Facebook rejects suggested ‘Panic Button’ for pages

NEWS
Facebook rejects suggested ‘Panic Button’ for pages
Tuesday, April 13, 2010

••• Facebook has announced an overhaul of its online safety measures that include the redesign of its abuse reporting system. But British users are concerned the new features still don’t go far enough.

Facebook’s “Safety Center” features new tools for parents, teachers, teens and law enforcement; it’s the first major endeavor from the social networking site and its four-month-old global safety advisory board.

Some new features of the safety center include four times more content on staying safe, such as dealing with bullying online, an interactive portal and a simpler design. But the company has not announced the installation of a panic button on every page as British officials had urged it to do.

Jim Gamble, chief executive of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, said the social networking giant did not agree to his demands outright at a meeting in Washington but he felt they were moving in the right direction.

Speaking after a four-hour meeting yesterday, Mr. Gamble said Facebook was close to “doing the right thing” but urged the website to turn “words into action”.

“They are one small step away from doing the right thing,” he said.

“I am more optimistic than when I came. They are not saying no, that is very clear.

“There is no doubt they are looking to improve their position around child safety and we recognise that. What I am looking for is turning words into action.”

The showdown came after controversy in Britain over Facebook’s refusal to include a “panic button” on its pages after the conviction of a serial rapist who used the site to lure and murder a teenage girl.

Peter Chapman posed as a young boy to lure 17-year-old Ashleigh Hall to her death in north-east England.

Calls have since grown for the inclusion of the buttons – which allow youngsters who feel threatened online to quickly contact a number of sources of help, such as CEOP or anti-bullying helplines.

Politicians, police and anti-bullying groups have voiced outrage that the online giant will not bow to demands to include the system.

“In our view they are experts at creating a fantastic online environment but they are not experts in law enforcement, the power of deterrents and the reassurance it brings for mums and dads,” Mr. Gamble said.

The other problem with a “panic button” is that it could lead to a false sense of security. If someone truly is aware of an online emergency, they are better off calling 911 or its equivalent in whatever country they are in.

Related: U.K. pressures Facebook to install ‘panic button’ to protect kids

GAO piracy report: A deeper look

NEWS
GAO piracy report: A deeper look
Tuesday, April 13, 2010

••• A report released by the Government Accountability Office questions Hollywood’s billion dollar losses claims, citing a lack of evidence as the main reason for the doubts. On the other hand, the Congress-commissioned report emphasizes that piracy may also benefit the entertainment industries and third parties.

The PRO-IP Act is a United Stated law that aims to combat copyright infringement by increasing civil and criminal penalties for offenders. As part of the Act, Congress has instructed the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to quantify the impact of piracy on the economy. The results of this investigation have now been published in a report.

The report puts the claimed ‘massive losses’ by the entertainment industries in a different light. After having interviewed many experts and plowed through the relevant literature, GAO writes that it cannot make any solid conclusions about the financial effect piracy has on the economy as a whole.

“Lack of data hinders efforts to quantify impacts of counterfeiting and piracy,” is one of the main conclusions from the report.

One of the problems signaled by the GAO is that government officials admit that they simply reply on statistics and reports from the entertainment industries without conducting research on their own. These reports naturally lack transparency about the source of the figures and are often written to sell a political agenda through lobbying efforts.

Although the GAO report cannot make any strong conclusions on the financial impact of piracy and counterfeiting on the economy, the writers do note that piracy can have several benefits for consumers and businesses.

“Some authors have argued that companies that experience revenue losses in one line of business—such as movies—may also increase revenues in related or complementary businesses due to increased brand awareness,” the report states.

“For instance, companies may experience increased revenues due to the sales of merchandise that are based on movie characters whose popularity is enhanced by sales of pirated movies.”

Another aspect that was mentioned is the positive impact piracy has on the revenues of third party companies. The example of routers is given in the report, but it is not hard to see that Apple’s iPod might also have benefited from the availability of pirated music.

“One expert also observed that some industries may experience an increase in demand for their products because of piracy in other industries. This expert identified Internet infrastructure manufacturers (e.g., companies that make routers) as possible beneficiaries of digital piracy, because of the bandwidth demands related to the transfer of pirated digital content,” the report reads.

