Techdirt. Stories filed under "belgium"

Some EU Nations Still Haven't Implemented The 2013 Marrakesh Treaty For The Blind

Glyn Moody — Wed, 5 Dec 2018 19:36:47 PST

The annals of copyright are littered with acts of extraordinary stupidity and selfishness on the part of the publishers, recording industry and film studios. But few can match the refusal by the publishing industry to make it easier for the blind to gain access to reading material that would otherwise be blocked by copyright laws. Indeed, the fact that it took so long for what came to be known as the Marrakesh Treaty to be adopted is a shameful testimony to the publishing industry's belief that copyright maximalism is more important than the rights of the visually impaired. As James Love, Director of Knowledge Ecology International (KEI), wrote in 2013, when the treaty was finally adopted:

It difficult to comprehend why this treaty generated so much opposition from publishers and patent holders, and why it took five years to achieve this result. As we celebrate and savor this moment, we should thank all of those who resisted the constant calls to lower expectations and accept an outcome far less important than what was achieved today.

Even once the treaty was agreed, the publishing industry continued to fight against making it easier for the visually impaired to enjoy better access to books. In 2016, Techdirt reported that the Association of American Publishers was still lobbying to water down the US ratification package. Fortunately, as an international treaty, the Marrakesh Treaty came into force around the world anyway, despite the US foot-dragging.

Thanks to heavy lobbying by the region's publishers, the EU has been just as bad. It only formally ratified the Marrakesh Treaty in October of this year. As an article on the IPKat blog explains, the EU has the authority to sign and ratify treaties on behalf of the EU Member States, but it then requires the treaty to be implemented in national law:

In this case, the EU asked that national legislators reform their domestic copyright law by transposing the 2017/1564 Directive of 13 September 2017. The Directive requires that all necessary national measures be implemented by 12 October 2018. Not all member states complied by this deadline, whereby the EU Commission introduced infringement procedures against them for non-compliance. The list of the non-compliant countries is as follows:

Belgium, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Germany, Estonia, Greece, Finland, France, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Latvia, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, UK

The IPKat post points out that some of the countries listed there, such as the UK and France, have in fact introduced exceptions to copyright to enable the making of accessible copies to the visually impaired. It's still a bit of mystery why they are on the list:

At the moment, the Commission has not published details regarding the claimed non-compliance by the countries listed. We cannot assume that the non-compliance proceedings were launched because the countries failed to introduce the exceptions in full, because countries can also be sanctioned if the scope of the exception implemented is too broad, so much so that it is disproportionately harmful to the interest of rightsholders. So we will have to wait and see what part of the implementation was deemed not up to scratch by the Commission.

As that indicates, it's possible that some of the countries mentioned are being criticized for non-compliance because they were too generous to the visually impaired. If it turns out that industry lobbyists are behind this, it would be yet another astonishing demonstration of selfishness from publishers whose behavior in connection with the Marrakesh Treaty has been nothing short of disgusting.

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Pompous 'International Grand Committee' Signs Useless But Equally Pompous 'Declaration On Principles Of Law Governing The Internet'

Mike Masnick — Wed, 28 Nov 2018 13:35:28 PST

So just a few weeks after a bunch of countries (and companies and organizations) signed onto a weird and mostly empty Paris Call for Trust and Safety in Cyberspace, a group of nine countries -- Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, France, Ireland, Latvia, Singapore and the UK, have declared themselves the "International Grand Committee on Disinformation and Fake News" and signed onto a Principles of the Law Governing the Internet. If that list of countries sound familiar, that's because it's the same list of countries that put on that grandstanding inquisition of Facebook that produced fake news in its own way, by falsely claiming that Facebook had discovered Russians extracting 3 billion data points via its API back in 2014 (it wasn't Russia, it was Pinterest; it wasn't 3 billion, it was 6 million; it wasn't abuse of the API, but using it correctly).

The Declaration makes some grand pronouncements:

Noting that:— the world in which the traditional institutions of democratic government operate is changing at an unprecedented pace; it is an urgent and critical priority for legislatures and governments to ensure that the fundamental rights and safeguards of their citizens are not violated or undermined by the unchecked march of technology; the democratic world order is suffering a crisis of trust from the growth of disinformation, the proliferation of online aggression and hate speech, concerted attacks on our common democratic values of tolerance and respect for the views of others, and the widespread misuse of data belonging to citizens to enable these attempts to sabotage open and democratic processes, including elections.

Affirming that:— representative democracy is too important and too hard-won to be left undefended from online harms, in particular aggressive campaigns of disinformation launched from one country against citizens in another, and the co-ordinated activity of fake accounts using data-targeting methods to try manipulate the information that people see on social media.

