With the publication of the Office of U.S. Trade Representative’s notice in Wednesday’s Federal Register on procedures for requesting exclusions from Trade Act Section 301 tariffs on Chinese imports (see 1807080001), docket USTR-2018-0025 for posting such requests became active in the regulations.gov portal. No requests were posted yet by our Friday deadline. Exclusion requests are due by Oct. 9, and if granted will apply for a year retroactively to July 6, said the notice. Once a request is posted, the public will have 14 days to file responses to that request, it said. After that 14-day period, “interested persons” will have seven days to reply to those responses, it said. Though Oct. 9 is the deadline for the exclusion requests, “international trade team” lawyers at BakerHostetler are “advising clients to file as soon as possible in anticipation of the large administrative backlog that they expect.” Though the Trump administration’s threat to impose 10 percent tariffs on an additional $200 billion worth of Chinese imports (see 1807110034) “doesn't necessarily raise the risk of an all-out trade war, the tariffs would affect some industries and individual corporate borrowers,” said S&P Global Friday. Together with the 25 percent tariffs enacted July 6 on $34 billion in Chinese imports and the proposal to impose tariffs on another $16 billion in goods, “the total amount of $250 billion now represents about half the value of China's annual exports to the U.S.,” it said. The absence of an immediate “tit-for-tat” retaliatory response from China “lends hope to the belief that China-U.S. trade negotiations aren't completely off the table,” said S&P. “We are obviously not sanguine about the risk. Our current base-case assumption is that the tariffs, if imposed, will not likely greatly affect either economy. However, they would affect some industries and individual corporations.” The U.S.-China friction already is contributing to “jitters in the financial markets and is coloring business investment decisions,” said S&P. If China wants to retaliate with tariffs on U.S. goods, it “can’t match” the $200 billion figure because American imports to China totaled only $130 billion last year, it said: “Should China opt to pursue non-tariff actions that affect services and investments, it could damage global business and consumer confidence, investment prospects, and growth.”

The Chinese Embassy in Washington released a 1,300-word statement Thursday accusing U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer of “slander” for alleging that China uses unfair trade practices to gain advantages over its U.S. trade competitors. In announcing a new round of proposed 10 percent Trade Act Section 301 tariffs Tuesday on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods (see 1807110034), Lighthizer called China’s trade practices “an existential threat to America’s most critical comparative advantage and the future of our economy.” The retaliatory actions China took in response to the tariffs that took effect July 6 were "without any international legal basis or justification," said Lighthizer. The Chinese shot back, calling Lighthizer’s statement “a distortion of facts” and his accusations “groundless.” Any “underlying problems in the American economy and society are purely caused by domestic, structural reasons in the US,” said the embassy. China since February “engaged in four rounds of high-level economic talks with the US,” and reached “important consensus” on “strengthening trade and economic cooperation and avoiding a trade war,” it said. “But due to domestic politics, the US has gone back on its words, brazenly abandoned the bilateral consensus, and insisted on fighting a trade war with China. China has done its utmost to prevent the escalation of trade frictions. The United States is fully responsible for the current situation.” The tariffs the Trump administration implemented or proposed are “typical unilateralism, protectionism and trade bullying,” and are a “clear violation” of the basic World Trade Organization “principle of most-favored-nation treatment as well as the basic spirit and principles of international law,” said the embassy. That China was “forced to take” retaliatory “counteractions” against the tariffs was “an inevitable choice to defend national interest and global interest, and is perfectly rightful, reasonable and lawful," it said. Lighthizer's office didn't comment.

Sony Mobile Communications smartwatches and “smart bands” that use Google’s Wear OS platform violate a U.S. patent in the way they communicate with other devices, alleged a complaint (in Pacer) filed Sunday in U.S. District Court in Wilmington, Delaware. Beck Branch, a Plano, Texas, limited liability company, owns a March 2005 patent (No. 6,873,620) that describes a communication server acting as a gateway for the transmission of messages between two virtual devices communicating with networks implementing different protocols. The complaint against Sony was one of six actions Beck Branch filed Sunday in the same court alleging infringement of the same patent. Other defendants and their allegedly infringing products or services: (1) Blue Jeans Network (in Pacer), which operates a cloud-based platform for internet-protocol-based communication; (2) Polycom (in Pacer), which markets a unified communications software platform for open standards-based communication, including session initiation protocol (SIP); (3) Motorola Mobility (in Pacer), for its Wear OS smartwatches and fitness bands; (4) Unify (in Pacer), which markets OpenScape as a hybrid unified communications platforms for IP-based communication, including SIP-based communication; (5) Vonage (in Pacer), marketer of unified communications services based on cloud public branch exchange protocol. Defendants didn’t comment Monday.

