Congressional scrutiny of retiring ICANN CEO Fadi Chehadé’s involvement with the controversial Chinese government-led World Internet Conference (WIC) heightens the need for ICANN to select and announce Chehadé’s successor, while the controversy's potential effect on U.S. government approval of the planned Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) transition is less clear, said ICANN stakeholders in interviews. GOP presidential contender Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and two other senators jointly sent a letter to Chehadé Thursday questioning Chehadé’s plan to become co-chairman of a high-level WIC advisory committee, and what compensation he will be receiving for that role, in a bid to determine whether his decision to take on a role at WIC while still ICANN CEO is a conflict of interest (see 1602040061).
Swedish Post and Telecom Authority Director-General Göran Marby will be ICANN’s next permanent president-CEO, ICANN said Monday. CEO Fadi Chehadé is to leave ICANN in mid-March, with Marby set to take the helm in May. ICANN President-Global Domains Division Akram Atallah will be acting CEO until Marby can move from Sweden to Los Angeles, ICANN said. Friday night, Communications Daily reported that the nonprofit was nearing a pick, with one likely to come from Europe (see 1602050065).
Senators involved in the debate over whether to keep the Permanent Internet Tax Freedom Act (PITFA) language in the Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act (HR-644) remained tight-lipped Thursday about the state of support for and against keeping the language. Meanwhile, some who support passage of PITFA as part of HR-644 told us they believe the margin between the number of senators who would support sustaining or overturning an attempt to remove the PITFA language from HR-644 is very tight. PITFA supporters have been lobbying in recent weeks to ensure they get at least 60 senators to vote to overturn an expected challenge by Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., and Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill. Alexander and Durbin are expected to seek a point of order ruling that an ITFA extension is outside the scope of HR-644 (see 1601130071).
GOP presidential contender Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and two other senators who have been skeptical about the planned Internet Assigned Numbers Authority transition raised concerns Thursday about retiring ICANN CEO Fadi Chehadé's involvement with the controversial Chinese government-led World Internet Conference (WIC). Chehadé agreed to become the co-chairman of a high-level advisory committee to WIC after his planned March departure from ICANN, along with planned roles as a senior adviser to Abry Partners and World Economic Forum Executive Chairman Klaus Schwab. Chinese President Xi Jinping spoke at WIC's December conference in Wuzhen, China, supporting allowing countries to “independently choose their own path of cyber development,” raising concerns among pro-multistakeholder Internet governance stakeholders (see 1512180049 and 1512290044).
Book publishers Elsevier and Hachette, the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA), a group of writers and the Copyright Alliance were among parties filing amicus briefs supporting the Authors Guild’s petition to the Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari seeking review of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ ruling in the Google Books case, the guild said Tuesday. It petitioned the Supreme Court in December to review the 2nd Circuit’s ruling that the Google Books project to digitize portions of the world’s books is a “transformative” example of fair use, saying the 2nd Circuit’s ruling “fundamentally remakes” the fair use doctrine and conflicts with other courts’ fair use rulings. Copyright legal experts have told us they believe the Supreme Court is unlikely to grant the petition (see 1601040063). Elsevier and Hachette jointly argued in their brief that the 2nd Circuit took an “overly expansive view of the meaning and consequences of transformativeness, which displaces the statutory full factorial analysis Congress intended.” The 2nd Circuit’s ruling also “infringes and jeopardizes” authors’ exclusive rights to control their right to reproduce their copyrighted works, Elsevier and Hachette said. ASJA’s brief argued, as expected, that the 2nd Circuit failed to do a required “qualitative analysis of the portions of a work used by the defendant ... and instead it opted in favor of a quantitative analysis that makes no sense in the context of Google’s ‘snippet view’ product.” The 2nd Circuit also “erred by considering ‘transformativeness’ in a manner completely detached from ‘justification’ or fairness,” ASJA said. The Copyright Alliance said the 2nd Circuit’s ruling “employed a fair use analysis that is far removed from” the existing fair use precedent in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, which found commercial parody to be fair use. The ruling also “necessarily ignored numerous important interests and considerations, many of which were reflected” in the Copyright Office’s 2011 mass digitization study, the Copyright Alliance said. Stephen Sondheim and a coalition of other major authors and dramatists jointly argued that the fair use doctrine wasn’t intended “to permit a wealthy for-profit entity to digitize millions of works and to cut off authors’ licensing of their reproduction, distribution, and public display rights.” Google’s deadline for filing its opposition brief to the Supreme Court is March 1.
