The patent system is critical to the mobile economy. It exists to protect innovation and should not be abused by patent trolls to prey upon startups and small businesses. Trolls target small companies by the thousands with speculative lawsuits, seldom reviewing the software claimed to infringe. Under the threat of lengthy litigation and expensive legal fees, many small companies are coerced into costly settlements. Measures that address this abusive activity would benefit the entire ecosystem.

We have concerns, however, about the broad scope of the White House proposal and its potential impact on small business innovators. The administration’s efforts to expand the number of challengers before the Patent Trial and Appeals Board could disadvantage software innovation and limit the means of small businesses to protect their inventions. Reforming the patent system is important, but we cannot do so at the expense of software patents which protect small businesses and the innovations they produce.

“The agreement represents a win for the high-tech industry, and comes on the heels of intense lobbying by the industry. The Association for Competitive Technology, a trade group, sent 50 executives and application developers to Washington on Monday and Tuesday to meet with lawmakers, including members of the Judiciary Committee.”

New York Times

Immigration Overhaul Wins Panel’s Backing in the Senate

ACT members are coming to Washington to ensure lawmakers and regulators hear the voices of small business tech companies.  The pace of innovation is remarkable, but that could change suddenly with overreaching legislation or regulation. Our members will meet with their elected representatives to tell the story of their companies’ success and what they need (and don’t need) to continue to grow and create jobs.

Specifically, ACT members will advocate for solutions that:

• Implement a program to provide students with the computer science education that will help them qualify for rewarding careers in the tech industry. This will foster growth in our U.S. software development workforce where chronic labor shortages persist;
• Fund STEM education initiatives through increased fees from H-1B visas and green cards. This addresses the short-term urgency to find high skilled workers while laying the groundwork to grow the U.S. high skilled technology workforce;
• Allow internet companies to implement new solutions for data transparency; Congress should resist the urge to apply broad regulatory restrictions that would deny consumers many of the products and services they rely on every day;
• Allow small software companies to protect their intellectual property without having to fight patent trolls and speculative lawsuits; and
• Ensure that the government does not impede efforts to strengthen and expand our internet infrastructure so consumers can benefit from more reliable mobile and fixed data connectivity.

These are issues the federal government is facing. ACT members are looking forward to meeting with their elected officials and others in Washington to educate them about the technology industry so they can make the right decisions about our future. Hopefully, an informed Congress will allow small tech companies to continue to flourish.

Future of Privacy+Innovation Conference

Wednesday, April 10, 2013, 9am – 3:30pm PDT
Runway Workspace: 1355 Market Street #488, San Francisco, CA 94102
REGISTER: http://futureofprivacyinnovation2013.eventbrite.com

AGENDA:

9:00  
Intro & Welcome – UC Hastings Privacy and Technology Project, California Attorney General’s Office

9:15-9:40 
Keynote Speaker: Kamala D. Harris, California Attorney General
A regulator’s perspective on privacy and innovation.

9:40-11:15 
The State of Privacy & Technology: Implications for App Developers
Policy makers and industry leaders will provide a baseline for the audience to understand how the evolving rules on privacy affect them.

• Moderator: Charles Belle, UC Hastings Institute for Innovation Law, Privacy and Technology Project
• Morgan Reed, Executive Director, Association for Competitive Technology
• Travis LeBlanc, CA Attorney General’s Office
• Laura Berger, Federal Trade Commission
• Jonathan Nelson, Hackers & Founders
• Parker Higgins, Electronic Frontier Foundation

11:15-11:30
Break

11:30-12:30
Privacy+Innovation: A Successful Approach
Mozilla presentation on what developers should consider when working with third part platforms. The discussion will focus on integrating privacy tools and policies into an Open Standard philosophy when working with thousands of developers. Following the presentation, there will be an audience Q&A.

