The Federal Aviation Administration extended by 60 days to Sept. 23 the comment deadline on its notice of interpretation on the rules for model aircraft, the FAA said in a notice in Friday’s Federal Register (http://1.usa.gov/1khzEam). The FAA wants to crack down on what it calls the increasing recklessness of hobbyists who fly small drones for recreational purposes, and is proposing sweeping enforcement measures that has many in the model aircraft community up in arms (CD July 22 p10). The Academy of Model Aeronautics, which has orchestrated a big comments submission campaign at the FAA, asked for the extension so it could “educate the aeromodeling community, clarify the issues, and respond to questions regarding the impact that the interpretive rule has on various aspects of the modeling activity,” the extension notice said. “The FAA agrees that additional time for the submission of comments would be helpful,” the agency said. By early Sunday, more than 29,300 comments had been filed in docket FAA-2014-0396 on the rule interpretation (http://1.usa.gov/1tr8MVl). The vast majority of comments were critical of the FAA’s effort to impose new restrictions on model aircraft. Observers say the rule interpretation on model aircraft has broad implications for the FAA’s long-awaited rulemaking on commercial operations of small drones because it hasn’t ruled out including hobbyist drones in any future rulemaking.

After a Supreme Court ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit vacated its judgment favoring Akamai in a patent lawsuit against Limelight Networks. The Federal Circuit referred the case to two panel members and a newly selected judge, it said in an order issued Thursday (http://1.usa.gov/1k4qltX). In June, the Supreme Court ruled against Akamai, saying a company can only claim patent infringement if another company was involved in every step of the infringement (CD Jun 3 p4). The ruling overturned a 2012 appeals court decision “and remanded the case for further proceedings consistent with the Supreme Court’s opinion,” said the Federal Circuit.

Jing Wang, former president-global business operations at Qualcomm, pleaded guilty Monday to insider trading in shares of Qualcomm and Atheros, the Department of Justice said (http://1.usa.gov/1k8IhDX). Wang also pleaded guilty to laundering the proceeds using an offshore shell company, in federal court in San Diego before U.S. District Judge William Hayes. “Not satisfied with his lucrative executive position at Qualcomm, Jing Wang traded on insider information about the company’s acquisitions and earnings to gain an illegal advantage in the financial market,” said Assistant Attorney General Leslie Caldwell. Wang also laundered close to $250,000 in insider trading profits “and created a cover-up story to hide his crimes.” The insider trading took place on three separate occasions over a 10-month period in 2010-2011, DOJ said.

The National Public Safety Telecommunications Council is seeking volunteers for two new task groups supporting the Broadband Working Group, the organization said (http://bit.ly/WqQHvw). The Priority & Quality of Service (QoS) group will review and refresh the 2012 NPSTC Priority and QoS document, and the Local Control group will review and refresh the 2012 NPSTC Local Control document, NPSTC said. The two groups will be a collaboration of input from industry and public safety, according to the council.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed two separate lower court decisions in favor of LG Electronics in patent infringement cases brought by the Multimedia Patent Trust. In one decision Thursday, in docket 13-1621 (http://1.usa.gov/1mogF82), the circuit court affirmed a December 2012 jury verdict in U.S. District Court in San Diego that found LG did not infringe the two patents asserted by MPT relating to video compression technology (U.S. Patents 5,136,377 and 5,227,878). In its second ruling, in docket 13-1620 (http://1.usa.gov/1jFwhcu), the federal circuit upheld LG’s August 2013 win in San Diego federal court on preclusion grounds in another patent infringement lawsuit MPT had filed against LG involving the same two patents. LG is “very pleased that the appeals court has vindicated the position we have maintained all along -- that LG products do not infringe MPT’s patents,” the company said in a statement. “With hundreds of such patents of our own, LG Electronics is a leader in the very type of video compression technology MPT had wrongly accused LG of infringing.” MPT didn’t immediately comment.

