About: Sarah Lai Stirland was Contributing Editor for BroadbandBreakfast.com until April 2011. She has covered business, finance and legal affairs, telecommunications and tech policy for 15 years from New York, Washington and San Francisco. She has written for Red Herring, National Journal's Technology Daily, Portfolio.com and Wired.com. She's a native of London and Hong Kong, and is currently based in San Francisco.
Email: stirland@broadbandcensus.com
Website: http://BroadbandBreakfast.com
San Francisco, April 7, 2011 — When Hollywood’s largest movie studios launched a massive copyright infringement lawsuit against Silicon Valley DVD-streaming startup Zediva earlier this week, it looked as they would likely squash the company like a bug.
Investors in internet movie-streaming startup Zediva initially worried about how net neutrality rules could affect its future as a business, but ultimately it’s copyright law that might do it in, and doom it as a business model.
SAN FRANCISCO, March 29, 2011 — Amazon.com on Tuesday launched a new ‘cyberlocker’ service that allows music lovers and owners to remotely access their music collections on any device of their choosing.
SAN FRANCISCO, March 22, 2011 — A federal judge in New York City has rejected the expansive amended settlement agreement between Google, U.S. authors and publishers more than a year after the court heard from a wide variety of interested parties in hearings on the fairness of the settlement of a class action lawsuit.
WASHINGTON, March 4, 2011 — The U.S. Senate on Thursday rebuffed an effort by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. that would have eviscerated the current push to switch the United States’ method of awarding patents to one that is in line with the rest of the world’s.
WASHINGTON, March 1, 2011 — Top Obama administration officials moved to assuage American inventors’ fears Tuesday that a fundamental change being sought in the nation’s patent system won’t put them at a disadvantage .
Late into the night at the end of November, a text message woke up Waleed A. Gad El Kareem, an open-source web developer in Alexandria, Egypt. The 31-year-old developer had set up an alert to tell him whenever his site Torrent-Finder.com was inaccessible online.
“I waited for it to come back, and it didn’t so I called [domain name provider] GoDaddy,” he recalled in an interview. “They had no idea about it.”
For all of the tough talk coming out of Congress as the United States and China embark on a high profile trade summit today, a confidential memo sent by U.S. Ambassador Jon M. Huntsman at the beginning of 2010 illustrates how the fortunes of the two countries have changed in modern times, and how the leadership of the United States is scrambling for innovative ways to readjust as its economic clout fades.
SAN FRANCISCO, November 18th, 2010 — The U.S. Senate’s latest battle plan against intellectual property piracy online could gain traction and be approved by the body’s Judiciary Committee Thursday, but a large group of the internet’s founding architects are warning that the plan’s technical approach would wreak havoc and destabilize the global network.
San Francisco, October 25th, 2010 — Cablevision Systems on Monday accused Fox Television parent News Corp of violating federal regulations that govern the terms of negotiations underlying business agreements between video distributors and broadcasters.
The move sets the stage for a potential intervention by the Federal Communications Commission, or failing that, legislative action in Congress.