Brookings

Software application developers earn large salaries in the United States, $96,260 a year on average. But in metropolitan San Jose they earn $131,270, the highest in the country.

There are many partial explanations for this -- local cost of living, differences in education levels, experience, and industry -- but none of them quite account for it.

So what distinguishes San Jose software developers? It turns out that developers living in San Jose have acquired the specific skills most valued by employers.

The mass digitization by Google of millions of books made available to it by various libraries remains a matter of legal contention.

The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit will be reviewing a decision in 2013 where the US District Court in New York entered judgment in favor of Google based on a “fair use” defense under the Copyright Act of 1976.

The lower court found Google’s use was “highly transformative” because Google had converted the books’ text into digital form, creating a full text search capability that made existing works more accessible to users, and enabling new forms of research. The case underscores the increasing significance of “transformative use” in evaluating a fair use defense.

[Commentary] A popular water cooler topic in the policy and technology communities is something called the Privacy Paradox. Recently, EMC Corporation, a leading enterprise cloud-based services company, released its inaugural EMC Privacy Index.

This study was commissioned by the company to better understand consumer perceptions about the need to protect personal privacy online and how that ranks as a consumer priority against the benefits of convenient online commerce and social media sharing, alongside other priorities such as the use of data analytics to prevent terrorist attacks and protect national security. Its data reflects survey responses from 15,000 consumers in 15 countries, including the United States.

The vast majority of respondents in all surveyed countries (91 percent) indicated they value the benefit of “easier access to information and knowledge” that digital technology affords. Yet 81 percent also expected privacy to erode over the next five years, and 59 percent said they have less privacy than a year ago. Less than half of all respondents (45 percent) also indicated they were willing to trade some of their privacy for easier access.

[Commentary] In a new Brookings paper, James Klurfeld and Howard Schneider provide a detailed view of an innovative Stony Brook University program that teaches students to do more of the critical vetting of information that professional journalism has traditionally provided.

Today’s problem is that the business model which once supported newsroom journalism is disintegrating. Moreover, much of the public recognizes no difference, even in principle, between what (say) The New York Times does and what Daily Kos does.

If professionals are less and less able to vet information, perhaps consumers can do it themselves. Perhaps, in any case, they’ll have to, because no one else will.

Teaching young people how to evaluate information sources, think critically, and check before retweeting makes sense for all kinds of reasons. What news literacy cannot do -- and, of course, does not pretend to do -- is make professional newsrooms and journalists stop disappearing at an alarming rate. And the sad truth is that enlightened amateurism, whether on the part of consumers or producers, is no substitute for dedicated professionalism.

[Commentary] In their recent paper “Databuse and a Trusteeship Model of Consumer Protection in the Big Data Era”, Benjamin Wittes and Wells Bennett argue we need to reconceptualize privacy.

Privacy has morphed into a notion that could describe a range of beliefs and precisely but captures none of the potential harms. Consumers care about privacy, “in proportion to whether it is used for our benefit or to our detriment and critically, how seriously to our detriment.”

The authors invoke the concept of databause. Databuse is a negative right that invokes companies to safeguard consumers from undesired harms that might result from the sharing of data. They argue for a trusteeship model where companies are responsible to serve as good stewards of the data consumers entrust to them.

The authors identify several attributes of a good data trustee:
Safely store private data
Never use data in a way that injures consumers
Disclose uses of data in an open and clear manner
To the greatest degree possible give users control over how their data is shared and used
Keep promises to consumers about data

As the United States slowly emerges from the Great Recession, a remarkable shift is occurring in the spatial geography of innovation. For the past 50 years, the landscape of innovation has been dominated by places like Silicon Valley -- suburban corridors of spatially isolated corporate campuses, accessible only by car, with little emphasis on the quality of life or on integrating work, housing and recreation.

A new complementary urban model is now emerging, giving rise to what we and others are calling “innovation districts.” These districts, by our definition, are geographic areas where leading-edge anchor institutions and companies cluster and connect with start-ups, business incubators and accelerators. They are also physically compact, transit-accessible, and technically-wired and offer mixed-use housing, office, and retail. Led by an eclectic group of institutions and leaders, innovation districts are emerging in dozens of cities and metropolitan areas in the US and abroad and already reflect distinctive typologies and levels of formal planning.

In the US, districts are emerging near anchor institutions in the downtowns and midtowns of cities like Atlanta, Baltimore, Buffalo, Cambridge, Cleveland, Detroit, Houston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, St. Louis and San Diego. They are developing in Boston, Brooklyn, Chicago, Portland, Providence, San Francisco and Seattle where underutilized areas (particularly older industrial areas) are being re-imagined and remade. Still others are taking shape in the transformation of traditional exurban science parks like Research Triangle Park in Raleigh-Durham, which are scrambling to keep pace with the preference of their workers and firms for more urbanized, vibrant environments.

