The bill bans members of Congress from using knowledge gained in the performance of their duties to gain an advantage in the stock market. While the practice is already illegal for most of the population, members of the legislature were not specifically included.

The House version of the bill is slightly different than the version passed by the Senate – a fact which leads some to call it “watered down.” Since the bills are different, the two houses will have to work toward a version of the bill they can both agree on before it can go to the President for passage.

The House’s passage of the STOCK Act generated a significant amount of buzz on Twitter. Check out a sample of what people are saying below:

PRO IP Bill Slammed By Bloggers

Though the report on the House Judiciary Committee website noted how the PRO IP Act helps labor unions and industry groups, there isn’t any mention of how this legislation benefits anyone who isn’t dumping campaign contributions on the bipartisan supporters of the bill.

“This legislation is an important and necessary step in the fight to maintain our competitive edge in a global marketplace,” Chairman John Conyers said in the statement.

With all due respect, Chairman Conyers, and distinguished members of the Committee, it is not. Adding layers to US laws and bureaucracy matters not one whit to the counterfeiters who ply their trade in China, Russia, and a host of other countries.

It doesn’t benefit the rights of any American with regards to fair use of intellectual property. The Act certainly does a hell of a job criminalizing alleged copyright and trademark infringement. Jeremy Toeman commented best on this, on his heavily linked open letter to House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi:

Instead of protecting the wants and needs of the many by forcing big media firms to evolve and adapt to the new technologies, the laws sprung up to protect these companies and allow them to live in the older world. PRO IP is yet another example of such laws.

It is bad enough that we have so few major media companies. It is bad enough that they can exert financial pressure to dominate the movie theaters and the airwaves. It is bad enough that they control the enormous quantities of media we as Americans consume….individual creativity combined with the distribution power of the Internet is finally allowing people to slowly retake control of the media they consume.

Historically it is this effort, individual creativity, that our government has helped protect and thrive. Not the demands of the rich and famous. It is in fact ironic that the major media companies of today were built on the shoulders of enabling laws, not crippling laws.

Chris Thomas argues that Toeman and Robert Scoble are wrong to argue against PRO IP. Toeman agreed with most of Thomas’ argument, but pointed out that PRO IP isn’t focused on protecting IP; it’s focused on making it easier to sue and penalize individuals.

The provisions of PRO IP touted by the Judiciary Committee include the creation of a new Executive Branch office to oversee IP enforcement, and the creation of a permanent Intellectual Property Division within the Department of Justice.

More bureaucracy, another well-connected insider getting a sweet gig to graze at the taxpayer trough (we’re betting whoever gets the new IP Enforcement Representative job will have a big media background), and absolutely no impact on foreign counterfeiting whatsoever appear to be the salient points of PRO IP.

But Heaven help the first college kid busted under PRO IP for MP3 trading. It’s going to be brutal.

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The order from Judge Henry Kennedy in the U.S. District of Columbia was a win for the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a watchdog group that filed suit against the Executive Office of the President and the National Archives and Record Administration in September.

The lawsuit alleges that the defendants purposely did not recover, restore and preserve millions of electronic communications records in the White House. CREW said that if copies of deleted email messages existed, those would be on backup storage devices, and requested the documents be preserved.

"Today’s order is an important and necessary first step toward restoring and preserving for the public all the records of this administration, not just those self-selected for preservation by an administration committed more to secrecy than compliance with the law," Anne Weismann, CREW’s Chief Counsel, said.

The White House learned in 2005 that an unknown number of email messages were missing from its archive. Keith Roberts, the deputy general counsel of the White House Office of Administration said that a contractor responsible for daily audits of the email system and archiving did not find or report problems at the time.

Yesterday, the Community Broadband Act was passed out of the Senate Commerce Committee and will proceed to the Senate floor. Shortly after, the House Energy Commerce Committee approved the Broadband Census of America Act, legislation aimed at creating better measurement of broadband access.

The FCC has been roundly criticized for using an outdated and unrepresentative method for measuring broadband penetration, and thus relying on numbers favorable to incumbent telecom and cable providers seeking to extend monopolistic and duopolistic presences throughout most of America.

"Until now, virtually nothing has been done to gather data about the current broadband market," said Ben Scott, policy director of Free Press. "This bill represents a giant leap forward in our knowledge and will help spotlight the market failures that threaten to stunt innovation and endanger our global competitiveness."

Depending on which report you read, the US ranks between 13th and 22nd in broadband penetration and speed.

Obama’s pledge and the two bills passed out of committee follow Senators Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and Byron Dorgan (D-ND) call for the Senate Commerce Committee to hold a hearing evaluating the need for Network Neutrality legislation.

There is still a clause which restricts the benefit to bloggers to those who receive a “substantial portion of their livelihood” or “substantial financial gain” from the practice—and those who “regularly engage” in journalism. (This specific text is found in this PDF of the amendments, beginning on page 2, line 17.)

The bill passed its committee in August. A similar bill passed its Senate committee earlier this month. If you’ve forgotten your Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (or Schoolhouse Rock), for the bill to become law, however, we still have to:

• pass some version of the bill through the Senate
• have members of the House and the Senate come together in a correlation committee to work out differences between the two versions of the bill
• have the whole House and the whole Senate vote on and pass the new version of the bill
• be signed by the president—or at least not be vetoed

The last point might be difficult, with President Bush threatening to veto the bill. However, he has only exercised his veto four times—but three of the four have been in the last six months.

