Roy Mark

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) again warned Congress today that anti-spyware legislation is unnecessary with the existence of adequate fraud laws to contend with spyware perpetrators. FTC Commissioner Orson Swindle, speaking to Capitol Hill staffers at a Cato Institute luncheon Friday, questioned the need for new laws. “Our experience at the Department of Justice and […]

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) plans to begin filing copyright theft lawsuits Nov. 16 against users of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks who illegally trade movies over the file-swapping networks. According to the MPAA, the civil suits will seek damages and injunctive relief. Under the Copyright Act, statutory damages reach up to $30,000 for each […]

A jury in Virginia recommended a nine-year prison term Wednesday afternoon for the first U.S. felony conviction of a spammer. Jeremy Jaynes of Raleigh, N.C., was convicted on three counts of using deceptive routing information in sending bulk commercial e-mail. Under Virginia’s anti-spam law, which went into effect in April 2003, spammers living outside of […]

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced Tuesday it would rule Nov. 9 on whether Internet telephony is an interstate service and exempt from state and local regulation and tariffs. The decision is considered critical to the future development of the emerging Voice over IP industry, which hopes to avoid negotiating rates with 50 separate state […]

UPDATED: Major technology policy issues were left on the backburner of Congress in the run up to Tuesday’s hotly contested general elections. But with the winners in the U.S. House and Senate races (mostly) decided, including the re-election of President Bush — now that his Democratic challenger Sen. John Kerry reportedly conceded the race — […]

Shortly after the 2000 presidential election, the non-partisan political Web site Voter.com went belly up, taking tens of millions of venture capital with it. Similar sites like Vote.com and Politics.com also tanked, prompting political pundits and private capital alike to discount the Internet’s future in the electoral process. Four years later, as Americans go the […]

Pollsters, politicians and pundits have made it well known that the 2004 presidential race is tight for many reasons. But one thing is certain: Technology is not one of them. Throughout the campaign, tech policy has been a non-issue, as Democrats and Republicans differ little on tech topics, such as broadband rollout, Voice over IP […]

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. After Congress appropriated nearly $4 billion to help states buy electronic voting machines, technology was supposed to make things better, not confuse the issue further. Chaos, confusion, chads and courts dominated the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election. So Congress, reasoning public confidence in the voting system was […]

WASHINGTON — A John Kerry administration would use federal subsidies to help spur broadband deployment while President Bush would continue his policy of deregulation to spread the technology, two think tank officials said Tuesday. Thomas Lenard of the conservative Progress and Freedom Foundation and Robert Atkinson of the Progressive Policy Institute, which helped craft much […]

Two more vendors pleaded guilty Friday to fraud charges related to the country’s troubled E-rate program, the $2.25 billion initiative launched in 1997 to help schools and libraries connect to the Internet. Qasim Bokhari and Haider Bokhari both pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy, fraud and money laundering involving the federal program. Each faces up […]

President Bush signed into law late Friday $136 billion in corporate tax breaks, including a one-year reduction from 35 percent to 5.25 percent on foreign profits for U.S. multinationals. The provision was strongly backed by the technology industry despite criticisms that the break rewards corporations that outsource jobs overseas. Bush signed the legislation on Air […]

Failure is a large part of David Kirch’s game, and the Library of Congress just gave him $235,000 to work harder at it. As an assistant professor of entrepreneurship at the University of Maryland, Kirch is the driving force behind a project to create the “world’s largest digital archive of documents related to the historic […]