, and an analysis by the Morrison and Foerster law firm predicts that there will be an impact on U.S. companies doing business in France. The French government amended its data-protection law and adopted anti-spam legislation to comply with a 2002 European Union directive that required prior consent from Internet users before sending commercial e-mail unless businesses and customers have a pre-existing relationship. The United States, by contrast, does not require consent. Under the new French law, processing data now requires a legal basis beginning with a "positive." And sensitive data such as health and religious or political beliefs, face a stricter regime. In other news, U.S. officials voiced concern about the nomination of Viviane Reding to fill the new EU information society post. The Motion Picture Association of America is concerned about the possibility of her urging European governments to impose trade restrictions on U.S. products in the name of preserving cultural diversity.

Telecom
Firms Seek To Rewrite Rules For Connecting Phone Calls
     A group of nine telecommunications companies that want to rewrite the rules governing how much individual carriers pay each other to connect telephone calls announced an agreement and are seeking FCC ratification. The proposal would replace the current system, which imposes different connection rates based on the types of telecom companies that pass voice or data traffic. The companies, which include AT&T, MCI, SBC Communications and Sprint, also said the plan would bolster the universal service fund, a pool of money designed to fund rural telecom service through fees levied on consumers' phone bills. It would do that by expanding fund fees to all phone numbers and to high-speed Internet connections.

Security
Panelists Revisit Inability To Share Anti-Terrorism Data
     Three years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, intelligence officers at agencies like the CIA and FBI still do not have open access to each other's databases, according to the chairman of an independent commission that investigated the attacks. The chairman, former New Jersey Republican Gov. Thomas Kean, simply replied "no" when asked if intelligence agencies have computer interface capability. He added that intelligence officials have not provided a timeline for such action but said, "They're working on it." Kean and Vice Chairman Lee Hamilton said in testimony before the House Homeland Security that the core focus of a new national intelligence director would be enforcing information sharing across the 15 agencies that collect intelligence.

Security
Panel Hears Views On Biometric Passports, Other Ideas
     U.S. citizens should not be exempt from carrying biometric passports or other means of verifying their identities, former Rep. Lee Hamilton said. The current vice chairman of the panel that investigated the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks is urging the federal government to set standards for issuing identification documents such as birth certificates and driver's licenses. "We need a biometric system that is comprehensive," Hamilton told the Senate Judiciary Committee. Border agents must be able to access information to verify passports immediately, he said. Also at the hearing, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., said that despite efforts to build a national terrorist watch list, there is no standard among intelligence agencies for entering data such as names, birth dates and nationality on suspected terrorists. And for people whose information is accidentally added to existing watch lists, confusion remains on how they can be removed from the lists.

Civil Liberties
ACLU Case Challenging The USA Patriot Act Continues
     The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a motion to exclude from its case against portions of the 2001 anti-terrorism law known as the USA PATRIOT Act classified evidence that the government provided only to the court. In two legal challenges to a PATRIOT Act provision allowing access to private records without a subpoena or a warrant, the government filed secret evidence, refused to share it with the ACLU and asked the court to dismiss the ACLU's case based on that secret evidence. "Our system of justice does not and should not tolerate the use of secret evidence in deciding important constitutional questions, which is why this tactic has been repeatedly rejected by the courts," ACLU Associate Legal Director Ann Beeson said in a release.

Campaigns
Bush E-Campaign Differs From Kerry's Online Efforts
     President Bush's online political operation differs from that of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry by encouraging volunteers to e-mail, visit and write letters to voters in swing states, officials with the e-campaign of GeorgeWBush.com said. The Web sites for each of the candidates are packed with interactive features, political news and spin, and different approaches to the journal format known as Web logs, or blogs. Kerry's blog has more postings and allows readers to interact with the candidate's campaign by posting comments and feedback on the site; Bush's does not. "The fact that the blog is not allowing comments is not a way of saying that the campaign is not interacting" with volunteers and potential voters, said Michael Turk, the e-campaign director for Bush. "If people are sitting and reading the blog, they are not contacting people, recruiting and talking" face to face with potential voters, he said.