The EU and media industry launched a pilot to enable more use of digital content, they said Thursday. The Rights Data Integration (RDI) project will implement work by the Linked Content Coalition on a technical framework to help copyright owners and users manage and trade rights for all kinds of usage of all types of content and protected works in all media, they said. That will move the content industry closer to figuring out how to assert ownership and communicate copyright terms and conditions in the digital arena in a way machines and people can understand, they said. RDI is an early pilot for the “copyright hub” strategy under development in the U.K. and under consideration in Europe and the U.S., they said. It will use a “hub and spoke” architecture that lets users find and access information from rightsholders via a central transformation hub, they said. The hub will transform the data into a common format and then into a format accepted by exchanges that provide the interface for users, they said. RDI doesn’t directly affect copyright laws and agreements but makes it possible to process the results of those contracts in a more highly automatable way, they said. The project will run for 27 months, they said. Media participants include Elsevier, Getty Images and the International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organizations.

The White House must issue an official response to a petition asking for stronger email privacy protections, after the petition hit the necessary 100,000 signatures needed by Thursday (http://1.usa.gov/1avKNbR). Digital 4th, an industry and advocacy coalition, filed the petition, attempting to restart debate over updating the 27-year-old Electronic Communications Privacy Act (CD Nov 14 p19). The group was formed in March to advocate for an ECPA modernization bill from Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, which would protect electronic communications collected and maintained by third-party service providers (CD March 20 p10). The bill never made it out of committee. “Several bills in Congress would fix this by updating ECPA to require a warrant, but regulatory bodies are blocking reform in order to gain new powers of warrantless access,” said the petition. “We call on the Obama Administration to support ECPA reform and to reject any special rules that would force online service providers to disclose our email without a warrant."

A workshop to be convened by NTIA Friday on lessons learned from developing a process for sharing the 1755 MHz band will hopefully “produce ideas for even greater collaboration that can be incorporated into ongoing work across the Federal agencies,” said White House Deputy Chief Technology Officer Tom Power Thursday in a blog post. “Balancing the growing needs of both commercial and Federal spectrum users presents opportunities for increased efficiency and economic growth, but also poses challenges,” Power wrote (http://1.usa.gov/18odb53). “Commercial wireless providers must learn how to operate their systems in spectrum bands that will be shared by Federal agencies using that same spectrum for operations such as conducting military training exercises, maintaining air safety, or tracking criminal activity."

The FCC should try out important rule changes in small-scale “policy sandboxes” before issuing decisions, incentivize efficient use of spectrum, and take steps to attract up-and-coming engineers, Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel told the IEEE at its Global Communications Conference Wednesday (http://bit.ly/1gt0OYa). “What if instead of always relying on the big reveal, we set up small-scale policy experiments?” asked Rosenworcel. “What if we examined the effects of new rules before unleashing them all at once?” The commissioner pointed to experimental spectrum licenses as an area where the FCC is already encouraging trial phases for new ideas and said the concept might also expedite the authorization process for new radio equipment. “Because the number of devices in this process is expanding, our systems deserve an update to meet this demand,” said Rosenworcel. “By moving new devices through our approval process more quickly we can move them from sandbox to market much faster.” Small-scale policy experiments could also “kick-start” the IP transition, Rosenworcel said. “After all, big issues are at stake -- how to foster deployment, how to spur investment, and how to best serve consumers,” she said. The FCC should work with carriers to come up with location-specific and service-specific IP trials, she said. “Trying them out on a small scale just makes sense.” To increase the efficiency of spectrum, the FCC should hold a contest, with a prize of 10 MHz of mobile broadband spectrum to be awarded to the first person to make spectrum use below 5 GHz 50 times more efficient over the next decade, Rosenworcel said. “Think of it as [White House education incentive program] Race to the Top, the Spectrum Edition,” she said. The prize is worthwhile, because “if the winner can truly use spectrum 50 times more efficiently, they can make their 10 MHz do the work of 500 MHz,” she said. Rosenworcel also said the FCC could benefit from an influx of engineering talent. The commission should establish an engineering analog to its honors attorney program, she said. “By mixing young men -- and women -- with experienced engineers already on staff, the FCC could be better prepared to face the challenges of next generation communications networks,” said Rosenworcel.