Streaming cyberlockers -- which allow direct streaming of pirated content and are beginning to dominate video piracy online -- involve a vast ecosystem of web servers and aren't susceptible to many detection methods copyright enforcers use against torrents, Queen Mary University of London said Thursday. A small number of networks, websites and junctions host a disproportionate amount of content, which could point to a possible strategy for copyright enforcers, it said.

The HDR10+ Technologies company of Fox, Panasonic and Samsung took six months longer than expected to begin licensing its HDR platform “because it was lot more difficult than I think we anticipated putting a certification program together,” Samsung's Bill Mandel told a company-sponsored event Wednesday in West Hollywood, California. A week after starting the certification program (see 1806200047), HDR10+ has no formal “adopters,” but “there’s a full list of companies already requesting” technical materials as the first step toward acquiring a license, said Mandel, Samsung’s HDR10+ project manager. “Everyone’s very sensitive about which TVs will pass” the HDR10+ certification tests, “and how, and so every parameter was went over with a very fine-toothed comb,” said Mandel. All HDR content shown on the Amazon Prime service since December has been rendered in HDR10+ using Colorfront cloud-based mastering tools, said Mandel. “There’s more hours than I know how to count” of HDR10+ content on Amazon Prime, he said.

The Senate Judiciary Committee should advance the Music Modernization Act (S-2823) Thursday during markup (see 1806210043), said Internet Association CEO Michael Beckerman. “Bring mechanical licensing out of the era of player pianos and into the digital age,” Beckerman said Wednesday. “The entire music ecosystem will benefit from the increased choice and availability of music under the new system created by the MMA.”

Amazon Technologies got a U.S. patent Tuesday for a system of detecting “hostile takeover” of drones and returning them to friendly hands. As drone use increases, "so does the likelihood” of hostile takeovers, said the patent, naming Glen Larsen, an Amazon hardware and systems architect, as its inventor. "Nefarious individuals and/or systems may be able to obtain control” of the drones by hacking communication signals, it said. During normal-operating “mission” mode, the device receives a “heartbeat signal from a controller,” it said. If a preset timer expires without the drone receiving a new heartbeat signal, the device automatically switches into a “safety” mode in which it “performs one or more preprogrammed actions designed to reestablish communication with the controller” or lands safely, said the patent.

The Copyright Office is extending the comment deadline for its NPRM on a proposed new fee schedule by 60 days to Sept. 21 “to ensure that members of the public have sufficient time to respond,” it said Thursday.

Pay-TV operators often rely on conditional access fingerprint techniques such as VCID or HashCodes to "fingerprint" their content for tracing piracy leaks to the source, but a rapidly growing number of HashCode removal tools can in real-time strip away those visual marks from a video feed, blogged Irdeto Senior Director-Cyber Services and Investigations Mark Mulready Wednesday. This tool is often available online for as little as $2,000 and falls into "a legal grey-area'" since it doesn't actively enable piracy but helps pirates mask identity, Irdeto said. The solution is covert watermarking, where a unique user ID is put into the stream, but pirates can't see the watermarks and have difficulty obscuring them, it said. Irdeto said most film and TV studios already use covert watermarking for high-value content, and sports rights holders increasingly are requiring it in new licensing deals.

Toy companies met Senate Finance Committee, Customs and Border Protection, Consumer Product Safety Commission and Alibaba and Amazon representatives June 14 to discuss intellectual property issues, the Toy Association said Tuesday. "Participating toy companies spoke about their experiences tackling infringing toys sold online and discussed possible solutions to improve toy safety and IP protection on e-commerce platforms." The committee is looking at online counterfeit good sales (see 1805300068). "CPSC’s director of import surveillance said that the volume of e-commerce packages, lack of data, and enforcement procedures designed for ocean containers (not de minimis shipments) have collectively resulted in numerous challenges," the association said. CBP reportedly is interested in training association members to identify counterfeits.