The economic harm being caused by patent trolls is receiving increased attention in Congress, and we commend Senator Cornyn for his leadership on this issue.  We applaud his introduction of strong thoughtful legislation that would implement several needed patent litigation reforms. It is a crucial step toward an effective legislative response to the plague of patent trolls damaging American innovation and our economy.  As we seek to enact effective, comprehensive patent troll reform legislation this year, we look forward to working closely with Senator Cornyn, the leadership and members of the Senate and House Judiciary Committees and other stakeholders.

Ken Wasch is President of SIIA. Follow the SIIA Software team on twitter at @SIIASoftware.

Judge Says Copyright Owners Can’t Sue Google’s YouTube as a Group (Reuters)
U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton denied a motion to certify a worldwide class of copyright owners in a long-running lawsuit over videos and music posted on YouTube without their permission.

Berkeley-Led Group Central to U.S. Copyright Review (Managing Intellectual Property)
As the U.S. Congress embarks on a sweeping review of copyright law, the Copyright Principles Project (CPP) has emerged as a powerful voice in Washington. All five witnesses at the first in a series of congressional hearings on overhauling copyright law are members of the group.

Piracy: A Not-So-Victimless Crime (Digtriad.com)
U.S. postal inspectors arrested a man accused of selling pirated copies of Adobe software on eBay and making as much as $42,000 a month off the sales.

Keith Kupferschmid is General Counsel and SVP, Intellectual Property Policy & Enforcement at SIIA.

A new member, Wilkinson Publishing in Melbourne, Australia, sends a very interesting daily ezine featuring well-written stories that often plug books they are selling. For instance, a story this week on the retirement of Manchester United Manager Sir Alex Ferguson led to a discussion of leaders. “Management theory is it is best to make a clean break. Don’t let an old master hover over the new leader. According to Nicholas Barnett and his team at Insync Surveys…‘A 100 per cent rigid rule is not always best these days.’…Alan Hargreaves, author of the new book, 60 Second Recharge [offered by Wilkinson], sees the good, the bad and the ugly transitions as he consults [internationally]. ‘There are leaders and there are leaders. Call it the Recharge factor. The best have an amazing ability to stay young, innovative and passionate.’”

Here’s information about members who are coming to SIPA 2013, June 5-7, in Washington, D.C.:

You might want to talk about video to someone from Editorial Projects in Education, publishers of Education Week. They have an excellent feature called Leaders to Learn From with 2-3 minute videos of school superintendents from across the nation. (And catch today’s SIPA webinar on video if you can.) Look for Ryan Lanier, digital content sales & marketing manager.

eLearning is definitely one of the next big things in our industry, and PaperClip Communications will be a member to talk to in Washington. They have jumped into it with The Residence Life eLearning Training program and done a great job with the landing page, giving plenty of information and providing both a short and full demo for customers. Look for Andy McLaughlin, president, or Katherine Bitgood.

Interested in getting more advertising for your website? Talk to Dawn Sweeney, Donna Jefferson and Heather Grant from Jefferson Communications. A quick look at their Chesapeake Family website shows ads for the state of Maryland, an orthopaedic center and a water park. Click to a blog page and see more ads, for a health center, summer camp and music festival.

Barry Graubart has joined Connotate as VP, Product Strategy. Connotate is a market leader in web content extraction. They enable pricing intelligence, job posting aggregation, automated background checks, financial data aggregation and lots more—all done at scale.

Jack Farrell & Associates, an executive search firm, is a new SIPA member that will be represented at the Conference. They are dedicated to recruiting the top talent for clients in publishing, media and digital health information.

If you’re looking for a company that has been successful in social media, check with David Burns, VP/publisher and Katie Christianson, senior marketing planner, of Magna Publications. At the start of 2012, Magna created new groups on LinkedIn and worked to establish a more consistent and visible presence on their existing Twitter and Facebook accounts. As their social communities grew, the multiplier effect helped amplify each like, share and retweet.

Want to get on the airwaves? Guy Cecala of Inside Mortgage Finance Publications and Bob Coleman of Coleman Publishing would be good people to ask. Both have frequently appeared as industry experts on national news shows. You might have to be prepared to put an occasional dinner on hold, however. They would be happy to speak with you about the plusses and minuses of their relative stardom.

