Good Morning Tech

Senate votes to clean up federal copyright laws. The Senate unanimously approved a series of fixes to federal copyright laws late Monday night. The changes are mostly designed to improve operations at the Copyright Office, ease the transition to digital recordkeeping and allow filers
to submit documents electronically. The bill also asserts that dramatic or
literary works were not “published” when included on a record album,
allowing their original owners to retain their rights. Sponsors Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) expressed hope that the House would follow suit expeditiously.

Industry
notes

Saudi Arabia bans Blackberry services, RIM pushes back. In response to the news that Saudi Arabia has ordered local cell phone providers to halt Blackberry services, Ontario-based Research In Motion released a statement denying that it gives preferential treatment to any government. “There is only one BlackBerry enterprise solution available to our customers around the world and it remains unchanged in all of the markets we operate in,” RIM said in a statement. “RIM cooperates with all governments with a consistent standard and the same degree of respect. Any claims that we provide, or have ever provided, something unique to the government of one country that we have not offered to the governments of all countries, are unfounded.”

The company made headlines this week when the United Arab Emirates announced it would block some Blackberry services over the weekend, citing the government’s inability to monitor messages on RIM’s secure servers. While some reports have indicated that UAE, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states are merely trying to secure the same sort of access as their Western counterparts, Research In Motion argues that it is unable to provide access to any customer’s encryption key by design, meaning users can be confident in their device’s security. India, Kuwait and the European Union have also indicated their need for access to the device’s messaging capabilities.

Who, Where

Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz will announce a settlement Wednesday morning between the FTC and Intel regarding the latter’s use of anticompetitive tactics to stifle competition and harm consumers in the market for microprocessors. The event will take place at FTC headquarters at 10 a.m.; stay tuned to Hillicon Valley for complete coverage.

Commerce Secretary Gary Locke will visit NASA’s Kennedy Space Center Wednesday to tour the Space Life Sciences Lab at Exploration Park. He will be joined by Rep. Suzanne Kosmas (D-Fla.), U.S. Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Economic Development John Fernandez, NASA Associate Deputy Administrator Charles Scales, and Kennedy Space Center Director Robert Cabana.

Said

“It’s difficult, quite frankly,
to measure prevention. Ask me how much fraud
we’ve prevented and I have no idea, but I know we’ve prevented some.”

—Recovery
Accountability and Transparency Board Chairman Earl Devaney on the
amount of waste his team has prevented through the use of technology.