12:30-1:30
Lunch (Presented by Munger Tolles & Olson)
Developers! Your App May Be Subject To the EU’s Privacy Rules If Downloaded In Luxembourg

1:30-2:30
Making It Real: Privacy Practices for App Developers

• Moderator: Casey Oppenheim, co-founder, Disconnect.me
• Tim Wyatt, Director, Security Engineering, Lookout
• Kevin Trilli, VP, Product, TRUSTe

2:30-3:30 Data Implications of Platform APIs
On stage interview with successful companies in privacy with a focus on working with developers to leverage APIs and protect their data.

• Jim Brock, founder, PrivacyChoice.org
• Allison Hendrix, Policy Manager (Platform, Promotions, and Payments terms), Facebook
• Reese Solberg, Director Privacy, Microsoft

As content is increasingly accessed on mobile devices, we are faced with new concerns about copyrighted material. The app marketplace has emerged as an amazing economic force creating over 500,000 jobs since its inception five years ago. Innovation is taking place at a rapid pace, but the steep rise in app piracy threatens to stunt the development of the mobile economy. We look forward to working with the Congressional Creative Rights Caucus and other stakeholders to address this issue and other concerns facing creative industries.

Happtique CEO Ben Chodor

ACT member Happtique was invited to testify at today’s hearing based on its leadership in the mobile medical app community. Founded by the Greater New York Hospital Association, Happtique created the Health App Certification Program to review and certify apps that physicians can prescribe.  We provided guidance in this effort and were pleased that Happtique found ACT’s assistance critical.

Happtique’s efforts to make the benefits of mobile medical apps more widely available depends heavily on users’  confidence and trust. Requiring apps to be tested by medical professionals and ensuring they meet strict guidelines for accuracy and privacy is important for the success of the mHealth marketplace. We are pleased to support Happtique’s work to meet these standards and share the position expressed today by CEO Ben Chodor that regulatory clarity from the FDA is urgently needed for mobile health apps to succeed.

Learn more about ACT member Happtique’s Health App Certification Program.

The median salary for a software developer now exceeds $90,000. Our nation’s classrooms should be producing graduates capable of pursuing the degrees needed for these jobs. Sadly, that is not happening. Tens of thousands of high-paying tech jobs remain unfilled because our country is not graduating enough engineers and computer scientists to qualify for these positions.

In order for the United States to retain its competitive edge in the tech industry, we need to rely less on students from abroad and more on homegrown talent. That will only happen if we make significant improvements in math, science, and computer education. Congress earlier recognized the importance of these curricula when it passed a Pi Day resolution. What’s now needed is a far greater commitment to improve education of these core subjects in our nation’s schools.

A problem that costs real jobs
Two years ago our local congressman, Peter DeFazio, visited a software company in Eugene, Oregon and learned the company had been attacked by a patent troll. Patent trolls are entities that abuse the patent system by threatening hundreds of small businesses with legal action without even checking if products truly infringe on a patent. Most of the target companies end up paying the “license” fee rather than going through a lengthy and expensive litigation process, even if the patent doesn’t even remotely apply to their products.

The company visited by Rep. DeFazio wanted to hire more developers but concerns about potential patent litigation forced them postpone the hiring process. It became painfully obvious that patent trolls are not just a problem for big companies but that small businesses are especially vulnerable too. In this case the problem of patent trolls was costing real jobs.

The solution: give patent trolls a downside
DeFazio went back to DC and came up with a very simple, surgical solution to minimize the havoc caused by these abusers of the patent system: Disincentivize trolls by empowering judges to make plaintiffs liable for the legal expenses of the defendants if the suit had no realistic chance of winning.

That will make a patent troll will think twice before adding a company to the list of parties to sue: if the court finds the developer did not infringe, the court can order the troll to pay for the legal expenses of the developer. OR if a court finds the plaintiff is a troll, they can require them to pay a bond that will be used to pay for the legal expenses of the developer if the developer wins.

Proud to be part of the solution
In May of last year, ACT Members — app developers and software entrepreneurs from all over the country — were flying into Washington DC for our annual ACT Policy Summit. We spent the first day on policy discussions and explorations. The next day we shared our real-world experience with tech policy in over one hundred meetings with policy makers on Capitol Hill.

