EU's Cookie Law Should Crumble

from the not-a-good-situation dept

A bunch of folks have been sending in versions of this story about new EU cookie rules that will require anyone placing cookies on your computer to first get consent. This is the sort of law that is passed by people who don't understand the technology at all, and misinterpret "cookies" as automatically being malicious. This is the sort of thing that people who were first understanding the web got concerned about a decade ago, until they realized it was nothing to worry about. Except... it appears some people haven't quite figured that out yet, and tragically, they make laws in the EU.

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EU Officials Push Back Against Hollywood... Sorta; Note That Internet Access Should Be A Right... Sorta

from the well,-it's-something dept

The pendulum on the entertainment industry's push to have countries force ISPs to kick accused (not convicted) file sharers offline via a "three strikes" policy keeps swinging back and forth. While there was some capitulation recently, with the EU Parliament group that was negotiating with the EU Commission agreeing to remove the clause claiming that internet access was a human right, Hephaestus was the first of a few of you to send in word that negotiations have moved back a bit in the other direction. The new agreed upon text says that internet access is a human right, and that anyone should have the right to defend themselves against being kicked off the internet. But... (and it's a big one) if internet access is such a human right, why should anyone ever need to defend themselves? That's because the new text doesn't really mean what it says. It will still allow countries to force ISPs to kick people off the internet without judicial review. The only thing it adds is that people will be able to appeal after the fact. That's really not that helpful.

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EU Worried About IP Harming Innovation... But Gets It Backwards

from the sigh dept

Rob H alerts us to an article that starts out sounding reasonable... pointing out that politicians in the EU are meeting because they're worried about intellectual property laws holding back innovation in Europe... but then it goes off the rails. You see, they're not worried that the laws are holding back innovation because they're too strict, but because they're too weak. As you look, though, you realize that these politicians have basically been lobbied by businesses that want protectionist policies. The "report" they discuss talks not about how to better incentivize innovation, but how to "better favour business." What that means is they went and spoke with a bunch of incumbent businesses, not innovative startups, and those businesses said they want more patents. Someone should send them a copy of Boldrin and Levine's book...

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EU Gov't Study: People Won't Pay For Content; New Business Models Needed

from the wow dept

Just as more and more European countries are trying to ban or block sites like The Pirate Bay, it seems like a few more politicians should take the time to read the new EU study on digital competitiveness (found via P2P Blog). In it, the authors study the question of paid content and "pirated" content, and find that an awful lot of people have absolutely no interest in paying for content, no matter what -- and that the entertainment industry is exaggerating the impact of things like file sharing, since so few people would actually pay for the content in the first place (even if it weren't available for free). Rather than blaming "piracy," the report properly notes that it's a shift in technology (from atoms to bits) that has created the business model problems today:

De-materialisation of creative content distribution is shaking up the business models of the creative industries, with both potential opportunities and potential losses and bringing new players into the media industries' landscape.

It goes on to point out that the answers to these questions aren't going to come from lawsuits, but by recognizing how people (especially younger generations) view such things and putting in place business models that work. Still, the report does hedge in places, talking about the need for a "favorable regulatory environment," though it's not at all clear what's meant by that. But it's good to see a gov't report recognizing this is really a business model (and technology) issue, rather than a legal problem as many in the legacy entertainment industry would have you believe.

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EU Antitrust Regulator Scolded For Simply Ignoring Evidence In Intel's Favor

from the well-that's-convenient dept

It's no secret that we think that EU antitrust regulators are way too aggressive in pursuing antitrust claims against US tech companies. The EU continues to view market size as a problem, rather than looking as closely at actual anticompetitive behavior. And, now, it's coming out that the EU's antitrust regulators may be so overzealous to take down companies that they'll ignore evidence that goes against their hypothesis. The EU's ombudsman has apparently issued a report scolding EU antitrust regulators for flat-out ignoring evidence from a Dell executive concerning Intel and AMD. The EU, as you probably know, fined Intel €1 billion a few months back, finding that the company had abused monopoly powers to force hardware makers into using its chips. But, the EU's ombud discovered that the antitrust regulators had interviewed Dell execs who said simply that AMD's chips didn't have the performance of Intel chips. In fact, in their tests, AMD's chips were "very poor," so they chose Intel chips entirely on the basis of performance. And... conveniently, the EU's antitrust regulators simply failed to record this info and did not include it in their report. Of course, you can make anyone appear to have violated antitrust rules if you purposely ignore all evidence to the contrary.

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EU Telco Chief: Business Model Failure Leads To Piracy... Not The Other Way Around

from the could-they-be-getting-it? dept

Could it be that some politicians are actually figuring this out? Reader Arhac alerts us to the news that the EU's telecommunications chief, Viviane Reding, gave a speech where she noted that it wasn't "piracy" that was destroying the recording industry's business model, but it was the failed business model that was leading to "piracy":

"In my view, growing internet piracy is a vote of no-confidence in existing business models and legal solutions. It should be a wake-up call for policy-makers."

