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Intellectual Property
Senate Patent Bill Faces Challenging Road To Floor
by Andrew Noyes
Major technology sector players hailed the Senate Judiciary Committee's approval late Thursday of a bill that would overhaul the nation's patent system, but opponents vowed to press for substantive changes in the full chamber.
The bill, S.1145, was approved 13-5 nearly a month after committee debate began. The House Judiciary Committee approved a companion bill, H.R. 1908, by voice vote Wednesday.
Jonathan Yarowsky, counsel to the Coalition for Patent Fairness, which represents Apple Inc., Microsoft, Time Warner and others, said the action "shows Congress is serious about dealing with the overwhelming need for balanced and comprehensive patent reform this year."
"Congress recognizes that our patent system must work efficiently and fairly if American companies are to keep their competitive edge in driving the economy forward," Yarowsky said.
California Democrat Howard Berman, who sponsored the House bill, said he wants to get it to the floor before the August congressional recess. A staffer for Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy said the Vermont Democrat "hopes to make progress this year," but securing floor time soon could be hard with appropriations bills in the queue.
The Innovation Alliance, which represents small tech and patent licensing firms, said the Senate measure is "still very problematic." "The bill will still erode, not strengthen, patent protections, thereby dampening innovation and stifling entrepreneurship," the group said.
The legislation would change the U.S. system for filing patent applications from the existing "first to invent" regime to the "first to file" process common in other countries. The measure also would streamline challenges to patent validity and enforceability, Leahy said.
The Senate bill kept language that would create a "second window" for patent review. A similar provision was stripped from the House measure. The Computer and Communications Industry Association said the section is crucial because in the information technology arena, "only the wealthiest companies can afford to monitor the flood of patents as they are issued."
But efforts to appease concerns from biotechnology and emerging tech companies, as well as universities, venture capital and manufacturing interests, illustrate "the difficulty many senators are having with this measure," the Innovation Alliance said.
Changes to language dealing with how damages are awarded in patent lawsuits and modifications to other provisions are necessary, the group said. Leahy's committee rejected an amendment on apportionment of damages.
As it stands, the Senate bill "will not advance the nation's leadership in innovation" and actually "skews the patent system in favor of the infringer over the inventor," said Gary Griswold, chief intellectual property counsel for 3M.
"It is obvious that many members of the committee remain concerned with the bill and that much more work will be needed," he said on behalf of the Coalition for 21st Century Patent Reform, which also is backed by Eli Lilly, General Electric and Motorola.
However, critics said the committee improved the Senate bill by moving to permanently keep Patent and Trademark Office fees from being diverted to unrelated federal projects and by eliminating language that would have given the agency broader rulemaking authority.
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Security
Senate To Consider Funding For ID Standards Law
by Michael Martinez
Senators are prepping for a debate over how much money the federal government should give states to help them meet pending nationwide standards for driver's licenses.
A spokeswoman for Tennessee Republican Lamar Alexander said Friday that he is preparing an amendment to the annual homeland security appropriations bill that would help states comply with the so-called REAL ID Act. The aide said Alexander, an outspoken critic of the law, wants $300 million for the states. The details of his proposal are still being finalized.
Floor debate on the Senate's version of the spending bill could begin as early as next week. President Bush did not reserve any money for REAL ID compliance in the budget proposal he submitted to Congress in February.
The Homeland Security Department estimated earlier this year that REAL ID will cost states as much as $23 billion. Worried about the cost of compliance and whether the law would create an invasive, backdoor national ID system, 17 states already have voted not to follow it.
REAL ID requires states to begin issuing federally compliant licenses next year. Under the law, noncompliant licenses no longer will be accepted for federal purposes, such as accessing Social Security or boarding airplanes.
Tim Sparapani, legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, said it is clear that support for REAL ID has eroded significantly on Capitol Hill and in the states. Last month, senators moved to strip references to the law from a comprehensive immigration bill, which since has stalled.
According to Sparapani, the REAL ID standoff in last month's immigration debate was significant because it was the first time the Senate truly voted on the law. The chamber passed REAL ID in 2005 after it was attached to an unrelated bill authorizing funding for the Iraq war and tsunami relief.
Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute, said it is unlikely that partial funding for REAL ID compliance will ease state-level concerns about the law. He added that it is imperative for Congress to avoid "throwing good money after bad."