During one of these meetings I met with Rep. DeFazio along with two of my friends and colleagues: one was part of a brand new, fast growing software company in Eugene, and another had just received a threat by a patent troll. Needless to say, it was a very productive meeting with lots of sharing of both specifics and personal experiences. We were all very encouraged and proud that Rep. DeFazio had decided to tackle a problem that was important to us.

The initial version of the SHIELD Act was introduced a few months later, in August 2012 as a bipartisan bill that was co-sponsored by Rep. Jason Chaffetz. The legislative process often moves in slow and mysterious ways: while the bill didn’t get an immediate vote, we were optimistic that Congress would eventually address the patent troll problem. I met with Congressman DeFazio again in Eugene during the congressional recess and shared (overwhelmingly positive) feedback on the bill from ACT members. Over time, the SHIELD Act was fine-tuned and support for the bill has grown across the industry.

Almost There
A few days ago, Rep. Peter DeFazio and Rep. Jason Chaffetz introduced the new version of the SHIELD Act. The bill is receiving widespread industry support and positive reactions. We’re excited about this simple and creative approach to address a complex problem that too many of ACT member companies have faced first-hand. Please let your member of Congress know that you support this bill.

It sounds like something too far-fetched even for Grey’s Anatomy: In the middle of a cross-country flight, a passenger suddenly convulses in pain. Responding to the pilot’s urgent call over the intercom, a doctor on the plane pulls out his smartphone, attaches a heart monitor and makes an instant diagnosis: It’s a heart attack.

Based on the doctor’s recommendation, the plane makes an emergency landing and the patient is rushed to a nearby hospital. He survives.

That real-life incident, featured this year on NBC News’ Rock Center, offers a glimpse of the potential for medical apps. We have already grown accustomed to hearing that there’s an app for everything, but advances in mobile technology are about to radically transform health care.

The incident on the plane is only half the story. A smartphone connected to a medical device can allow you to monitor your health outside the doctor’s office — and that’s amazing. But what makes medical apps truly revolutionary is that they use internet-enabled smartphones and tablets to connect us directly to our family physicians and medical professionals. Patients can now measure their blood pressure, glucose levels, and other vital statistics at home and transmit them daily to their physician.

Receiving these diagnostic measurements remotely, a doctor can track conditions that require frequent monitoring like hypertension, diabetes, and sleep apnea. It is also valuable for patients that need extra attention such recent stroke victims or those who suffer from neurological diseases such as multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s, or dementia. Mobile health apps can also connect physicians with those in underserved communities, remote areas, or with limited mobility for whom office visits are difficult and occur infrequently. With more diagnostic data, doctors can spot the early signs of adverse conditions and take preventive measures to improve health outcomes.

Recognizing these opportunities, the President launched the White House Health Design Challenge, a competition held to challenge designers to reimage healthcare records. The winner, a mobile and desktop product called Nightingale, takes complex patient data (medical history, allergies, current medications, immunizations) and displays this vital information in an intuitive, easy-to-digest format. The Department of Veterans Affairs has already committed to use this app to assist in the treatment of its 6 million patients.

Advances like these, making health care information more accessible to patients, are possible because of the remarkable growth of the smartphone. No technology has ever been so rapidly adopted. Not the car, computer, electricity, microwave, or the internet. In less than a decade, more than half of U.S. mobile phone users have adopted smartphones — they now carry a powerful computing device in their pocket or purse that has constant internet connectivity.

With over a million apps created to use this as a vehicle for wireless broadband, internet usage has exploded. Mobile data traffic rose by 70 percent in 2012 and is expected to grow to eleven times today’s level within four years. Americans are now communicating in entirely different ways than we did just a decade ago, and our nation’s resources are strained trying to meet the massive demand of merged voice and data traffic.

