If BlackBerry’s $1.4 billion buy of cybersecurity company Cylance (see 1811160024) goes through, “we will keep them as a separate business unit for sure,” said CEO John Chen on a Thursday earnings call. “That has been decided,” he said, though he hasn't decided on the organizational plan “going forward.” With the FTC having cleared the transaction with a Hart-Scott-Rodino early termination notice (see 1812130063), BlackBerry and Cylance await the comment and review period ending late January on the joint voluntary notice they filed at the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., said Chen. He expects the deal will close “shortly after,” he said.
Four TV makers and one panel maker will be founding members of the new 8K Association launching at CES to spread consumer awareness of the fledgling ultra-high-resolution format, emailed Insight Media President Chris Chinnock, who will be the group’s executive director. It plans a Jan. 9 debut news conference, CTA announced. A pre-CES release will name companies involved, said Chinnock Tuesday.
The lawyer who filed companion lawsuits alleging Apple and Samsung are shortchanging the public on the screen-resolution specs on which they market their smartphones won’t rule out targeting additional manufacturers. “That depends on what comes to us,” attorney C.K. Lee told us Monday, when asked if he plans more lawsuits. The iPhone X, XS and XS Max smartphones lack their “advertised” screen resolutions and screen sizes in violation of consumer protection laws in all states, alleged last week's complaint (in Pacer) in U.S. District Court in San Jose (see 1812140052). Nearly three dozen models of Samsung smartphones dating to 2010 were marketed with “nominal” screen resolutions that “misleadingly count false pixels,” said the complaint against Samsung (in Pacer) in U.S. District Court in Manhattan. Apple and Samsung didn’t comment.
Though encrypting data is “relatively simple” using established “mechanisms,” unlocking encrypted data “in the recovery environment is often difficult and sometimes not possible using current techniques,” said a Microsoft patent application published Thursday at the Patent and Trademark Office. Application 20180357412, filed Aug. 21 and naming six Microsoft inventors, describes techniques to “facilitate” the “secure” unlocking and recovery of encrypted data. A consumer device can use “credentials” associated with an authorized user to obtain a “recovery password to unlock keys for interpreting the encrypted volumes,” it said: The device can use a shortened recovery password “in conjunction with anti-hammering capabilities of a Trusted Platform Module in order to unlock keys for interpreting the encrypted volumes.” Friday, the company didn’t comment.
The iPhone X, XS and XS Max smartphones lack “advertised” screen resolutions and screen sizes in violation of consumer protection laws in all states and the District of Columbia, alleged a complaint (in Pacer) Friday in U.S. District Court in San Jose that seeks class-action status. Apple's "nominal screen pixel resolution counts misleadingly count false pixels as if they were true pixels," said two consumers. The screens have rounded-off corners with "notches" at the top containing no pixels, yet Apple "calculates the screen size" by including "non-screen areas such as the corners and the cut-out notch," they alleged. California's Christian Sponchiado paid $1,149 for his X at an AT&T store in San Francisco, and co-plaintiff Brooklynite Courtney Davis bought her XS Max for $1,099 from Apple online. The company didn’t comment.
The three rounds of Trade Act Section 301 tariffs imposed since July on $250 billion worth of Chinese goods are costing the tech industry more than $1 billion a month in added fees, reported CTA Friday. CTA released its estimates as the Trump administration officially delayed to March 2 its plan to raise the third tranche of 10 percent tariffs to 25 percent.
Amazon Web Services stole three Kove inventions to become the world’s first large-scale vendor of “economical cloud infrastructure and services,” alleged a Wednesday complaint (in Pacer) in U.S. District Court in Chicago. AWS' access to the cloud “without having to set up their own servers, software, and functionality” on the wide "scope and scale was made possible through infringement of Kove’s patents,” said Kove. The patent theft paved the way for AWS “to become what is believed to be Amazon’s largest profit center,” it said. Kove is a “small, innovative product company competing in a field of behemoths,” including AWS, it said. Respect for Kove’s IP, “as the law requires, is essential to fair competition,” it said. Kove’s inventors developed the “breakthrough technology” for enabling “high-performance, hyper-scalable” cloud storage years before the commercial “advent” of the cloud, it said. Kove’s technology “became essential to AWS as the volume of data stored on its cloud grew exponentially and its cloud storage business faced limitations on the ability to store and retrieve massive amounts of data,” it said. "We don’t comment on active litigation," emailed Amazon spokesperson Angie Quennell Thursday.