The FCC needs to work with the states to ensure that 911 accountability across jurisdictions “is not diluted,” said FCC Public Safety Bureau Chief David Simpson in a speech at a NARUC meeting Wednesday, according to a prepared version of the speech the FCC posted Thursday. The FCC and states’ “combined jurisdiction is clear, and we need to adjust our governance to make that clear as well,” he said. The FCC plans to explore 911 accountability issues in the coming months, including ways to ensure all participants are “fully accountable,” including for the carriers, Simpson said. “The buck stops with the carrier,” he said. “The transition to IP does not -- and will not -- absolve providers’ responsibilities for ensuring that 911 functions as our citizens expect it to function.” Simpson said its investigation of a multi-state 911 outage April 9-10 that affected IP-based facilities supporting 911 calls revealed that there’s “a need for close coordination between critical service providers in the end-to-end 911 chain.” Any lack of a shared operational picture, common situational awareness, or a clearly designated “tier one"-level operations center empowered to coordinate rapid localization of problems discovered by other providers can put public safety at risk, Simpson said (http://fcc.us/1yyf20b).

The U.S. could help restart recently stalled growth in trade of technology goods through the completion of Trans-Pacific Partnership and Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, said TechAmerica in a report (http://bit.ly/1oYIhoV). “These new agreements could expand U.S. free trade markets to 53 countries, creating significant opportunities for U.S. technology companies,” TechAmerica said in a news release Tuesday (http://bit.ly/1ww0AD1). Tech goods exports totaled $205 billion in 2013 and imports accounted for $351 billion, the report said. Many of the tech imports are part of a global supply chain, where U.S. multinational companies create and design the products in the U.S. while producing the final product overseas, the report said. Often such imports represent “an intra-company transfer” as U.S. firms bring their products into the U.S. for sale from overseas production facilities, the study found. While both exports and imports have recovered since the recession, “the past two years have seen a slowdown in the growth rate as key overseas markets have experienced economic malaise and the economic recovery in the United States has been slow,” said TechAmerica. NAFTA partners Mexico and Canada were by far the largest destination for U.S. tech exports, accounting for $39 billion and $28 billion worth, respectively, said the group.

Intellectual property company Inventergy filed a patent complaint Tuesday against telecom software and product manufacturer Genband, Inventergy said in a news release (http://on.mktw.net/1mejM2r). Inventergy is alleging Genband infringed on five of its VoIP and information management services patents. Inventergy owns over 750 telecom-related patents. The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court in Plano, Texas. Genband did not comment.

Friday’s rural broadband order (CD July 14 p11) was “another important step in modernizing the nation’s phone network,” said Benton Foundation Policy Director Amina Fazlullah in a statement (http://bit.ly/1nnYhwf). “As the public switched telephone network makes a complex transition to Internet Protocol (IP)-enabled networks, regulators must protect the nation’s core values to ensure the newest technologies benefit all Americans,” she said Friday. “Universal service, consumer protection, competition, and access to emergency services must be part of communications networks whether they be copper, fiber, or wireless. The FCC’s experiments to bring broadband to rural areas are needed."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and its Our Fair Deal coalition (http://bit.ly/1ok0x97) partners released two letters to Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiators highlighting how the TPP could strengthen the position of copyright holders, said Jeremy Malcolm, senior global policy analyst, and Maira Sutton, global policy analyst, in an EFF blog post (http://bit.ly/1qkJWnZ) Wednesday. The letters address TPP’s “copyright term extension proposals” (http://bit.ly/1rTXmLR) and its “intermediary liability proposals” (http://bit.ly/1qKR4MK), they said. On liability proposals, “countries around the Pacific rim are being pressured to agree to proposed text for the TPP that would require them to adopt a facsimile” of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, said the blog post. “Industry lobbyists are pushing for an even stricter regime, dubbed ‘notice and staydown,’ that would make it harder than ever before for users and innovators to safely publish creative, transformational content online,” it said. Concerning copyright term extensions, the TPP would extend the “rash 20 year extension of the term of copyright protection” to “all other TPP negotiating countries,” it said. “This would be a senseless assault on the public domain and on those libraries, authors, educators, users and others who depend upon it,” it said.