Additionally, the target date for adjournment is October 26 for the House and November 16 for the Senate. If a bill passes through those steps and goes to the president after November 6, if he doesn’t sign it into law, it will be automatically vetoed (a pocket veto).

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House Passes Law Shielding Bloggers

The bill passed with overwhelming support by a vote of 398-21.

"In the past few years, there have been too many instances where the pendulum has swung against the free flow of information and in favor of the government," House Minority Whip Roy Blunt, R-Mo., said on the House floor.

"I was troubled by the instances I’ve seen where reporters have been jailed or threatened with jail for simply protecting their sources."

The Whitehouse is less than thrilled with the passage of the bill and is likely to veto it saying that it could harm national security.

The Whitehouse issued a statement saying, "It is likely that the legislation will encourage more leaks of classified information by giving leakers such a formidable shield behind which they can hide."

The Society Of Professional Journalists were pleased with the passage of the bill saying, "Today’s vote in the House is a victory for a free press and for the American people as much as journalists," SPJ President Clint Brewer said.

"This law is in the interest of democracy. Journalists must be able to protect confidential sources in order to truly report on the operations of our government." They also pointed out that the bill offers protection for bloggers and freelancers.

"This bill is pro consumer, pro innovation and pro technology," said Rep. Mel Watt, D-N.C., according to the AP. He is also one of the bills sponsors.

Rep.Lamar Smith, R-Texas, said a permanent ban would allow businesses to keep investing in the Internet and provide access that is affordable to users. He said by limiting the House to consideration of a temporary extension, Democratic leaders "want to leave the door open to taxing the Internet in the future."

Watt said there was a good reason for extending the ban and not making it permanent. "The Senate has not done anything yet and in many ways has made it clear that a permanent moratorium would be dead on arrival," Watt said. He went on to say that insisting on passing a permanent ban, "runs the risk that time will run out before the month ends and the moratorium will run out before the month ends."

The bill HR 3678 will now go to the Senate. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. Is expected to pick up the house passed measure for a speedy Senate vote.

The two companies have been in talks about Google’s book-scanning project according to Reuters. A Random House spokesman who was asked about a possible agreement said, "Random House continues to have periodic constructive conversations with Google on issues of mutual relevance."

Random House is a member of the American Association of Publishers and says it still supports a U.S. copyright case filed against Google in 2005 that is being funded by the association.

The suit comes from Penguin, Pearson, McGraw-Hill, Wiley and Simon & Schuster and asks to stop Google from scanning in copyright books it receives from its library partners without explicit permission from publishers.

Google has partnered with over 10,000 publishers who provide books to Google to be entirely scanned. Google make the books partially available to online readers under the agreements with each publisher.

Google has scanned the complete text of more than 1 million books. The total number of books in the world is not known, but WorldCat, a global library collective has 91 million bibliographic records in its database.

 For instance, querying for the keyword “google” with this option found a Google logo with the dimensions 3600*1500 pixels. Note that in combination with image sizes, you can restrict your Google Image searches to a specific domain as usual by using the site operator, like site:flickr.com house

*Not sure how new exactly it is… it wasn’t there in May this year, for instance.

**Google earlier this year told us, “the dimensions are small < 51 x 51, large >= 1024×768, and medium captures everything in between. As images continue to improve with the advances in digital photography, these dimensions will likely change over time.”

[Thanks David T.!]

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The Blogoscoped mention of Yahoo’s love for Flickr content is particularly timely, since Yahoo! announced back in June that they were permanently shutting down Yahoo! Photos in favor of their Flickr property, and the final closing date is tomorrow, September 20th.

Previously, I’d railed a bit against Yahoo! because I’d seen a lot of evidence that they didn’t spider/index Flickr content as well or comprehensively as Google did — altogether ironic since Yahoo owns Flickr. Just as with the anecdotal reports in the Blogoscoped post, I’m seeing nice indications that my earlier criticism of Yahoo’s lack of inclusion of Flickr content may now be completely resolved.

For instance, for experimentation purposes, I optimized a number of pictures of the picturesque Holly Hill House on Catalina Island via Flickr over a year ago. For many months, none of those pictures were showing up at all in Yahoo’s Image Search results (while, they were indexed and ranking really well in Google Image Search results within just a few weeks). Now, TWELVE of my Holly Hill House pics are appearing in the first 20 image search results on Yahoo:

(click to enlarge)

So, I’d say there is now even more benefit to optimizing through Flickr, since there’s greater chance of getting search referrals from Yahoo! Image Search results.

So far, I’m not actually seeing more referral traffic from Yahoo because of this, though, but I’ll soon be deploying much larger sample sets for the purposes of experimentation, and I’ll circle back around to report my statistical findings.

I can still critique Yahoo! a bit, though: images newly uploaded to Flickr seem to still have a significant amount of time before they get included in Yahoo Image Search results. Why? These images show up really rapidly via search in Flickr, so one assumes Yahoo would be able to pull those contents into their SERPs through a federated search of Flickr… The images really should be available quicker, and Yahoo should improve absorption of new Flickr images content faster.

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