GoPro will move most of U.S.-bound action-camera production from China by summer as a hedge against exposure on “any new” tariffs list, said the company Tuesday. It escaped duties through the three rounds of tariffs imposed between July and September. “Today's geopolitical business environment requires agility, and we're proactively addressing tariff concerns,” said Chief Financial Officer Brian McGee. “This diversified approach to production can benefit our business regardless of tariff implications.” President Donald Trump threatened Sept. 17 to "immediately pursue" a fourth tranche on $267 billion if China retaliated for duties that took effect Sept. 24. China did retaliate, but Trump never acted. GoPro didn’t comment Tuesday on where it’s moving production.
A new U.S.-Japan trade agreement should “promote innovation” and U.S. "competitiveness," so it should include “a robust chapter” on digital trade modeled after the text of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade deal, testified Charles Freeman, U.S. Chamber of Commerce senior vice president-Asia, Monday at an Office of the U.S. Trade Representative hearing on U.S. negotiating objectives for a free-trade agreement with Japan (see 1811270002). The digital economy “is growing at almost two and a half times faster than the global economy, and trade in digital goods is growing more rapidly than trade in traditional manufactured goods and agricultural products,” said Freeman. Negotiations with Japan are “a real opportunity to set the highest global standard” intellectual property “creativity and innovation,” he said. “Both countries should take this opportunity to advance a model approach to sustainable access to innovation and creativity by promoting respect for property rights and a return of fair value for innovation.” Along similar lines on negotiating objectives for a potential U.S.-EU pact, the Computer & Communications Industry Association wants the USTR to “seek a holistic trade agreement with the EU to reduce barriers and encourage investment across the economy,” it commented Monday in docket USTR-2018-0035. The USTR is “strongly encouraged” to make digital trade a “priority in these negotiations with the EU,” said CCIA. “Failure to do so would be a significant missed opportunity.” Commitments to digital trade in a U.S.-EU agreement “will be important in ensuring continued EU market access for innovative American firms and in establishing a model elsewhere in the world,” said the Software & Information Industry Association. Though the EU’s position is that privacy can’t be subject to a trade negotiation, the U.S. “should nonetheless strive to come to an agreement providing for a positive cross-border data flow commitment,” it said. The U.S. “should also push back against a highly likely EU request for a cultural carve-out,” it said. There also should be an effort “to establish closer U.S.-EU cooperation on both digital and intellectual property rights issues vis a vis third countries,” it said. A hearing on U.S.-EU negotiating objectives is set for Friday. Comments in the docket were due midnight Monday.
The FCC “wants to create flexibility for broadcasters to do new things that are beyond their core,” but the free “component is still really important,” said Martha Heller, chief of the FCC Media Bureau Policy Division, at the TV of Tomorrow conference in Manhattan. “A big part of our regulatory framework is that we’re obviously requiring broadcasters to continue providing at least one free over-the-air channel to consumers. Beyond that, we recognize that spectrum is going to be much more efficient in this new standard.” Local-simulcast rules on 3.0 “are an important part of this to make sure that consumers don’t lose access to the stations they can get today,” since 3.0 won’t be backward-compatible, Heller said Thursday. Over-the-top video delivery services can be a “template” for many things stations can do with 3.0 in addition to providing linear, terrestrial TV services, said John Hane, president of the SpectrumCo consortium that includes Nexstar and Sinclair (see 1812070038). "Think about an OTT platform that doesn’t rely on a broadband connection being there all the time, that has some of the most valuable programming available for free.” Hane personally envisions "a base-layer video, and give that away free” in "standard definition," he said. “We could add enhancement layers that add HDR and other capabilities” that could be advertising-free under a subscription model, he said. He wants broadcasters to “think about an OTT platform that could be received everywhere on capable devices, whether there’s a broadband connection or not.”