Aereo and Internet Television: A Call to Save the Dukes (A La Carte)

If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it is probably a duck. The most recent U.S. Supreme Court decision regarding the Copyright Act employed this “duck test” when determining that Aereo, an Internet content-streaming company, violated the Copyright Act by infringing on the copyrights of television broadcast networks. The Supreme Court ruled that Aereo\u27s Internet streaming services resembled cable television transmissions too closely. Therefore, by streaming copyrighted programming to its subscribers without the cable compulsory license, Aereo violated the Transmit Clause of the 1976 Copyright Act. Subsequently, Aereo used this Supreme Court decision to obtain a compulsory license from the Copyright Office but was denied. Forced back into litigation, Aereo filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy This Issue Brief describes Aereo’s technology, the litigation that followed, and the related precedent, and concludes that the district court should have granted Aereo a Section 111 Statutory License in line with the Supreme Court’s “duck test.” It considers the implications of the Court’s preliminary injunction against Aereo’s “a la carte” TV technology, what this means for the future of similar technological innovation, and the effects on consumers and competition

Aereo and Internet Television: A Call to Save the Dukes (A La Carte)

If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it is probably a duck. The most recent U.S. Supreme Court decision regarding the Copyright Act employed this “duck test” when determining that Aereo, an Internet content-streaming company, violated the Copyright Act by infringing on the copyrights of television broadcast networks. The Supreme Court ruled that Aereo\u27s Internet streaming services resembled cable television transmissions too closely. Therefore, by streaming copyrighted programming to its subscribers without the cable compulsory license, Aereo violated the Transmit Clause of the 1976 Copyright Act. Subsequently, Aereo used this Supreme Court decision to obtain a compulsory license from the Copyright Office but was denied. Forced back into litigation, Aereo filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy This Issue Brief describes Aereo’s technology, the litigation that followed, and the related precedent, and concludes that the district court should have granted Aereo a Section 111 Statutory License in line with the Supreme Court’s “duck test.” It considers the implications of the Court’s preliminary injunction against Aereo’s “a la carte” TV technology, what this means for the future of similar technological innovation, and the effects on consumers and competition

Political Economy of Renewable Energy Deployment in India: Case Study of Karnataka

Over the past few years, India has paid considerable attention to the development of its Renewable Energy (RE) capacity. This can be attributed to the country's energy security concerns, necessity to provide reliable electricity to its citizens and the global need to mitigate climate change. India's ambitious targets project that by 2020, 10 per cent of its power shall come from renewable sources and by 2022 there will be 165 GW of RE capacity installed. Of this target capacity, there will be a 100 GW of installed solar capacity, 60 MW from wind and 5 MW from other sources such as small hydro and bioenergy (Vashishtha 2014). This implies that within the next five years, India has to undertake the mammoth task of almost doubling its RE contribution to the energy mix from the current 6 per cent. The solar sector faces the largest challenge of scaling up its capacity by almost 20 times in six years, from the current 4.7 GW (MNRE 2016).Such tremendous growth can only be accomplished through an effective policy and regulatory framework, which is essential to incentivise the deployment of RE. Pegels and Lu?tkenhorst (2014) state that government intervention is particularly necessary for energy policy because market mechanisms such as falling prices alone are not sufficient to ensure the development of long-term sustainable infrastructure. They further say that as a nation's energy policy determines the future of the basic public services, it is important to have a holistic view from the political, socio-economic and technological aspects. In India however, RE policy interventions have not taken such a holistic approach. Current national policies such as preferential-grid access, Feed in Tariffs (FiT), Renewable Purchase Obligations (RPO) on utilities, tax holidays, RE Certificate (REC) trading and Accelerated Depreciation (AD) only address techno-economic barriers. While these are surely important incentives, in the past they haven't been sufficient for Indian states to meet their RE targets. Further, it appears unlikely that India will manage to meet its FY 16 targets in the next few months looking at the large gap between target and achievement (Figure 1). does India need to do to ensure that it's RE aspirations do not remain a pipedream? As Sreekumar and Chitnis (2014) point out, in order to have a complete idea of the electricity sector, in addition to techno-economic considerations, a political perspective is also imperative. Hence, this article attempts to answer the question posed above by providing insights into the political economy of the RE sector in India. Key observations from an extensive stakeholder consultation (n=20) conducted in the Indian state of Karnataka have been used in this study (CSTEP 2014).This case study revealed that despite high targets and two comprehensive RE policies (GoK 2014; GoK 2010) the deployment of RE technologies has faced significant barriers in Karnataka during the past five years. The state was unable to meet its targets for RE capacity installation in all renewable sources (biomass, wind, solar, small-hydro) that were laid down in the Karnataka 2009-2014 RE policy. Although the state did have an impressive 10 per cent of its electricity from RE sources in Financial Year (FY) '13, there was an unmet peak demand of 1.4 GW and electricity deficit of 14 per cent (CSTEP 2013)

Prevalence of hypertension among rural population of Doiwala block, Dehradun, Uttarakhand India

Hypertension is a major health problem in developed as well as in developing countries. The prevalence pattern of hypertension in developing countries is different from that in the developed countries. The increasing epidemic of hypertension in India was documented by studies done at various places across the country. Various studies estimated a prevalence rate of hypertension among urban population ranging from 1.24% in 1949 to 36.4% in 2003 and for rural people from 1.99% in 1958 to 21.2 % in 1994.  Uttarakhand is a newly formed and one of the hilly states of the India with more than 70% rural population. Since very scanty reports are available on prevalence of hypertension from Uttarakhand so this community based cross sectional study was conducted to know about the prevalence of hypertension in rural population of an area of Uttarakhand. Gumaniwala, a village near Rishikesh was the place of survey.  A total of 340 peoples aged 30 years and above were selected through simple random sampling method for the study. All the subjects underwent an interview through a pretested questionnaire and clinical examination. Blood pressure of all the study subjects was measured using standardized technique. All the data were analyzed using SPSS software version 16.0. The prevalence of hypertension was presented as percentage. The association between categorical variables and hypertension were tested using Chi square test. A p value of < 0.05 was considered statistically significant.  The overall prevalence of hypertension and pre-hypertension was 33.2% and 40.6% respectively. The prevalence of hypertension among females is higher (34.2%) than in males (32.4%). Among all studied variables age, smoking and Body mass index (BMI) were significantly related with hypertension (p<0.05). Since prevalence of hypertension is associated with socio-demographic factors hence the identification of the variables influencing hypertension is an important aspect for taking appropriate preventive measures to stop increase in the incidence of hypertension

Steganography based image compression

The intention of image compression is to discard worthless data from image so as to shrink the quantity of data bits favored for image depiction, to lessen the storage space, broadcast bandwidth and time. Likewise, data hiding convenes scenarios by implanting the unfamiliar data into a picture in invisibility manner. The review offers, a method of image compression approaches by using DWT transform employing steganography scheme together in combination of SPIHT to compress an image