Fortunately, innovation and investment in the future of our telecommunications infrastructure has been very active during this period of growth. What has emerged as the next generation solution is an internet-protocol (IP)-based infrastructure that treats all communication as data.

The IP-based network greatly improves performance by more efficiently managing traffic for existing services while providing scalability to meet the demands of future growth. Internet protocol networks can be modified, offering the flexibility needed to adapt to innovation and new technologies. Functions and features can be added without the need for new infrastructure.

As the results of the White House initiative demonstrate, mobile health care and telemedicine are still in their relative infancy. But its potential to dramatically improve health outcomes is clear — just ask the stroke victim on the plane. What will be critically important for these services to succeed on a large scale — improving patient care and physician resources — is a stable, reliable communications infrastructure. To ensure this happens, and to accommodate the massive growth in voice and data traffic projected far into the future, it is essential we make the transition from legacy voice-centric networks to those that are internet protocol-based.

The only thing that could stand in the way of making these crucial updates is Washington. Laws written in the 1930s establishing the regulation of communications services have been suggested as a guide for IP-based networks. Unfortunately, these are ill-suited for today’s data networks that transmit voice, video, email, and health information every day.

While our telecommunications services have evolved, our nation’s regulatory system has not. Internet protocol is an entirely different mode of transmission than the drafters of the 1930s legislation envisioned. Embracing this new technology will be critical to ensure our communications infrastructure is capable of handling the growth that emerging technologies require. We’ve already seen a medical app save one life. Ensuring a stable network to allow mass adoption of these services would have a profound impact on many more.

Parents With Apps is an informal group of mom and dad app developers founded – originally as Moms with Apps – to create and promote educational apps they would approve for their own children. Its members are parents first and developers second, a priority that led Parents With Apps to set a high bar for educational content and children’s privacy standards.

ACT’s expertise on privacy issues and its leadership within the app community led Parents With Apps to seek its support to develop privacy measures. The two years that followed were a productive period as the organizations’ collaboration resulted in highly acclaimed initiatives identifying industry best practices, promoting developer education, and producing the first developer-created short form privacy policy – the Kids App Privacy Icons. On Friday, the FTC praised this work in its Mobile Privacy Report highlighting the privacy badge that “combines icons and limited amounts of text” as a model for the industry noting, “Commission staff encourages this kind of innovation.”

The new ACT 4 Apps|Kids initiative will:

• Commit resources for creating or identifying COPPA-compliant tools for children’s education app developers.
• Promote the growth of educational apps, particularly with the move toward One-to-One programs, ensuring that developers can meet or participate in education attainment standards such as Common Core.
• Provide a forum for software firms to share best practices, track trends, standardize designations for software privacy.
• Identify standards of online applications aimed at children globally through networking, education, promotion, templates, tools, registration, and certification.
• Facilitate communication between ACT industry partners and app developers to provide education and guidance on new opportunities.

“ACT is thrilled to join forces with Parents With Apps to create a home for family friendly kids app makers,” said ACT executive director Morgan Reed. “Parents find that their children grasp new concepts more easily on the touchscreens of tablets and smartphones. The intuitive design of these devices makes them accessible to young children who are increasingly engaged by the simple interactivity of education apps. We are proud to launch ACT 4 Apps|Kids to assist developers seeking to build innovative educational resources for mobile devices while meeting high standards for content and child privacy.”

“In a highly regulated environment, kids app developers need a trusted source to turn to,” said Lorraine Akemann of Moms With Apps. “This new organization will help app makers put family first by designing products with privacy in mind. Creating apps for children is about to become the ‘new’ new thing, and I’m thrilled to be a part of it.”

“By joining forces with ACT, Parents With Apps has the resources and the capacity to provide independent developers proper guidance in a highly regulated environment, and to provide a pathway to turn their ideas into marketable products while minimizing the risk of unintentional legal missteps,” said Scott Weiner of Parents with Apps.

For more information about charter member companies and to keep updated on ACT 4 Apps|Kids events and activity visit us at http://ACT4apps.org/kids.