"Now the question is whether Congress will try to buy state compliance, and that puts us in a good position because taxpayer money is priceless," he said.
Legislation also has been introduced in both chambers of Congress to repeal REAL ID. Those bills may be revisited once lawmakers decide how much money, if any, to direct to states.
But Harper said that with so many states electing to opt out of REAL ID, the script is already starting to play itself out. "It's just as good an alternative to let nothing happen at all," he said.
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Politics
YouTube Changes How Candidates, Supporters Connect
by Heather Greenfield
YouTube is changing the way candidates and supporters communicate, and come Monday, it will throw a few twists into the way they debate thanks to an event in Charleston, S.C., with Democratic candidates that is being co-hosted by CNN.
Each candidate in the debate will get to air a 30-second video. Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., sent an e-mail to supporters earlier this month asking them to submit videos on why they support her. The plan is to use excerpts in the Clinton campaign's debate video.
The YouTube video-sharing site, meanwhile, has been gathering its own video -- questions submitted by voters to be directed to the Democratic candidates. The deadline to submit questions is Sunday.
By Friday, nearly 1,800 people had submitted questions. YouTube News and Politics Editor Steve Grove said the site is "becoming the world's largest town hall for political discussion."
CNN Senior Vice President David Bohrman said there may be questions that challenge candidates, but he promised "no foolish gotcha questions."
CNN and YouTube also announced Friday that they will hold a similar debate for Republicans Sept. 17 in St. Petersburg, Fla.
YouTube has a separate YouChoose08 channel for voters to easily find videos produced by presidential candidate. The site further has been spotlighting a question from a candidate each month.
Clinton used her moment to seek help in choosing a campaign song. Her campaign reported receiving more than 200,000 votes online, and millions saw various postings of her "Sopranos" spoof video that announced the winner.
Former Energy Secretary Bill Richardson is using his time in the spotlight this month to ask the public to submit the next big energy idea. His video question and promise to personally visit the winner to draw attention to the idea has been seen 324,383 times.
That's even more than the edgy ad he posted two months ago dubbed "Job Interview," in which a guy eating a sandwich mentions Richardson's qualifications for president -- Energy secretary, U.N. ambassador, governor of New Mexico -- and pronounces him overqualified.
Richardson has begun to use YouTube to offer more interviews with supporters and informal footage. Clinton has been doing more informal, "behind the scenes" footage from campaign stops in New Hampshire and Iowa.
Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and John Edwards, two of the top Democratic candidates, have offered less formal video all along. Obama's campaign has done the most to turn the camera around by interviewing donors and, more recently, the winners of a private dinner with Obama.
But controversy tends to draw the most views. Edwards' posting of conservative pundit Ann Coulter sarcastically wishing about Edwards getting killed by terrorists drew more than a quarter-million views.
Some unofficial videos get far more hits. The anti-Clinton "Vote Different" video drew 3.5 million views, and 794,363 people have watched Edwards fixing his hair to the tune "I Feel Pretty."
The recent music video "I've Got a Crush on Obama" has been seen 2.5 million times.
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Culture
Global Experts Discuss Societal Impact Of Technology
by William New, for Technology Daily
The information and communications technology explosion is an historic paradigm shift for societies and may be creating a new divide among those with access to knowledge and those without, a panel of experts at the United Nations said Thursday.
Humans are living through a paradigm shift, "but we have to ensure the shift does not become a knowledge divide," said Axel Plathe, a senior official at the U.N. Economic, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
The shift is occurring because people "now have the opportunity to organize information in a much more functional way," which is benefiting global economies, Plathe said. But "we are seeing a divide" between those able to develop their economies and those that are not, based on their ability to acquire technologies and information.
Other factors contributing to the divide, according to Plathe, are freedom of expression, multilingualism and gender.
Plathe mentioned the importance of open standards to science, such as the Human Genome Project, which put the gene map online. He stressed the importance of access to knowledge, in addition to high-end technology, at the grassroots level. For instance, indigenous communities lack proper intellectual property rights over their traditional knowledge, he said.
Charles Geiger, special adviser for the U.N. Commission on Science and Technology for Development, said whenever research is publicly funded, everyone should be able to see the related literature.
Tim Kelly, former head of the strategy and policy unit at the U.N. International Telecommunication Union, said science, technology and innovation are "major contributors" to society, but the "real revolution" was the coming of the telegraph, which introduced the "promise of globalization."