Of course, it's not clear what sort of solution she's proposing -- and it sounds a bit like she's suggesting putting in place a universal licensing fee for online music, which isn't much of an improvement. Luckily the Pirate Party's Christian Engstrom points out the problem with where that thinking leads, by noting that citizens shouldn't just be thought about as "consumers":

"We are citizens... and we do have certain human rights according to the European convention on human rights which includes the right to information freedom."

Still, given where things are in the US, it's impressive enough to find multiple politicians who aren't just buying the major record labels' story that it's "piracy" that's killing their business models, rather than the other way around.

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EU Says No To Three Strikes On Accusation Only; Requires Court Order

from the that's-a-start dept

One of the biggest problems with most of the proposed "three strikes" laws out there (the entertainment industry likes to call them "graduated response laws," but I prefer Bill Patry's recent description of calling them "the digital guillotine") is that it works based on accusations rather than actual conviction. This is a pretty significant issue if you believe in innocent until proven guilty -- combined with the rather long and detailed history of the entertainment industry falsely accusing people of file sharing. The EU Parliament has rejected the various three strikes laws as civil rights violations in the past, but the issue keeps coming up again (especially considering France is still insisting such a law is necessary. However, in the latest vote, the EU Parliament has said that no one should be kicked offline without a court order, meaning that a court would need to review any accusation, rather than just the ISP being told to kick those accused of file sharing offline.

No restriction may be imposed on the fundamental rights and freedoms of end users, without a prior ruling by the judicial authorities … save when public security is threatened...

Your move, France.

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EU Reaches Draft Deal That Would Make Three Strikes Provisions More Difficult

from the good-for-them dept

Over in the EU, they've been battling back and forth over telco reform, that has been hung up on the issue of ISPs and three strikes regulations, with countries like France wanting to make sure such things were allowed, and other countries worrying that cutting people off from the internet violated their basic human rights. However, it appears that a "compromise" of sorts has been worked out, whereby countries will be able to enact three strikes laws if they involve an independent and impartial tribunal, rather than the ISPs themselves or copyright holders. So, basically, France can continue down its path (since it was going to establish a gov't bureaucracy anyway).

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EU Rejects Copyright Extension... For Now

from the good-news dept

Following the recent debates on copyright extension, there's a bit of good news. It appears that the Council of the European Union rejected yet another attempt to extend the copyright on sound recordings from 50 to 95 years. Unfortunately, it doesn't sound like this is (by any means) the end of such proposals. In fact, it's been made clear that this rejection is just a step in the process towards copyright extension. Of course, a bunch of recording industry lobbyists are complaining about how unfair this is, but they fail to explain how it could possibly be seen as fair to retroactively change the deal made with the public to take away the public domain. The entire purpose of copyright is to put in place a limited-time monopoly to act as incentive to create new works. Obviously, that incentive worked, or the content wouldn't have been created. Unfortunately, the recording industry now wants people to believe that copyright is some sort of welfare system for musicians, whereby they should continue getting paid for work they did over 50 years ago. It's a total distortion of the purpose of copyright law -- and one that will cost consumers dearly, and pay musicians little, but enrich the recording industry tremendously. Yet, because of some sob stories about how musicians need this, politicians across Europe have been leaping on board.

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Google So Dominant That A French Town Might Need To Change Its Name?

from the or-hire-some-better-seo? dept

Apparently, the French coastal town of Eu is so upset that people can't find the town via a Google search, that it's considering changing its name. The mayor of the town is quite concerned about how this is impacting the town's tourism business -- which does show the cultural dominance of Google, these days, on some things. Of course, as the article notes, a search on Eu french town turns up plenty of results -- though, even those are currently dominated by stories like this one about the name search. Perhaps the town just needs to hire better SEO experts...

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Google, Too, Chooses Lobbying Over Competing

from the is-that-so-googley? dept

Microsoft's increasing regulatory headache from the European Commission concerns its Internet Explorer browser that comes standard with Windows. We've said before that this investigation is prima facie silly given the vibrant and increasing competition in the browser market, but it looks like things are just going to get worse for Microsoft. First, it was Mozilla deciding to complain that Microsoft was creating an unhealthy browser market by bundling IE with Windows. Now, Google is jumping onto the bandwagon and arguing that Microsoft's policy limits competition and harms innovation.

This is primarily problematic because the browser market is anything but uncompetitive. Firefox has created what is widely considered a better product, and, wouldn't you know it, gained considerable market share around the world (as high as 30% in some regions). More recently, Google introduced its own browser, Chrome, that launched to accolades and much user adoption. By introducing regulators into the browser market, these companies will all be distracted from providing users with the best possible product.