One of the most interesting benefits of piracy mentioned in the report is that it encourages innovation, since this is the exact opposite of what copyright holders always argue. Unfortunately for consumers, this innovation is not always aimed at making a better product.

“While competitive pressure to keep one step ahead of counterfeiters may spur innovation in some cases, some of this innovation may be oriented toward anticounterfeiting and antipiracy efforts, rather than enhancing the product for consumers.”

The overall conclusion of the GAO is that they can’t put a number on what the financial consequences of piracy are for the economy. However, blindly trusting statics and reports from the entertainment industry is probably not a good idea, they say.

It is unclear at this point what impact the report will have on the legislation and anti-piracy measures as proposed by the PRO-IP Act.

Story Highlights:
▪ The development of technologies that enable the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted works is widely recognized as leading to an increase in piracy.

▪ To the extent that counterfeiting and piracy reduce investments in research and development, these companies may hire fewer workers and may contribute less to U.S. economic growth, overall.

▪ The U.S. economy may also experience slower growth due to a decline in trade with countries where widespread counterfeiting hinders the activities of U.S. companies operating overseas.

▪ There is no government agency that systematically collects or tracks data on the extent of digital copyright piracy.

▪ Many of the experts we interviewed identified lost tax revenue as an effect of counterfeiting and piracy on governments. IP owners or producers of legitimate goods who lose revenue because of competition from counterfeiters pay less in taxes. The U.S. government also incurs costs due to IP protection and enforcement efforts.

▪ Some authors (of studies on this issue) have argued that companies that experience revenue losses in one line of business–such as movies–may also increase revenues in related or complementary businesses due to increased brand awareness. For instance, companies may experience increased revenues due to the sales of merchandise that are based on movie characters whose popularity is enhanced by sales of pirated movies.

▪ Commerce and FBI officials told us they rely on industry statistics on counterfeit and pirated goods and do not conduct any original data.

▪ According to experts and government officials, industry associations do not always disclose their proprietary data sources and methods, making it difficult to verify their estimates.

▪ There is no single methodology to collect and analyze data that can be applied across industries to estimate the effects of counterfeiting and piracy on the U.S. economy or industry sectors.

▪ The Business Software Alliance publishes piracy estimates based on a set of annual surveys it conducts in different countries. Based on its survey results, the industry association estimated the U.S. piracy rate at 20 percent for business software, carrying a loss of $9 billion in 2008. This study defined piracy as the difference between total installed software and legitimate software sold, and its scope involved only packaged physical software. While this study has an enviable data set on industries and consumers located around the world from its country surveys, it uses assumptions that have raised concerns among experts we interviewed.

Democrats take aim at John Roberts court

NEWS
Democrats take aim at John Roberts court
Tuesday, April 13, 2010

••• Democrats hope to turn the upcoming Supreme Court confirmation hearings into a referendum of sorts on controversial recent decisions by the Roberts court – portraying the conservative majority as a judicial Goliath trampling the rights of average Americans.

As President Barack Obama mulls possible replacements for retiring Justice John Paul Stevens, the administration and congressional aides are gravitating toward a strategy that goes beyond the goals of a run-of-the-mill confirmation fight – to define a corporations-vs.-the-common-man battle between Democrats and the high court.

In addition to building a defensive perimeter around Obama’s pick – whoever that may be – Democrats will use the hearings to attack what they view as a dangerous strain of conservative judicial activism espoused by Chief Justice John Glover Roberts, Jr. and Associate Justices Samuel Anthony Alito, Jr., Antonin Gregory Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

“I don’t think people are going to tell the nominee, ‘It is terrible what the Roberts court has done — what are you going to do to reverse it?’” said Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), laying out the argument on Monday.

“But I think what people are going to do is say, ‘Do you share our concern about the fact that the court always seems to side with the big corporate interests against the average American?’” he added. “I think there’s going to be more of the public realizing they really do have a stake in who’s on the Supreme Court.”