Kelly said applications are the key to technologies. He said, for instance, that copper wire was in use for decades before new ways to speed larger amounts of information across it were found. He said high-speed Internet take-up is an important factor in development and noted a recent ITU report that found price-performance rates doubling about every 15 months (twice as many kilobytes per second for the same price).
Kelly also noted that spectrum, now essential to rapid wireless telephone growth (with mobile phones expected to reach one in every two people worldwide next year), had previous uses.
But the ITU found that the price for broadband service is on average 10 times higher in Africa than in developed countries, he said.
Erich Ruetsche of the IBM Zurich Research Lab highlighted the importance of science to business. He also stressed the importance to innovation of open standards and "open source" software whose underlying code can be viewed and altered. IBM is working with African governments to "see how we can help" find appropriate solutions, which also open new markets. "Face it," he said, "this is a selfish thing. This is a market."
"ICTs are a particularly pervasive technology," said Matthias Finger, dean of the continuing education school at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. And because information relies on ICTs, and information is everywhere, "ICTs will affect everything," he said. But they do not stand alone.
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On The Hill
Permanent Grants Plan Sought For Emergency Systems
by Theresa Poulson and Sarah Myers
A permanent grant program to improve the compatibility of emergency communications equipment would be established under new House legislation. The bill aimed at increasing interoperability was one of several technology-related measures introduced this week.
Reps. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., Vito Fossella, R-N.Y., and Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., are sponsoring the measure, H.R. 3116, which would establish a continuing revenue stream to be funded from the sale of government-owned broadcast spectrum.
While Engel said in a statement that Wednesday's announcement by the Commerce and Homeland Security departments to allocate $968 million in grants for emergency communications is a move in the right direction, only $61 million would go to New York. He noted that the state's Rockland County alone is spending almost half that amount to establish interoperability there.
"We learned on [Sept. 11, 2001] that all across America, emergency responders were unable to communicate with [each] other because they were using different radio frequencies," Engel said. "I have been introducing legislation ... to enable emergency personnel to establish communications that will allow them to work together more effectively."
On the privacy front, meanwhile, House Ways and Means Social Security Subcommittee Chairman Michael McNulty, D-N.Y., introduced a bill that would criminalize the sale of Social Security numbers and limit their display. The full committee quickly approved the measure, H.R. 3046, on Wednesday.
And in the health information technology arena, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., introduced a bill aimed at ensuring the privacy of individuals' medical records. (See separate summary)
Also in health IT, a new measure, H.R. 3051, would review and expand telehealth and telemental health programs at the Defense and Veterans Affairs departments. In the Senate, new legislation, S. 1824, would establish an electronically accessible system for grading hospital quality.
Another new bill, H.R. 3078, calls for utilizing and updating state-based abuse and neglect registries and national criminal history databases for screening nursing facility staff.
Other tech-related bills introduced this week included:
-- H.R. 3064, which would suspend certain non-resident immigration visa programs to provide temporary workload relief at the Homeland Security Department. The goal is to ensure screening and monitoring of immigrants and non-immigrants entering the United States;
-- H.R. 3045, which would regulate the judicial use of presidential signing statements;
-- And H.R. 3055, which would provide expanded technical assistance to Even Start literacy programs.
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Today's Feature:
Executive Summary
The House Judiciary Committee's approval this week of a bill to overhaul the U.S. patent system was hailed as a victory for some in the high-tech sector and seen as a setback for those in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and patent-licensing arenas.
Every Friday, read the Executive Summary by K. Daniel Glover.
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E-briefs
Broadband: Telecom and cable industry associations on Thursday applauded the adoption of language to revamp a federal program designed to spur the rollout of high-speed Internet access to rural areas. The language is part of a bill approved by the House Agriculture Committee to reauthorize farm programs. The amendment would overhaul the broadband loan program overseen by the Agriculture Department's Rural Utilities Service. Funds would only go to unserved rural areas and could be paid back over longer periods; larger companies could qualify for support; and progress would be documented in annual reports to Congress. The current program has been criticized for inefficiencies and wastefulness. "We have to make it easier for companies to provide broadband access or we're never going to connect Appalachia," amendment author Zack Space, D-Ohio, said in a statement, decrying the "bureaucratic red tape" that limits financial support for expanding broadband into rural areas.
