Amazon has decided to cancel plans to develop a new campus in New York’s Long Island City, taking with it the promise of 25,000 new jobs and $2.5 billion in investment. In recent weeks, a debate has heated up between government officials who supported the e-commerce leader’s plans and New York politicians, activists and labor union leaders who have criticized a lack of transparency regarding deal specifics and questioned the necessity to provide Amazon with tax incentives worth billions. Despite the debate, the news still came as a surprise to many, especially real estate developers and renters who were rushing to the Long Island City neighborhood. Read more

In what has been an annual presentation at the HPA Tech Retreat, Thompson Coburn attorney Jim Burger delivered his update of legislation and litigation from the nation’s capital. His take on “administrative-legislative developments in copyright” was summed up by a slide of stars and the sounds of crickets, reflecting the government shutdown. Burger first briefly defined copyright as “an original expression in a fixed tangible medium,” and described the four-factor test that defines non-exclusivity. Read more

What if you could restore a film — at 12 million frames per second — in two weeks? That’s a case study that Video Gorillas chief executive Jason Brahms described in detail at the HPA Tech Retreat, capping off how his company has spent the last ten years developing tools enabled by artificial intelligence. In 2007, Brahms, who was with Sony Pictures Imageworks, first met a developer pitching his facial recognition software. “I asked him if he had software that could compare different movie cuts and find differences between them,” he recalled. Read more

In a Wednesday morning session at the HPA Tech Retreat in Palm Desert, Netflix’s Rohit Puri, engineering manager of the Cloud Media Systems team took attendees on a tour of the Netflix Media Database. The Netflix service experience, he explained, is made up of a seamless user interface, personalized content recommendation, efficient media streaming and curated content catalog. Other assets that “go a long way in helping users find content,” added Puri, include promotional artwork and video. Read more

Google has selected Equinix for its Los Angeles cable landing station that will support the Curie subsea cable system to Chile. The high-capacity subsea cable, expected to go live this year, will connect in El Segundo, California at the Equinix LA4 International Business Exchange data center. “With the significant increase in global data traffic, we see corporations running global businesses demanding access to high-capacity, low-latency networks capable of connecting them to data centers across oceans with stringent levels of reliability,” said Equinix VP of business development Jim Poole. Read more