NTIA Dir. Michael Gallagher will leave the agency early next year, as expected. He had led the agency since shortly after the departure of Nancy Victory in Aug. 2003, though he wasn’t confirmed by the Senate until Nov. 2004. Gallagher is expected to be replaced, at least in an acting capacity, by his deputy John Kneuer, industry sources said.
3M Precision Optics will cut 188 jobs starting Feb. 3 at its Cincinnati, O., facility as it transfers CRT lens production to a new plant in China, a spokeswoman confirmed. An initial 55 production workers will be laid off Feb. 3, with 48 and 45 employees following March 1 and May 1, respectively, the spokeswoman said. Another 37-40 salaried positions will be trimmed by mid-year as the overall workforce shrinks to 240 from 425, the spokeswoman said. 3M operations in Cincinnati will move into one building from 3 as the emphasis shifts to R&D for microdisplay products from lenses for CRT-based rear projection TVs. 3M earlier this fall announced job cuts, but not plans for the factory (CED Nov 1 p2). Meanwhile, 3M said it plans to build an LCD optical film production plant in Wroclaw, Poland, to bring production closer to customers that include LG.Philips LCD. The latter recently announced plans for a back-end LCD module assembly factory in Wroclaw, with production starting first half 2007 (CED Sept 7 p5). 3M, now acquiring land for the plant, hasn’t decided when to open the facility, a spokeswoman said. “We don’t have a lot of details yet, but we are committed to opening” a plant in Poland, the spokeswoman said. Among details unavailable at our deadline Fri. were how much 3M will invest and how large the factory will be. The plant is designed to serve customers for the European market. 3M has brightness enhancement film plants in Menomonie, Wis., and Decatur, Ala., and conversion facilities in Kansai, Japan; Suzhou, China; Tainan, Taiwan; and Hwaseong and Naju, S. Korea.
A bill to create a market-oriented, competition-based communications regulatory system was introduced Thurs. at our deadline by Sen. DeMint (R-S.C.). Under it, communications firms would be regulated like other businesses, to protect consumers and ensure there’s no unfair competition, he said. Services alike from a consumer’s perspective would be treated alike. As such, phone service offered by a cable, land line or wireless firm would come under standard rules. The USF program would be reformed so all service providers contribute equally and funds go out more efficiently, transparently and in a technologically neutral way. Cable TV franchises would be phased out over 4 years. States’ enforcement roles would be preserved, preserving their authority to protect consumers and manage public rights-of-way. “We can no longer force a modern, dynamic industry to operate on archaic rules that destroy job creation, limit consumer choice and needlessly raise prices,” DeMint said. He urged Congress to “wake up” to the fact that today’s rules date to the days of rotary phones.
A bill to create a market-oriented, competition-based communications regulatory system was introduced Thurs. at our deadline by Sen. DeMint (R-S.C.). Under it, communications firms would be regulated like other businesses, to protect consumers and ensure there’s no unfair competition, he said. Services alike from a consumer’s perspective would be treated alike. As such, phone service offered by a cable, land line or wireless firm would come under standard rules. The USF program would be reformed so all service providers contribute equally and funds go out more efficiently, transparently and in a technologically neutral way. Cable TV franchises would be phased out over 4 years. States’ enforcement roles would be preserved, preserving their authority to protect consumers and manage public rights-of-way. “We can no longer force a modern, dynamic industry to operate on archaic rules that destroy job creation, limit consumer choice and needlessly raise prices,” DeMint said. He urged Congress to “wake up” to the fact that today’s rules date to the days of rotary phones.
MTV Networks and Amp'd Mobile partnered to deliver content to the young adult market, the firms said Wed. MTV will provide content, drawing from subsidiary channels Comedy Central, MTV, VH1, CMT, MTV2, TV Land, Spike TV and iFILM. Amp'd will carry the content over the EVDO it leases from Verizon, which had its soft launch today (Thurs.). The firms also said they will develop a joint, co-branded marketing scheme.
