News of the movement for January 12, 2012 |
 It's ironic that the Web speaks the loudest when it shuts up. But as the Cheezburger network joins Reddit, domain registrar Tucows and other sites like Wikipedia that are considering a blackout on Jan. 18 in protest of Congress' attempts to pass legislation to stop piracy, it's becoming clear that site owners believe an end to their chatter might matter. However, as we draw nearer to the Jan. 24 date when SOPA emerges from the House, it's unclear how much room there is for compromise on each side of the debate. Stacey Higginbotham, GigaOM SOPA is good for one group, and one group only: members of Congress raising cash from the entertainment and now, by necessity, tech industries. Members of the unions still supporting SOPA should make it an internal issue, immediately, to persuade their leadership to take their names off this bill. Matt Stempeck, MediaShift Exactly 14,683 “lolz” after launching in 2007, I Can Has Cheezburger is celebrating its fifth anniversary this week, just before all Cheezburger sites will go black Jan. 18 to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act. Brian Anthony Hernandez, Mashable Sen. Patrick Leahy said he is preparing a manager's amendment to the Protect IP Act that will take concerns about the bill's possible effect on Internet service providers under consideration. Critics of the bill say that PIPA, as the bill is known, forces ISPs to censor the Web when the government seizes a domain name that it has identified as a site primarily dedicated to online piracy. Hayley Tsukayama, Washington Post The lawmaker behind a bill to combat online piracy vowed to press ahead in the face of fierce criticism from Internet giants such as Google and Facebook. Jim Forsyth, Reuters It turns out Rep. Lamar Smith, the author of the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act, has been caught red-handed infringing copyright with an image used on his personal website. Nadine Deninno, International Business Times The Sunlight Foundation submitted comments encouraging the FCC to quickly create a centralized, publicly accessible database of information about political ads buys. The current system, in which valuable information about political ads is located in the file cabinets of broadcasters across the country, prevents the information from being shared, analyzed or understood. To truly make the most use of the data, information from broadcasters' political files should be available to the public on a centralized, searchable, sortable database on the FCC's website. Sunlight Foundation In less than a year, AT&T went from swallowing up T-Mobile USA for $39 billion to owing T-Mobile's German parent company $3 billion in cash and another billion in spectrum because that deal slammed into the regulatory roadblock at the FCC and the Justice Department. Speaking for the third year in a row at the Consumer Electronics Show, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski defended his agency's actions against the deal. Chris Morran, Consumer Reports The FCC said it will review whether to get rid of decades-old TV rules stopping cable and satellite companies from airing NFL games and other sporting events that are blacked out on local broadcast TV. USA Today The FCC has opened the docket on cable companies' sale of wireless spectrum to Verizon. That comes in the wake of the filing of applications by cable joint venture SpectrumCo and Cox to sell spectrum they bought at the FCC's advanced wireless services auction to Verizon. John Eggerton, Multichannel News The FCC's Media Bureau has given media companies more time to file amendments to current waiver requests, renewal applications or new requests for permanent waivers of its newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership rules. John Eggerton, Multichannel News KRIS Communications has filed a complaint with the FCC. In order to protect local viewers from continued disruption, KRIS has asked the FCC to find that Time Warner has negotiated in bad faith with KRIS Communications in its attempts to reach a new agreement to carry its four stations. The filing urges the FCC to order Time Warner to return to the negotiating table and negotiate in good faith to bring these stations back to the viewers of Corpus Christi, Texas. KRIS-TV  |
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