The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) has issued a notice announcing the closure of review for cases 012-CP-05, protection of worker Rights in Swaziland, and 015-CP-05, protection of intellectual property in Kazakhstan. According to USTR, the Subcommittee of the Trade Policy Staff Committee (TPSC) decided to close these cases following its 2005 Annual Review of petitions concerning the practices of certain beneficiary developing countries of the General System of Preferences (GSP) program. (FR Pub 05/01/06, available at http://a257.g.akamaitech.net/7/257/2422/01jan20061800/edocket.access.gpo.gov/2006/pdf/E6-6536.pdf)
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has issued additional notices stating that effective April 27, 2006, ACS programming now allows the ABI filing of preference claims under the U.S. - Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR). As a result, non-ABI entries are no longer required and any quota entries (textiles or agricultural tariff-rate quotas) that had been held by the ports due to the unavailability of ABI can now be processed through the quota module. (See ITT's Online Archives or 04/27/06 news, 06042705 for earlier BP summary) (QBT-06-014 (textiles), QBT-06-527 (agricultural TRQs), dated 04/27/06, available at http://www.cbp.gov/linkhandler/cgov/import/textiles_and_quotas/qbts/qbt2006/06_014.ctt/06_014.doc and http://www.cbp.gov/linkhandler/cgov/import/textiles_and_quotas/qbts/qbt2006/06_527.ctt/06_527.doc respectively.)
The International Trade Administration (ITA) and the International Trade Commission (ITC) have issued a notice, each initiating an automatic five-year Sunset Review on the above-listed antidumping (AD) duty order.
The Committee for the Implementation of Textile Agreements (CITA) has published a notice, effective April 28, 2006, setting forth the procedures it will follow in considering requests from the public for the imposition of duty rate safeguard actions on Australia Free Trade Agreement (AFTA) textiles and apparel.
The Commandant of the Coast Guard has issued a notice announcing that, effective April 28, 2006, he is directing Coast Guard Captains of the Port (COTP) to prevent access to all facilities regulated under 33 CFR Part 105 (Maritime Security: Facilities) to persons that do not have acceptable identification credentials. This notice also states that the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) will implement the threat assessment screening of facility employees and longshoremen as described below.
Mocking what it termed other filers’ “nonsensical” read of the Copyright Act, DoJ said in a file-sharing brief Fri. that Internet distribution clearly comes under the Act’s treatment of the distribution right pertaining to “material objects.” The Elektra v. Barker defendant and Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) have said the definition of “copies and phonorecords” in the law excludes network transmission of copyrighted works, a claim that spurred DoJ to tell the U.S. Dist. Court, N.Y. it might intervene (WID April 6 p12). Court precedent and congressional intent line up with its argument, DoJ said.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has issued revised guidance on the classification of festive articles due to its recent decision to limit the court decisions in the case Park B. Smith, Ltd., vs. U.S.(Park) to the litigated entries only, i.e., the specific cotton woven table linen and cotton woven dhurry rug entries before the courts in that litigation.
Mobile phone users could conduct voice-activated searches if a patent granted to Google Tues. for a voice interface search engine is deployed. If so, Google would be weighting records of stored text and audio queries to improve speech recognition, as it does now with recognizing near- misses of keyed in text, the firm said.
Mobile phone users could conduct voice-activated searches if a patent granted to Google Tues. for a voice interface search engine is deployed. If so, Google would be weighting records of stored text and audio queries to improve speech recognition, as the it does now with recognizing near- misses of keyed in text, the firm said.
The FCC Wed. adopted long awaited rules on educational institutions’ leasing broadband radio service (BRS)and educational broadband service (EBS) spectrum to firms planning to use the spectrum for wireless broadband. Firms anxious to roll out wireless broadband networks on the spectrum scored key wins, but many details remain unclear. Comr. Copps voiced deep concerns about the order.