The FCC’s predictive model doesn’t account for buildings, trees and other “clutter,” EchoStar said Mon. in oral argument at the U.S. Appeals Court, D.C. Consumer ability to get over-the-air signals matters to DBS providers, since customers seen as “unserved” are eligible to get certain network TV stations over satellite. EchoStar called the FCC’s use of a revised version of the Individual Location Longley-Rice (ILLR) model (CD Dec 12 p9) “mystifying.” A user may live near a broadcast tower, but the Empire State Building may be in the way, said EchoStar attorney Pantelis Michalopoulos. Michalopoulos said the FCC’s revised version of the ILLR is blind to buildings and other “land use” variables Congress requires the FCC to weigh in predicting TV signal coverage. But FCC attorney Joel Marcus said today’s ILLR takes land use into account, albeit generally. Changing the model only would make it less accurate, he argued. In tell the FCC to consider “clutter loss” when predicting TV signal coverage, “Congress wasn’t saying ‘This is an interesting engineering exercise for the FCC to do.’ Congress was saying it wants a reliable model,” Marcus said. The FCC’s ultimate decision to zero out clutter loss in the ILLR equation for VHF channels made for the most accurate model, he said. Said Judge Ginsberg: “So it’s as if Congress says, ‘Do the best you can, taking into account X.’ And you came back and said, ‘It looks like we already did'?” Marcus agreed, saying: “For better or for worse, that’s why we are the experts at this stuff.” Judges Williams and Sentelle asked questions that revolved around a now-contested NAB data set the FCC used in its paradigm, the statistical distribution of the model’s output and the FCC’s ex parte rules. Mon.’s arguments came just after the appearance of a related FCC report to Congress on gauging DTV signal strength. Released Fri., that report’s findings were consistent with Marcus’s arguments. Lawmakers had asked the FCC to conduct an inquiry and recommend what changes, if any, the agency should make to its digital signal strength testing standards, which determine if a household is “unserved” and thus eligible for distant digital signals. The FCC recommended no standards changes, and said an overhaul of the ILLR model isn’t needed. But the FCC did say it will study whether ILLR needs some modifications to address differences between analog and digital TV signals.
A federal appeals court ruled against a Chicago woman charged with illegally downloading music on the Internet. In its decision late Fri., the 7th U.S. Appeals Court, Chicago, upheld a $22,500 judgment against Cecilia Gonzalez, 29, rejecting her defense that she was only sampling songs to decide which to buy The defendant in BMG Music v. Gonzalez, an immigrant mother of 5, used peer-to-peer (P2P) service Kazaa to download tracks. She based her fair-use claim on the Sony Betamax case.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has posted to its Web site a fact sheet regarding the Secure Border Initiative (SBI) announced by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Chertoff. CBP has also posted the transcript of a press conference with the DHS Secretary on this initiative. Both of these documents are highlighted below:
Utah Attorney Gen. Mark Shurtleff (R) slammed a Free Speech Coalition (FSC) lawsuit last week that he said aims to dismantle a new state registry that protects children online. Shurtleff filed a motion to dismiss a complaint filed Nov. 16 in federal court by the adult entertainment industry trade group challenging the constitutionality of Utah’s Child Protection Registry law. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. Dist. Court-Salt Lake, “shows the pornographers’ true colors,” Shurtleff said. “They claim a ‘right’ to market porn to adults, but by challenging our Child Protection Registry, they have proven their real intent to force smut on our children in our homes and schools,” he said, pledging to “vigorously defend” the registry. The law prohibits emailing to registered addresses “a product or service that a minor is prohibited by law from purchasing or… contains or advertises material that is harmful to minors.” In its 39-page complaint, FSC said the underlying state law is flawed in several respects, most significantly by conflicting with the national CAN- SPAM Act. The law also violates the U.S. and Utah Constitutions by treating some e-mail marketers differently from others, the group said. FSC’s claims that the cost of regularly “scrubbing” e-mail lists against Utah’s registry database could be prohibitive and have a “chilling effect” aren’t legitimate, said Matthew Prince, whose company Unspam works with the state on the registry. It costs adult industry marketers only a fraction of a penny per e-mail address to ensure their messages aren’t landing in registered inboxes, he said.
USDTV -- the subscription-based over-the-air terrestrial DTV service -- will ship a 2nd-generation set- top box in first half 2006, along with optional MPEG-4-to- MPEG-2 transcoders and 250 GB hard drives as it sets a goal of landing 2 million subscribers within 5 years, CEO Steve Lindsley told the UBS Global Media Conference in N.Y. Thurs.