[Commentary] The first sale doctrine as it exists today can most easily be understood in the context of books. Suppose someone walks into a bookstore and buys a brand new paperback book. After she reads the book, she could decide to lend it to a friend who lives down the street or donate it to the local library. Under the first sale doctrine, these actions are legal because she is the owner of that particular copy.

This proves difficult with digital versions of creative works. No longer are copyrighted works like CDs or books transferred physically from person to person. The transfers are occurring electronically and a new copy of the work is created at the destination of the transfer. The first sale doctrine does not allow the digital purchaser to electronically transfer their files to someone else pursuant to a loan or sale.

Although Villasenor states that if this first sale doctrine was changed to include digital works, the change would be exploited and would open up a Pandora’s Box of unintended consequences:

• Short duration loans of digital works could be facilitated by web-based services that would match listeners and owners whose copies of requested songs were sitting unused on hard drives. In this situation, the recording artist would only sell a small number of copies to the web-based services as opposed to selling copies to every listener. This would dramatically reduce the market for digital music sales.
• Normally, used printed books, CDs, and DVDs are less valuable than their brand new counterparts. On the other hand, a digital representation of a work can be transferred countless times and stay exactly the same with no wear-and-tear. “Used” digital copies never become less valuable and this would cause the market to behave differently.

[Commentary] In May, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) generated controversy with its ruling on privacy. The case involved a Spanish man’s grievance with Google over a search result for his name that linked to information outlining a 15-year-old bankruptcy proceeding. The ECJ ruled that Google, and other search engines, should be required to remove the information that is deemed “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive in relation to the purposes for which they were processed and in the light of the time that has elapsed”.

The ECJ held search engines responsible for the results delivered to its users. This ruling suggests that search engines can affect the reputation of an individual person, as opposed to functioning as a tool that enables users to access information across the Internet.

The ECJ acknowledges that this ruling will not deter potentially damaging information from being discoverable since the information will still exist on the Internet even if a search engine can’t link directly to the result. Would this type of ruling ever occur in the United States? It’s difficult to imagine a ruling like this to come from an American court, for the following reasons:

• One: Given the First Amendment, it would be difficult to justify limits on publication of digital material.
• Two: The United States and Europe have fundamentally different approaches to protecting privacy. In his recent paper Cameron Kerry describes the political and legal differences between the EU and the US.

Policy recommendations to support the IP Transition:

• Government leaders need to speed up lengthy rulemaking procedures.
• Regulators need to be open to new business models and applications with the potential to improve consumer communications and commerce.
• During the IP Transition, a critical priority is to protect vulnerable populations. To ensure the IP Transition has a soft landing, the elderly, disabled, and those residing in rural areas must be provided the same or better service than they are currently receiving.
• Increase the number of experiments to gauge the impact of these transitions, to assess costs and benefits. Using the information from these trials to enact data-driven regulation. Regulations can use data to match the needs and responsibilities of the public sector with the innovation capacity of the private sector.
• With the insatiable demand for larger amounts and faster content delivery, we need to build a next generation digital infrastructure. This new infrastructure should support innovation in commerce, health care, education, transportation, and energy.

Barriers to Innovation:

• Reskilling current workers for new technologies is critical for future success. Current methods include partnering with local universities and using MOOCs to reskill workers for new technologies, but transforming a mathematics expert into a big data scientist is a difficult and timely process.
• The telecommunications industry needs more spectrum.
• Adaptation is vital to the ever evolving telecom industry. Some television networks have successfully transformed from a content creator to a content distributor.
• There is tremendous competition to hire the qualified tech engineers. The STEM pipeline must be improved.

On May 2, the Center for Technology Innovation (CTI) at Brookings hosted a panel of industry experts to address the future of digital content delivery in the United States, including discussion on how the explosion of video streaming is changing how we consume content. Below are some highlights from the discussion.

Archived video is available on the event's page, and TechTank blog will have a more detailed analysis of the event soon. Panelists included John Donovan, AT&T's senior executive vice president for technology and network operations; Derek Aberle, president of Qualcomm; and Jeremy Legg, a senior vice president at Turner Broadcasting System.

Donovan said that the new environment of networking and technology is "challenging in every dimension: the people, the way we manage the business and then the underlying technology that we've built."

Aberle also spoke to the "tremendous change in the industry over the last ten years."

Legg asked, "What isn't changing in content distribution at this point?

Toward the end of the program, an audience member asked the panelists what they see coming on five- and 10-year horizons.

Legg described a new product, CNNx that allows viewers to annotate videos in real time to get all of the content from around the web about that content, and also to go to the social conversation on Facebook or Twitter about that content. "That's an example of how we're going to have to think in the future," he said.

Aberle said that the place he sees innovation in the future is mobile health care.

Donovan's answer to the future horizon question centered on the possibilities of the Internet of Things, "my things coordinating with each other."