If you have a copyright question, be sure to attend the session of—or corner—Lesley Ellen Harris of copyrightlaws.com on Wednesday.  She is a popular speaker and has another conference in San Diego to head to on Thursday.

Almost every person attending SIPA 2013—all 300-plus—probably has something to tell you that can be valuable to your business. But there’s only one way to get that information—come to Washington, D.C., June 5-7 and join the crowd.

Ronn Levine began his career as a reporter for The Washington Post and has won numerous writing and publications awards since. Most recently, he spent 12 years at the Newspaper Association of America covering a variety of topics before joining SIPA in 2009 as managing editor. Follow Ronn on Twitter at @SIPAOnline

On Monday, SIIA released a white paper that provides an in-depth look at the benefits of Data-driven Innovation, along with a detailed public policy roadmap. SIIA crafted the white paper to provide guidance to help policymakers understand and enable the economic and social value of data-driven innovation, urging them to proceed cautiously and avoid policies that seek to curb the use of data, as they could stifle this nascent technological and economic revolution before it can truly take hold.

Data collection and use is at crossroads, and decisions by policymakers could have an enormous impact on American innovation, jobs and economic growth. It is essential for policymakers to recognize that data-driven innovation presents an economic growth engine that is revolutionizing our lives and will create 1.9 million U.S. jobs by 2015. With this paper, we’ve taken a comprehensive look at the issue — providing significant analysis of where the opportunities lie with data and what needs to be done to unlock its full potential. Our goal is help government and industry work together to enable the transformative power of data-driven innovation, and to avoid strict regulations that will stifle innovation and economic opportunity.

The full white paper is available here. Read more on SIIA’s Digital Discourse Blog or recent coverage by the Washington Post.

SIIA Responds to RFI on Acquisition Provisions in Cybersecurity Executive Order

Earlier this week, SIIA submitted comments in response to the GSA and DOD solicitation for input on Improving Critical Infrastructure Protection. In our comments, SIIA expresses support for the overall goals of the Administration in developing a cybersecurity framework that improves our ability to protect government information and critical infrastructure from cyber-attacks, but raises significant concerns regarding the potential effects of its implementation as proposed. Specifically, SIIA highlighted questions and concerns about the broad scope of the proposal, that it may conflict with sector-specific guidance and urges the Administration to avoid establishing a new, overly prescriptive supply chain or software assurance scheme that would establish the Government as a leader in the process of developing technology or that would create a U.S.-centric standard. Read more on SIIA’s Digital Discourse Blog.

David LeDuc is Senior Director, Public Policy at SIIA. He focuses on e-commerce, privacy, cyber security, cloud computing, open standards, e-government and information policy. Follow the SIIA public policy team on Twitter at @SIIAPubPolicy.

SIIA shares the overall goals of the Administration in developing a cybersecurity framework that improves our ability to protect government information and critical infrastructure from cyber-attacks.  In fact, many SIIA members provide products and services that protect businesses, consumers and public sector entities from cyber-attacks, viruses and a wide-range of online security threats.  As a result of this experience, these members have a critical voice in the debate on the implementation of Section 8(e) of the Executive Order.  While we recognize the importance of the overall goals of the Executive Order we have some significant concerns regarding the potential effects of its implementation as proposed in the RFI.

Most notably, we have an overarching concern that the RFI itself does not accurately reflect the carefully crafted definition of “critical infrastructure” reflected in the Executive Order.  Instead the RFI appears to sweep all IT companies or their customers into the same regulatory basket as the most critical systems.  This distinction is crucial as not all systems and assets should be required to comply with this level of regulation.

In addition, SIIA expressed concerns in our comments about how the development of a broad cybersecurity framework, an ongoing process at NIST, may impact sector-specific guidance such as what is proposed here for government contractor / acquisition sector.  As a result, we have requested that the implementation of Section 8(e) be delayed until NIST cybersecurity framework has been fully developed.

Furthermore, we support the “common criteria” as a globally recognized, effective solution to a rapidly changing IT marketplace, we caution the Administration to avoid  establishing any new, overly prescriptive supply chain or software assurance scheme that would establish the Government as a leader in the process of developing technology or the would create a US centric standard, as this would conflict with the proven security regime that has long been the foundation of our national security strategy.