Amazon should release the identities and contact information of owners of video programs on its Instant Video service with closed captions that don’t comply with FCC rules for IP video, said Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing in an FCC filing Wednesday (http://bit.ly/18EQZ1t). It’s the latest in a proceeding that began last year (CD April 19 p11) with a formal complaint against Amazon submitted by TDI and several other consumer groups over problems with Amazon’s IP closed captions. The FCC should “establish daily base forfeitures for subsequent violations of the rules by Amazon, and issue a forfeiture sufficiently large to make clear that non-compliance with the Commission’s rules is not simply an acceptable cost of doing business,” said TDI. Previous Amazon filings have blamed the captioning problems on the video programming owners (VPOs) which provide content on its streaming video service, but though that information was submitted to the FCC it was redacted from public documents, TDI said. “The Commission’s confidentiality measures are not intended to protect the identities of parties who violate their obligations to make their programming accessible from public scrutiny.” Amazon’s filings don’t provide the information required by a request for confidential treatment, and don’t explain how disclosing the information would harm Amazon, TDI said. It said the commission should “compel Amazon to reveal the identities of VPOs it believes to be responsible for violations of the Commission’s closed captioning” rules.

Ex-FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski backed the delay of the broadcast incentive auction to mid-2015 by current Chairman Tom Wheeler. Genachowski said he wanted to join three other ex-chairmen from both parties who earlier this week backed the delay that Wheeler disclosed Friday (CD Dec 10 p6). Genachowski “fully agrees with Chairman Wheeler’s decision,” said an assistant to Genachowski by email Thursday. Genachowski had planned a 2014 auction when he was chairman.

The FCC admonishment stands against the receiver of WHNR(AM) Cypress Gardens, Fla. (CD April 10 p23), said a Media Bureau decision Thursday (http://bit.ly/1aZYwI5). An April request of George Reed to nix the admonishment was dismissed, said the order, signed by Audio Division Chief Peter Doyle. Also, “the April Petition is based on facts that were in existence and known by Reed at the time of his last opportunity to present such matters,” wrote Doyle. Reed had been admonished for not giving the commission a copy of an order about such a transfer of control from a Florida court (CD July 5 p7).

The Georgia Public Service Commission should reverse a $5 fee imposed on about 785,000 state residents on the federal Lifeline program in late October (CD Oct 18 p18), consumer advocacy groups urged the PSC in a joint statement Thursday (http://bit.ly/condemningGAPSC). Consumer Action, the Community Action Partnership, League of United Latin American Citizens, Maryland Consumer Rights Coalition, National Consumers League and National Grange urged the PSC to “reverse this punitive, anti-consumer fee.” The new fee “flies in the face of the goals” of the Lifeline program, which was created to ensure that “qualifying Americans have the opportunities and security that phone service brings,” said the groups. The federal Lifeline program doesn’t use funds from the states, and any possible savings “from squeezing low-income consumers out of the program” wouldn’t impact state-level taxpayers, it said. No other state charges its Lifeline consumers this fee, and the monthly fee “of this sort” was rejected by the FCC when it was considered, said the groups. There’s no factual basis or evidence that this kind of fee will result in reduced fraud or less abuse of the program, or that it will result in better sales practice conduct on behalf of the Lifeline providers, said the letter. It said the National Lifeline Accountability Database is going online in five states this month to help carriers identify and resolve duplicate claims for Lifeline-supported service, and Georgia will begin participating in the database in January. The coalition urged other states to not follow Georgia in “attacking the pocketbooks of low-income Americans in this misguided fashion.” The Georgia PSC didn’t respond to request for comment.

Spectrum is the “central issue” for smart automotive technologies, said Leo McCloskey, Intelligent Transportation Society of America senior vice president. “If you look at the progress of technology from where we are today to where we want to be, I think everyone in the room would put a show of hands up that if they could go and in jump in a vehicle that was driven by a robot and safely get to their destination, they'd gladly not drive the car, especially in D.C.,” he said at a Politico event. ITS America has raised concerns about an FCC proposal to use the 5850-5925 MHz band, already allocated for a Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) backbone, for Wi-Fi on a secondary basis (CD Jan 16 p1). “If the spectrum should disappear in such a way that precludes us, or hampers us in getting to autonomous transportation, which requires a lot of connectivity … we're being shortsighted,” McCloskey said Thursday. But Information Technology & Innovation Foundation President Rob Atkinson said that when the DSRC spectrum was allocated by the FCC in 1999, the world was a very different place. “The world back then was people got slices of spectrum for single purpose uses,” he said. But today spectrum is viewed as “a generalized pool and you get specialization in the application,” he said. “When you think about most interesting applications, they are going to run on the LTE platform or sharing that with some kind of Wi-Fi platform.”

The sixth Wideband Global Satcom (WGS) satellite from Boeing was delivered on orbit for the U.S. Air Force, Boeing said in a press release (http://bit.ly/JaOo8Y). Australia’s funding of the satellite provided the Australian Defence Force with immediate access to the WGS network, Boeing said. “Four additional WGS satellites are in production in El Segundo, Calif., under the program’s Block II follow-on contract.”