But what's even more confounding is Google's involvement. Obviously the company desires control of most browsers so it can set the defaults in its favor, but it is increasingly obvious that Google should not be bringing regulatory attention to the Internet -- especially when it comes to antitrust questions. Although claims of Google's "monopoly" are as specious as Internet Explorer's, making noise about antitrust is likely to come back and bite Google, especially given the rising number of political enemies they have.

Kevin Donovan is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Kevin Donovan and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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EU Committee Ignores All The Research; Approves Copyright Extension

from the stealing-from-the-public dept

Who needs evidence when you have bogus emotional appeals? That seems to be the reasoning behind the EU Parliament legal affairs committee's decision to approve a plan to extend performance copyrights from 50 to 95 years. This despite a coalition of intellectual property experts who pointed out that such extension harms innovation and only serves to help the record labels. It also ignored plenty of research on the harm done by copyright extension. There is, once again, simply no good reason to retroactively change the deal that was made between the musicians and the public at the time of creation. This is nothing more than defrauding the public, by going back on a clear deal that was made. And, for what? The money (despite the slick marketing campaign) isn't going to musicians for the most part. It's going directly into the coffers of (you guessed it) the major record labels. None of this appears to have been addressed by the committee -- which seems to have fallen for the "we must keep paying those poor session musicians for a single performance they made 90 years ago" marketing campaign. This still isn't final -- it still needs to be approved by the Council of Ministers, but the fact that it's even gotten this far is troubling.

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European Parliament Study Finds Video Games Are Good For Kids

from the put-away-your-moral-panic dept

For the past decade or so, the press and certain politicians have been somewhat successful in building a moral panic about video games and the supposed harm they do to children. The problem is that there's almost no evidence that this is true -- and almost all of the evidence that claims this is true doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Often, the moral panic-inducing results are actually either the researcher or (more likely) the press coming up with a conclusion that does not match with the actual study results.

However, in just the last year, we've finally been seeing prominent researchers and politicians start to push back on this notion of video games causing harm. Last year, two Harvard professors came out with a book reviewing all of the research and adding some of their own, all of which showed no evidence that video games made kids violent (in fact, it found that it was the kids who didn't participate in video games that you should be worried about.

Perhaps even more surprising, though, is that some politicians are now pushing back, as well. A study done in the EU Parliament is now noting that video games are actually good for kids, noting that they can help "stimulate learning of facts and skills such as strategic thinking, creativity, cooperation and innovative thinking, which are important skills in the information society." The report does, unfortunately, still claim that in some cases violent video games may stimulate violence (though, without much proof), but it's still surprising to see a political report on video games that sees them as being useful.

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Disappointing: Mozilla Siding With Bogus EU Antitrust Action Against Microsoft

from the just-go-out-and-compete dept

Last month, it seemed silly that EU regulators were pursuing Microsoft for antitrust violations in the browser market for bundling IE. It was clear that some of the initial complaints had come from Opera -- an also-ran in the browser market. However, it seemed silly because there is vibrant and growing competition in the marketplace. Firefox has continued to grow its market share, and in the past few years we've seen new entrants in the browser market from Apple and Google -- both of whom have established small, but significant footholds.

So, it's especially disappointing to read that the Mozilla Foundation appears to be siding with the regulators, complaining about Microsoft's actions. Obviously, Mozilla is competing with Microsoft in this space, so at a first pass it may seem in their best interests to lobby the EU to punish Microsoft. But it's disingenuous to say the least. Mozilla got where it did because it competed effectively. It built a better, more secure browser that many people made the choice to support over IE. In fact, Firefox's chief architect, apparently unaware of what his "bosses" were cooking up, seems to have recently contradicted the Mozilla Foundation's new position, where he admitted that he couldn't see how anyone with a straight face could claim that Microsoft's ability to bundle created a monopoly, noting that Firefox's success in growing marketshare showed that making yourself "demonstrably better" worked. Oops.

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EU Court Says Simply Taking Someone's Photo Can Violate Their Civil Rights

from the who-did-what-now? dept

I'm definitely a big supporter of privacy rights, but sometimes it seems that big time privacy rights supporters go too far. The latest is that an EU court on human rights has declared that simply taking someone's photograph can be a violation of their privacy. In the past, laws in Europe have said that you can't necessarily publish a photo of someone without their permission, but merely taking the photo was allowed. No longer. In the press release about the decision, the court explained its reasoning:

"The Court reiterated that the concept of private life was a broad one which encompassed the right to identity. It stressed that a person's image revealed his or her unique characteristics and constituted one of the chief attributes of his or her personality. The Court added that effective protection of the right to control one's image presupposed, in the present circumstances, obtaining the consent of the person concerned when the picture was being taken and not just when it came to possible publication."