Education: The House on Wednesday adopted language that would boost funding for a teacher development program at the Education Department. Michigan Republican Vernon Ehlers, a physicist, proposed adding the money to the spending bill for the department after discovering that the government's math and science partnerships program was set to receive the same funding in fiscal 2008 as this year. With help from fellow physicist Rush Holt, D-N.J., Ehlers convinced the House to increase proposed funding by 8.6 percent, or $15.7 million. "I am thrilled that my colleagues in the House saw the importance of this issue, especially since there are so few funds available for training for teachers," Ehlers stated Thursday. Ehlers' office noted that the amendment would provide an overall net savings of $10 million thanks to other offsets. Separately, congressional appropriators have supported funding increases for a National Science Foundation competitive grant program of the same name.
Labor: Texas Sen. John Cornyn on Thursday proposed raising the annual cap on visas for highly skilled workers from 65,000 up to 115,000 for fiscal 2008. "A key part of the American economy is our ability to innovate," Cornyn, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Immigration Subcommittee, said in proposing an amendment to a higher education bill. "Yet today our country's technology companies are facing an impending crisis which requires critical interim relief." The amendment also would allow the Homeland Security and State departments to reassign unused employment-based visas. "The [U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services] announcement this year that the cap for H-1B workers was met in just one day, coupled with the recent July announcement that employment-based visas were no longer available for those with advanced degrees, makes clear that industry needs interim relief today until we can return to comprehensive immigration reform," Cornyn said.
Intellectual Property: Qualcomm said Friday that the U.S. Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, which oversees patent cases, has denied the company's request to stay an International Trade Commission decision to bar the import of new models of cellular telephones with Qualcomm chips. The court decided that "the issue was not ripe for their consideration until after the passage of the presidential review period," according to Qualcomm. The ITC ruled that Qualcomm had violated a chip patent of rival Broadcom and banned the imports as a result. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative is evaluating the ITC decision and theoretically could protest the order before Aug. 6. The court "made no determination of the substantive merits of the stay request, and the parties are free to renew their request for a stay if the president does not veto the ITC decision," Qualcomm stated.
Spectrum: Google announced Friday that the FCC must meet four conditions before the search engine will participate in a major, upcoming spectrum auction. The conditions would guarantee that the auctioned frequencies are accessible to unaffiliated applications and devices, and could be leased by other parties at wholesale rates. Google also wants to ensure that competitors can interconnect with wireless networks controlled by licensees. FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, a Republican, recently floated proposed auction rules to colleagues that would appear to meet two of the four conditions -- the demands regarding applications and devices. "Should the commission expressly adopt the four license conditions ... with specific, enforceable and enduring rules, Google intends to commit a minimum of $4.6 billion to the bidding in the upcoming auction," CEO Eric Schmidt wrote in July 20 correspondence to Martin. The frequencies will become available after analog television broadcasters shift to digital signals.
E-Government: Chief information officers from the Defense Department and the office of the national intelligence director signed a memorandum Thursday agreeing to a joint vision that will permit enhanced information-sharing within the intelligence community. The agreement seeks to create a "services-based information environment" and reinforces the parties' commitment to implementing a system that will work across jurisdictions, and that leverages commercial practices and builds capabilities using standard Web technologies. The memorandum outlines shared goals to ensure that the envisioned data-sharing culture is achieved. Goals include providing services rather than developing stand-alone applications and mitigating duplicative efforts, according to an agency press release.
Politics: "Blogosphere Day," a day of activism for liberal bloggers, drew $17,482 in donations Thursday. This year's recipient of the cash was ActBlue, the site whose infrastructure is credited with Democratic fundraising success. Erin Hill, a spokeswoman for ActBlue, said the money will be used for technology and staff over the next 18 months. In a blog post on Daily Kos, Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., called ActBlue "an engine for progressive change." He added: "ActBlue is on its way toward raising $100 million for Democrats this election cycle. But reaching that amazing number isn't automatic. We need to make sure that ActBlue has the resources and support it needs, right now, to provide a strong financial platform for the progressive blogosphere." Retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark wrote at The Huffington Post that "supporting ActBlue not only strengthens the progressive movement, but it strengthens our democracy."
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Editor in Chief -- Louis Peck, 202-739-8481
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