We also point out concerns about how that which is proposed in this Executive Order may impact the consistent, accepted, risk-based government cybersecurity requirements contained in FISMA.  Beyond its impact on FISMA, the Executive Order may also overlap with and be redundant to the FedRAMP program, potentially subjecting any Internet-enabled computing services utilized by the government to new baseline security assessments, on top of the existing FISMA and FedRAMP requirements. Not only would this practice be costly, slow, and inefficient, but it could lead to new technology-specific overlays for services that are already being utilized and assessed by the federal government in a technologically-neutral way.

Lastly, we highlight our concerns regarding the potential effect of the rules proposed as a result of the Executive Order on the other major cyber-related requirements, both current and proposed, including those found in the FAR, the DFARS, FISMA and the last two National Defense Authorization Acts.

Michael Hettinger is VP for the Public Sector Innovation Group (PSIG) at SIIA. Follow his PSIG tweets at @SIIAPSIG. Sign up for the Public Sector Innovation Roundup email newsletter for weekly updates.

I have my own question today: Do we want faster, better, easier or cheaper? I know—all of the above. But what if we had to pick one? On Saturday morning, I heard an interview with Connie Schultz, former columnist and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. For her, the answer would definitely not be faster. “I am willing to wait that extra 15 minutes [even if it means getting beat] and know that the readers can trust what they just read in the Plain Dealer. And newspapers around the country, this is what we’re best at. We tell the bigger story. We don’t just break the news. We then explain why it happened.” I think SIPA members succeed as well in large part because of that trust.

I’ll venture to say that “better” is not the answer either. Also on Saturday morning, in perfectly okay weather, I passed a McDonalds with about eight cars in the drive-thru line and hardly anyone inside. There is nothing “better” about waiting like that at McDonalds.

So that leaves easier and cheaper. On the whole, I just don’t think cheaper does it. I’ve heard many SIPA members talk about pricing for webinars and “memberships” and it seems more a case of value than price. Said Schultz about newspapers’ problems: “We went up early online for free. It’s very hard to start charging people for something you used to give away for free.” She added that the “Plain Dealer’s never had more readers, because of the online presence.” (Check out Minal Bopaiah’s session on Strategies for Successful Paywalls on Thursday, June 6 at 2:15 p.m. at SIPA 2013. It’s an issue many of us struggle with.)

I’m going to vote for “easier.” Obviously, things are more complicated than that—and quality content still matters perhaps more than it ever did—but it just seems that there’s so much we have to deal with these days. And most times, easier will win out.

The Christian Science Monitor will be giving a keynote that you won’t want to miss at the Conference on their Digital First transition. And although it certainly wasn’t easy for them, the transition was designed to make it easier for their audience to take in all their amazing information. “We offer the why of the story and solutions, and then tailor that for a specialized audience that cares about a higher level of knowledge,” Editor John Yemma said. “So we took our human relations people and other brainy people in the company and turned them to web first. We learned web practices and search optimization, developed quizzes. We’ve been able to increase unique visitors tenfold.”

(Speaking of search optimization, we highly recommend the Pre-Conference workshop on SEO Basics and Beyond being delivered by Mequoda’s Don Nicholas. He’ll share a real-world case study of an SEO campaign that uses free content, keywords and SEO marketing on your website, in outbound emails and on social media to generate millions in revenue.)

Donal Toole, finance & strategy director of the Monitor, puts together all their charts. He spoke about outreach— “ask a question and we’ll write a story about it”—and trying new initiatives like the DC Decoder that explains complicated issues. Both are designed to make readers’ lives easier. They also spruced up long-time stalwarts like the Monitor Breakfast video. “What the market wants is often different from your thoughts,” Toole said. “Trying new things is critical. [But] you need fortitude to make it through the trial process.”

Again, what’s easy and good for your customers may not be so easy for you. But like the Monitor, it could be very worth it.

Ronn Levine began his career as a reporter for The Washington Post and has won numerous writing and publications awards since. Most recently, he spent 12 years at the Newspaper Association of America covering a variety of topics before joining SIPA in 2009 as managing editor. Follow Ronn on Twitter at @SIPAOnline

The patent troll problem was addressed to some extent back in September 2011 when the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act (AIA) was passed.  But even then, we all knew that the AIA only addressed part of the problem and that it was just a matter of time before Congress would need to re-visit the issue and consider new legislative initiatives aimed at addressing the continuing patent troll problem.  That time has arrived.

