Roy Mark

In an effort to avoid the costly arbitration proceedings of last year, the recording industry and webcasters on Thursday agreed to royalty rates and terms to apply to commercial subscription and non-subscription-based webcasters and Internet radio. The parties submitted the proposal to the Copyright Office for industry-wide adoption. The agreement, if approved by the Copyright […]

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has finalized its Gramm-Leach-Bliley Safeguards Rule, which requires financial institutions under the FTC’s jurisdiction to develop and implement appropriate physical, technical, and procedural safeguards to protect customer information. The rule becomes effective on May 23. The rule implements the safeguards provisions of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLB Act), which requires the […]

The Bush administration plans to release its latest strategy for implementing the E-Government Act on April 17, according to Mark Forman, associate director of information technology and e-government at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). The plan will focus on better use of enterprise licensing for purchasing software and how to more fully leverage […]

Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) hopes to stem the rising tide of identity theft and other privacy abuses with legislation setting a national standard for protection of personal information, including Social Security numbers, driver’s licenses and health and financial data. This legislation, known as The Privacy Act of 2003 (S. 745), establishes a two-tiered system of […]

More than four years after a receiving a presidential directive to determine if their networks were vulnerable to terrorist attacks, at least four federal agencies have not completed the processes of identifying critical agency assets and assessing their vulnerabilities, according to a General Accounting Office report released Wednesday. The GAO report, ordered by the House […]

Legislation giving public safety agencies greater access to shared broadcast frequencies for interoperable radio communications has been introduced in Congress by U.S. Rep. Jane Harman (D.Calif.), ranking member of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and Rep. Curt Weldon (R.-Pa.), vice chair of the Armed Services Committee. The Homeland Emergency Response Operations (Hero) Act sets […]

U.S. Senators Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Conrad Burns (R-Mont.) joined Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Calif.) Monday to underscore their efforts to support legislation to indefinitely extend the existing moratorium on new and discriminatory Internet taxes. The current moratorium on Internet taxes — including taxes on Internet access, multiple-state taxation of a single item bought online, and […]

The Home Recording Rights Coalition (HRRC) is urging the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to completely ban the practice of program-by-program “downresolution,” the remote signaling of home devices to degrade the quality of an HDTV signal for both viewing and recording out of concern that the signal might be recorded. In December, the cable industry and […]

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has banned a husband and wife team, doing business through six corporations and five unincorporated entities, from operating an alleged online work-at-home scam. The FTC claims the defendants used false earnings claims in e-mails and online advertisements to deceptively market and sell work-at-home data entry job opportunities. The FTC’s complaint […]

U.S. Rep. Tom Trancredo (R.-Colo.) has introduced legislation (H.R. 1252) to terminate the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) E-Rate program, the $2.25 billion fund designed to help schools and libraries connect to the Internet and financed by fees added to consumers’ telephone bills. Following the passage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, telecoms were faced with the […]

The General Services Administration (GSA), which administers the .gov domain, issued a rule Friday that it reserves the right to “charge for domain names in order to recover costs of operations.” The government currently does not charge a fee for a .gov domain, which is used by federal, state and native sovereign nations to promote […]

FBI Director Robert S. Mueller said Friday the agency has completed a key component of its modernization program, the costly, oft-criticized Trilogy network. The $458 million project, which has been plagued by cost overruns, is expected to allow FBI agents to receive multi-media case files at their desks and to link various law enforcement agency […]