Microsoft's Bitcoin trial; Arista hits back at Cisco; Turnbull's ISP deadline

The federal government has given the telecommunications industry just four months to come up with a code relating to online copyright infringement. If the industry fails to do so, the government will force a code upon the industry.

Attorney-General George Brandis and Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull last week wrote to members of the industry, telling them to “immediately develop an industry code”, a joint media release from the two politicians said.

If the industry fails to come up with something by 8 April, 2015, “the government will impose binding arrangements either by an industry code prescribed by the Attorney-General under the Copyright Act 1968 or an industry standard prescribed by the ACMA, at the direction of the Minister for Communications under the Telecommunications Act”, the release said.

In the letter, the ministers outlined their expectations of such a code, including a stipulation that ISPs “take reasonable steps … to deter online copyright infringement on their network, when they are made aware of infringing subscribers”.

The ministers also stipulate that the code “include a process for facilitated discovery to assist rights holders in taking direct copyright infringement action against a subscriber after an agreed number of notices”.

Some have voiced concern over the deadline. Fairfax quoted M2 Group CEO Geoff Horth as saying: “With Christmas in between now and then, I don’t know how you can get consensus on that for this sort of code done within that period of time, particularly if there is a consultation and review by ACMA, which there would be. It seemed like a very aggressive timeline.”

The Greens’ communications spokesperson Scott Ludlam reportedly described the timeframe as “farcical”.

ITnews quoted Communications Alliance CEO John Stanton as saying the timeframe was “challenging”.

“But we’ve done a lot of work already on the shape of a notice scheme, so the mechanics of spelling out what ought to be in the code are achievable within that timeframe,” Stanton is quoted as saying.

Arista hits back at Cisco lawsuit

Networking vendor Arista has hit back after rival Cisco launched legal action against the company over alleged patent and copyright violations.

Cisco filed two lawsuits against Arista a little over a week ago, in an attempt to stop what Cisco’s Mark Chandler described as “Arista’s repeated and pervasive copying of key inventions in Cisco products”.

The two lawsuits cover “key Cisco proprietary patented features and Cisco’s copyrighted materials”, Chandler said.

“The patented and copyrighted Cisco features and implementations being used by Arista are not industry standards. In some cases, the engineers who were the named inventors on the patents now work at Arista; in other cases, they were developed by Cisco engineers who were supervised by former Cisco employees, who are now Arista executives,” he wrote.

A list of the patents allegedly infringed upon is available at Cisco’s website.

Cisco is also suing over copyrighted materials. “Entire sections of our copyrighted user manuals, complete with grammatical errors, are included in Arista’s documentation. In addition, Arista lifted over 500 of our multi-word command line expressions identically and directly from our ‘IOS’ into Arista’s ‘EOS’, comprising almost half of their entire command line interface.”

Now, Arista has responded. Dan Scheinman, a director on Arista’s board, wrote a blog claiming that Cisco’s legal action is “just like the lawsuits (actual and threatened) brought against it in the 90s by Lucent, IBM and Nortel - an attempt by a legacy vendor that is falling behind in the marketplace to use the legal system to try and slow a competitor who is innovating and winning”.

“I was the general counsel at Cisco in the 1990s when it was being attacked in much the same way as Arista is today,” Scheinman wrote. “Suing the new competition did not work in 1998 and it will work no better in 2014.”

Microsoft’s Bitcoin flirtation

Microsoft is now allowing its US customers to pay for some of its products using Bitcoins.

The company announced the plans in a blog post late last week. “Starting Thursday in the US, by using BitPay, the world’s leading bitcoin payment processor, you can trade-in bitcoin - at current market value - and add it to your Microsoft account,” the blog post read.

“Those funds can then be used to purchase content in the Windows Store, or in stores that house Xbox Games, Xbox Music or Xbox Video,” it continued.

Microsoft’s adoption of Bitcoin is so far limited, however; the company isn’t accepting Bitcoins outside of the listed options “at this time”.

The Wall Street Journal quoted Microsoft spokesman Ryan Day as saying “we are dipping our toe in the water, we are not going guns blazing on this yet”.

BitPay CEO Tony Gallippi labelled Microsoft’s foray with currency “the best endorsement for Bitcoin to date”, the WSJ reported.

Image courtesy Zach Copley under CC