In the near future we expect that leaders in the relevant House and Senate Committees will release draft bills that will begin the process of more formally discussing how best to combat the patent troll plague.  But this time around, the discussions aren’t just about how these trolls are adversely affecting the software, hardware and other technology industries.  Ordinary end-users–like your neighborhood supermarket–have become part of the conversation as the take-no-prisoners approach of patent trolls has expanded to suing the customers of high tech companies.  Legislation is needed to ensure that companies are able to voluntarily intervene in cases where their customers are sued.

This new tactic of suing the users of patented technology rather than the manufacturers  represents just one of a litany of patent troll-related problems that needs to be addressed.  It is our view that any legislation in this space must include proposals that help combat the patent troll problem at both the litigation and the pre-litigation stage.  These proposals may include legislation to address:

• The asymmetry in patent discovery

• The problem of identifying the real-party-in-interest during litigation – and even more importantly during prosecution of the patent application as well as any grant or conveyance of the patent

• The awarding of court costs and attorneys’ fees in patent cases in a manner that will effectively impede a troll’s ability to bring unwarranted infringement suits.  The first step in ensuring such effectiveness is inclusion of a bond requirement that prevents a patent troll from circumventing an attorneys’ fee award by setting themselves up to be judgment proof

• The need for heightened pleading requirements with enough specificity regarding the product(s) and/or feature(s) that satisfy the claim limitations

These are just a few of the concepts that need to be fully aired and discussed.   We would like to see other concepts on the table – concepts relating to damages, willfulness and venue  – which in our view still need to be addressed.  But whatever measures are considered, they need to be effective. It is  essential that those proposals  are considered, and move forward–not watered down.

At this early stage of the discussions we see no reason to restrict the dialogue to consideration of a few proposals.  Instead, we favor the “let a thousand flowers bloom” approach – so long as those flowers don’t come from Monsanto seeds.

Keith Kupferschmid is General Counsel and SVP, Intellectual Property Policy & Enforcement at SIIA.

Russell Perkins, ICG

Doubtless by now you’ve heard the buzz around the travel news start-up called Skift. Skift is the brainchild of Rafat Ali, the founder of PaidContent.

Skift wants to broadly cover the incredibly huge global travel industry with only a handful of reporters. That means Skift will deliver a mix of original reporting along with licensed and curated content. So where’s the innovation and disruption? The answer, in a word, is data. Skift seems to have a firm grasp of the new dynamics of the information marketplace: while there is an important role for news, it’s increasingly hard to monetize. That’s why news married to data is a much smarter business model.

Read more here.

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Learn more about Data and Content  through the following activities and upcoming events:

• Profiting from Public Domain Data– June 11
• Content Crossroads: Product Opportunities with Big Data and Semantics– September 5
• Models for Exellence: Here are the Best Data Products of the Year!– September 12
• DataContent 2013 – October 15-17

The NYPL has unveiled its new website, and it came with a very interesting letter from Matt Morgan, their website director. He writes that the new design “builds off of a history of Web research, as well as a lot of recent work at NYPL suggesting we should do a better job of exposing our patrons to the full breadth of great NYPL services, programs, and other offerings.” (Thanks to Alicia Brayboy – @AskAlicia - of Lattice Engines for this link.)

The main question that the NYPL tried to figure out was do people prefer search or link-based navigation. Morgan writes that “many Web users now have an expectation of which method will work better, depending on what they’re looking for. That is, it’s not so much the site you’re on; it’s the information you’re looking for that determines whether you search or navigate.” For instance, are you looking for one specific book or a series of webinars?

About 80% of their home page visits go straight to search, most looking for that one book. And only around 10% go to the navigation bar, to read a blog post or perhaps find an event listing. “One way to look at these data is entirely positive: we’ve succeeded in providing user-friendly paths to a lot of our most important content,” Morgan writes.

“But here’s the critical point: the home page appears to be doing a satisfactory job of helping you find what you came for, when you came with something in mind. What about exploration and discovery? How well do we inform you of all those things you didn’t already know about?”