The House Homeland Security Committee’s aim to make the Department of Homeland Security’s plan to reorganize the National Protection and Programs Directorate its first cybersecurity focus of 2016 is a reflection of timing rather than an indication that NPPD reorganization is a higher priority than other cybersecurity issues, cybersecurity-focused executives and lobbyists told us. But early consideration of the NPPD reorganization plan may be necessary, given ongoing industry concerns about the plan, executives and lobbyists said. DHS began seeking legislation last year to codify its planned reorganization of NPPD, which would rename it the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection division (see 1509170038). House Homeland Security plans to file a bill on NPPD reorganization this spring (see 1601290058).
The House Homeland Security Committee’s first cybersecurity priority for 2016 will be to continue examining possible legislation related to the Department of Homeland Security’s planned restructuring of its National Protection and Programs Directorate (NPPD), which leads much of the department’s cybersecurity work, a committee aide told us Friday. House Homeland Security Chairman Michael McCaul, R-Texas, alluded in a blog post last week to plans for an ambitious 2016 cybersecurity agenda beyond conducting oversight of implementation of the Cybersecurity Act as enacted in the FY 2016 omnibus spending bill (see 1601270044). House Homeland Security began looking last year at DHS' plans for reorganizing NPPD and renaming it the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection division (see 1509170038). McCaul eventually paused work on legislation to authorize the NPPD reorganization amid lawmakers’ questions about the reorganization and the increased focus on conference negotiations on information sharing legislation that resulted in the Cybersecurity Act, an industry lobbyist told us. House Homeland Security plans to meet with DHS officials in the coming weeks and anticipates filing a bill on NPPD reorganization at some point this spring, a committee aide said.
The Department of Commerce’s Internet Policy Task Force (IPTF) recommended Congress pass legislation that would amend guidance to courts for determining statutory damages in copyright infringement cases. The IPTF white paper, developed by NTIA and the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO), opposed using legislation to address remixes’ status within the fair-use doctrine and digital transmissions’ place in the existing first-sale doctrine. Private sector stakeholders should find solutions to both of those issues, the IPTF said. The task force said it supports creating a “streamlined procedure” for adjudicating “small claims” copyright infringement cases and urged “further consideration” of the Copyright Office’s 2013 proposal to establish a small claims copyright court (see report in the Oct. 1, 2013, issue). A small claims court “could help diminish the risk of disproportionate levels of damages against individual file-sharers,” the IPTF said.
The federal government should take enforcement action against Amazon for violations of traditional antitrust statutes, leaders of the Author's Guild, New America and other anti-Amazon publishing interests said Wednesday. Many of the groups speaking at a New America event Wednesday previously urged action against Amazon, including a direct appeal in July by the American Booksellers Association, the Author's Guild and two other authors' advocacy groups for a Department of Justice Antitrust Division investigation (see 1507130065). A book pricing deal Amazon reached in 2014 resolved the e-book pricing dispute between the online retailer and Hachette (see 1407100037). The larger antitrust issues highlighted in the dispute have “not gone away,” Authors United President Doug Preston said. Amazon and Justice didn't comment.
ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee said it hasn’t reached a consensus on whether to support several controversial parts of the Cross Community Working Group on Enhancing ICANN Accountability’s (CCWG-Accountability) draft proposal for changes to ICANN’s accountability mechanisms. GAC’s lack of consensus on some parts of the CCWG-Accountability proposal and earlier Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) feedback show the working group still needs to address significant issues in an expected supplementary draft of its proposal, ICANN stakeholders told us. The CCWG-Accountability proposal has become the main focus of the debate over the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority transition, other ICANN stakeholders said Monday during a State of the Net conference panel.