Now, I could potentially understand such reasoning in private settings, but the statements above don't seem to limit the issue to private settings. The situation in the case itself also highlights what's a gray area between public and private. It involved a hospital that photographed a newborn baby -- as it does with all newborn babies. The parents protested and demanded the negatives, claiming that the photograph violated their baby's privacy rights -- and the court agreed. What's troubling is the implications of such a ruling, that you simply cannot photograph anyone without their official approval. This will almost certainly lead to new lawsuits, and even begins to raise some other questions. If it's a violation of someone's privacy rights to photograph them, at what point is it a violation of their rights just to see them?

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EU Proposal Would Outright Ban BitTorrent Sites, Make ISPs Copyright Cops & Use 3 Strikes

from the just-what-the-industry-ordered dept

You have to give the entertainment industry lobbyists credit for one thing: they never give up. When one of their proposals gets slapped down they always have many other efforts underway to give a similar proposal life somewhere else. So what if the EU Parliament said that using a three strikes policy went against basic civil rights? Just get another person to come up with a proposal that's even more strict. That seems to be what's happening as the EU Parliament may consider a proposal by Manuel Medina Ortega, which TorrentFreak notes basically is a perfect wishlist of the Big Copyright players. You've got your three strikes policies, your demands that ISPs "take responsibility" and (best of all) the declaration that all BitTorrent and file sharing services are 100% illegal -- no questions asked. Hmm. Apparently someone forgot to inform all the creative folks who are happily using such systems to distribute their works... I don't know enough about European politics to know if this is likely to go anywhere, but given earlier EU Parliament rulings, I'm hopeful that this is quickly tossed aside as being completely out of touch with reality.

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EU Regulators Can't Resist: Go After Microsoft For Antitrust Yet Again

from the punching-bag dept

Microsoft is becoming quite the antitrust punching bag over in Europe. After a years long fight concerning antitrust charges in Europe, Microsoft finally gave in and agreed to pay up. So, now the matter is over with, right? No, of course not. EU regulators are back at it, telling Microsoft that the company is probably violating antitrust laws by bundling Microsoft Internet Explorer with Windows. This seems like an odd issue to bring up now as there is increasing competition in the browser market. Firefox's marketshare has continued to climb. Google has entered the market with Chrome. Safari is gaining increasing life (in part due to the iPhone) and there are numerous other upstarts as well. The idea that Microsoft is somehow exerting undue influence on the browser market (a market that, for the most part, involves free software) seems rather odd. It seems to confirm the initial opinion that many had of the original antitrust lawsuit in the EU against Microsoft. It's more about a simple dislike for Microsoft than any actual antitrust violation.

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Why Is The EU Funding DRM?

from the focus,-people,-focus dept

CaptainCode writes in to point to an article about an EU-funded project to create new methods for DRM. It makes you wonder why Europeans tax money is going to fund something like DRM. By now, plenty of folks are realizing that DRM serves no good purpose. It does not stop any kind of unauthorized use, and tends to piss off legitimate customers by putting unnecessary restrictions on them (devaluing the content). Its only purpose, really, is as a weak attempt to keep an obsolete business model in place. How is that possibly in the best interests of European citizens?

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EU Catches On: Drug Companies Abuse Patent System To Block Competition

from the well,-duh dept

I'm long overdue on some promised posts concerning the patent system and the harm it does for the healthcare field, but it's going to have to wait a little while longer. In the meantime, it's good to see that more people (including those in a position to do something about it) are noticing this as well. While we often feel that the EU goes overboard in declaring monopolies or anti-competitive behavior, it's finally realizing the one area where monopolies really do tend to be a problem: patents. The European Commission has released a report detailing how pharmaceutical companies regularly abuse the patent process for anti-competitive purposes, rather than to promote and ensure progress. It's unlikely that much will come of this now, but it's good to see people starting to recognize that the patent system can often be more of a problem than a solution.

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European Council Rejects EU Parliament's Amendment Against Three Strikes Rule

from the it's-good-to-be-the-king dept

Earlier this year, we noted that the European Parliament overwhelmingly rejected the idea of various countries implementing any kind of policy that would kick file sharers off the internet -- often referred to as "three strikes" legislation. However, TorrentFreak is now reporting that, despite 88% of Parliament voting in favor of rejecting any such law for being a violation of basic human rights, the European Council (made up of the heads of state of various EU governments, has rejected the amendment drafted by the Parliament. Why? Well, TorrentFreak notes that French President Sarkozy just so happens to be President of the European Council, and as we recently noted, France just recently moved forward in approving a three strikes law, which was originally championed by Sarkozy. So, rather than listen to the vast majority of the EU Parliament, Sarkozy has apparently convinced the Council to let him push through this particular law, despite the widespread concerns about its draconian nature.

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