That’s a good question to ask ourselves. Yes, our website may be showing off our popular webinar series or the annual conference, but is it telling enough about our daily ezine, white reports and new site licenses? The NYPL wants its book readers to attend classes and readings and the people in its classes to wander around. And they want to inform people not using the library to know what they’re missing.

Here’s my favorite line from Morgan: “Essentially, we need to pleasantly distract our visitors!” He goes on. “We absolutely want it to be as easy [note that important word] as possible for you to find what you’re looking for (whether with search or links), but we also want you to find things you didn’t even know you’d be interested in. This kind of impact comes from encouraging exploration, and the data doesn’t show we’re doing that right now…And the home page, of all the pages on the site, is possibly our best opportunity to promote discovery beyond what visitors initially sought.”

Of course, Kiplinger or Golf Odyssey or Healthcare Europa is not the New York Public Library. But there does seem to be some transferable lessons in what Morgan writes:

1. Don’t lose what’s good.  Their new homepage still clearly displays the search mechanism and the invitation to subscribe to their newsletter.
2. Be visual. But now you’re also met with sharp, attractive pictures luring you to their exhibits and events.
3. Keep it relatively simple and clean. It’s all very easy-to-read and inviting.
4. Test. The NYPL is testing – from Morgan: “…if we record more clicks on the bold and bright new feature items, or the book recommender, we’ll know we’ve succeeded…”
5. Measure. They have set up mechanisms to measure if they are successful or not.
6. React. Change accordingly.

Ronn Levine began his career as a reporter for The Washington Post and has won numerous writing and publications awards since. Most recently, he spent 12 years at the Newspaper Association of America covering a variety of topics before joining SIPA in 2009 as managing editor. Follow Ronn on Twitter at @SIPAOnline

Last week I was able to attend a briefing where IBM showcased how Watson is proliferating medical information and improving health care efficiency and quality.  While at this briefing I kept thinking about how this was a perfect real life case study of using big data and how it fit in with SIIA’s recent white paper  Data-Driven Innovation A Guide for Policymakers: Understanding and Enabling the Economic and Social Value of Data.

The briefing was led by Dr. Martin Kohn, the Chief Medical Scientist of IBM and Dr. Mark Kris, the Chief Thoracic Oncology Service at MSKCC.  During the briefing they showed us how Watson is able to use a patient’s record and look at relevant data to come up with a list of potential treatment plans and their odds of being successful.  If important information is missing Watson lets the doctors know what information it needs in order to make a decision.  Over time as the patient has new symptoms or gets back the results of certain tests or treatments or expresses preferences on treatment Watson takes all of these things into consideration when coming up new treatments and their probabilities of success.  Additionally based on the information Watson has received it can diagnose or change the diagnosis of a patient.

Dr. Kris believes that Watson is successful at diagnosing and offering treatments because it looks at everything not just what people believe are important.  The other reason he believes Watson is successful is because it goes about things the way a doctor would such as giving a list of possibilities not one definite solution and the likelihood of various treatments being successful.  Watson has the added ability to look at information collected by doctors in the field around the world and use their cumulative knowledge instead of just relying on what a few specific doctors at that hospital know.  Just like with people Watson is able to learn and remember things so the more patients it works with the better it is able to do in the future. 

While these initial results of transforming Watson from a games show winner into a doctor have been promising there are still many problems they have to work on fixing before using Watson at the hospital becomes a common occurrence.  The two biggest of which are that for Watson to come up with diagnoses and treatments requires it to analyze and store massive amounts of data which is very costly to do at the moment.  The second is that at the moment they need to figure out how to best maximize the use of Watson as it is only capable of working in a narrow field at the moment such as cancer instead of in the broader field of healthcare.  Both Dr. Kohn and Dr. Kris stressed that Watson at the time is a tool that can be used to support or come up with a second opinion on things but is not a substitute for an actual doctor. 

At the moment Watson is a useful tool at the MSKCC but there is a still lot of work that needs to be done before it is able to potentially revolutionize the healthcare industry.  The most important thing is to remember the use of big data to create Data Driven Innovation to create real world benefits is still in the early stages and the best thing we can do is to not put restrictions or limitations on how or why it is used or collected so that we don’t accidentally prevent monumental changes in how we do things from happening.

Denys Emmert is the Public Policy intern at SIIA. He has a degree in marketing and political science from Florida State University.