Obama himself laid the groundwork for the strategy during the State of the Union speech in February, when he stunned Roberts and Alito by sharply criticizing their 5-to-4 decision in Citizens United v. FEC, which loosened McCain-Feingold restrictions on corporate contributions to campaigns.

“The justice [Obama] appoints will be a pivotal voice on this court on issues like, for example, the one we just saw, Citizens United, where the court ruled that corporations have the same First Amendment rights as individuals and they basically sanctioned a corporate takeover of our elections,” said Obama senior adviser David Axelrod, speaking on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program Monday.

“Massive new spending by corporations – these kinds of decisions affect people’s lives. And the justice he appoints will be there for a generation,” added Axelrod.

Still, administration officials suggested Obama won’t seek to balance the court by tapping a controversial liberal.

Instead, the White House is emphasizing a candidate’s temperament, hoping to pick a “confirmable” candidate who shares Stevens’s personal charm and gifts of persuasion – which sometimes helped him win over swing voter Anthony Kennedy.

“The president will weigh heavily the ability of a nominee to build a consensus and win over a majority of his or her colleagues to counterbalance the increasingly ideological manner in which the business of the Supreme Court is conducted,” said an administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Leahy told that he has been consulting with the Obama administration’s SCOTUS team for weeks and personally tipped off the president about Stevens’s intention to retire in January, after meeting with the 89-year-old justice in Stevens’s personal office inside the Supreme Court building.

Senate Republicans have vowed to scrutinize Obama’s pick – and have refused to rule out a filibuster if the candidate is outside the “mainstream,” according to Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, and Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.).

Don Stewart, a spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, dismissed the frantic pre-nomination strategizing by Democrats and scoffed at statements by Obama’s aides saying the process would have nothing to do with political considerations.

“Are you telling me they want to use the Supreme Court confirmation for political purposes? They told us we weren’t supposed to do that,” he said. “Jeez Louise, I’m confused. You need a scorecard to keep up with these guys.”

Obama is expected to decide on a nominee from a list of about 10 moderate to liberal lawyers and judges within the next several weeks.

On Monday, an administration official confirmed the names of two more jurists on that list: federal appeals court Judge Sidney Thomas of Montana and former Georgia Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears, the first African-American state chief judge in American history.

They join a roster of possible picks known to include Solicitor General Elena Kagan, federal Judges Diane Wood and Merrick Garland, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Gov. Jennifer Granholm of Michigan, a former prosecutor.

While all of the names on Obama’s shortlist enjoy solid reputations, none of them have the sheer populist pop of the justices appointed to the high court by Franklin D. Roosevelt, another Democratic president claiming to represent the common man.

Roosevelt – operating in an age before instant messaging and cable news – had more leeway in his picks, but they were an audacious bunch: William O. Douglas, who cleaned up Wall Street as head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, utility-buster Hugo Black and Felix Frankfurter, author of the landmark Securities Act of 1933.

“These were big personalities, really famous people with long, controversial paper trails, people with really powerful liberal records,” said Harvard Law School professor Noah Feldman, who is writing a history of FDR and the court.

Regardless of the selection, Republicans on the committee will almost certainly paint any Obama nominee as a liberal judicial activist and pepper the person with familiar questions about his or her writings, decisions and speeches.

But this time, Democrats are likely to counter with their own set of questions about conservative activism – and question the judicial philosophy of Roberts, Alito, Scalia, Thomas and Kennedy in their recent decisions.

Among the cases Senate Democrats intend to focus on: the politically charged Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. (2007), in which the Roberts court denied a pay equity complaint from a female factory supervisor because she had failed to file by the three-year deadline, and the court’s 2008 decision to reduce damages from the Exxon Valdez spill from $5 billion to $507 million.

On a parallel track, Democrats, led by Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) and Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), will soon introduce legislation to increase transparency among some corporate donations.

But the Citizens United case, which scrapped key sections of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance laws, is the one that the White House and Hill Democrats plan to target most.

Citizens United “is the most high-profile case in the last couple of years, and there’s no question, in my judgment, that the issue will be raised one way or another during the nominee’s testimony before the committee,” said Obama spokesman Josh Earnest.