Believing that:— it is incumbent on us to create a system of global internet governance that can serve to protect the fundamental rights and freedoms of generations to come, based on established codes of conduct for agencies working for nation states, and govern the major international tech platforms which have created the systems that serve online content to billions of users around the world.

Okay. So what does it all mean? Well, here are the details of the "declaration":

i. The internet is global and law relating to it must derive from globally agreed principles;
ii. The deliberate spreading of disinformation and division is a credible threat to the continuation and growth of democracy and a civilising global dialogue;
iii. Global technology firms must recognise their great power and demonstrate their readiness to accept their great responsibility as holders of influence;
iv. Social Media companies should be held liable if they fail to comply with a judicial, statutory or regulatory order to remove harmful and misleading content from their platforms, and should be regulated to ensure they comply with this requirement;
v. Technology companies must demonstrate their accountability to users by making themselves fully answerable to national legislatures and other organs of representative democracy.

Of course, in the context of the committee who created this Declaration having now been revealed to have created "fake news" itself, this kind comes off pretty... weak. But also, the whole thing is kind of meaningless. The companies do recognize their "power" and have been trying to deal with this issue. Yes, perhaps they didn't grasp the severity of the issue in the past, but they certainly have more recently. But simple declarations and pronouncements don't really do anything useful in "solving" those issues. That's because much of it is a human nature issue, and expecting tech companies to "take responsibility" for human nature is... well... nonsense.

All That On-Off Excitement About CETA Last Year? It's Happening Again

Glyn Moody — Thu, 30 Mar 2017 03:36:22 PDT

Remember last year when CETA, the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement between Canada and the EU, was on, then off, then on again, then off again, and finally on again? After that, CETA was ratified by the European Union, and now needs to be approved by all Member States' parliaments before it is definitively in force. Well, guess what? One of those parliaments -- in the French-speaking Belgian region of Wallonia, which has already derailed CETA before -- could be about to block it again. As an article originally in The Globe and Mail reports:

The trade deal between Canada and the European Union is facing a new challenge from the Belgium region of Wallonia which is threatening to block final ratification of the agreement. Wallonia First Minister Paul Magnette said in an interview that his government will not support the CETA trade deal when it comes up for ratification unless changes are made to how disputes are resolved. Mr. Magnette also said his government is challenging the legality of the dispute resolution mechanism in the European Court of Justice, which could take at least two years to rule.

Yet again, the problem is mainly the corporate sovereignty chapter, which is emerging as a real trade deal killer (hint to governments: why not drop it?). But it's not just Wallonia that might stymie CETA. According to a post from the Council of Canadians, the final ratification of CETA also faces challenges in the Netherlands, France, Germany, Italy and Bulgaria. If one or more of those do halt the deal, another question arises:

If the full ratification of CETA is blocked, will the provisional application be undone? Council of Canadians trade campaigner Sujata Dey comments, "The German constitutional court has already ruled that provisional application can be undone. And in the country statements adopted by the European Council (the EU institution comprised of the heads of state or government of the member states, which sets the EU's overall political direction and priorities) many countries reiterated their right to undo provisional application."

It seems that as far as CETA is concerned, it ain't over until, well, it's completely over.

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Belgium Wants EU Nations To Collect And Store Personal Data Of Train, Bus And Boat Passengers

Glyn Moody — Fri, 6 Jan 2017 03:33:00 PST

It's become pretty common for the authorities to collect personal information about passengers from airlines, supposedly to ensure security. It's a sensitive area, though, as shown by the many years of fraught US-EU negotiations that were required in order to come up with a legal framework for transferring this data to the US when EU citizens were involved. However, not all EU countries are so concerned about that privacy thing. Belgium, for example, thinks that the current approach doesn't go far enough, and that it should be extended to include all forms of mass transport. As this EurActiv article notes, the Belgian parliament has already voted to bring in a national system for trains, buses and boats by May 2018, and the country is calling for the rest of the EU to follow suit:

In response to a number of terror attacks, Belgium wants greater control over who travels on its trains, buses and boats and will present its plans at the next meeting of EU interior ministers at the end of January.

However, there's a problem. Last year, the EU finally passed the EU Passenger Name Record (EUPNR) directive:

The EU PNR directive will oblige airlines to hand EU countries their passengers' data in order to help the authorities to fight terrorism and serious crime. It would require more systematic collection, use and retention of PNR data on air passengers, and would therefore have an impact on the rights to privacy and data protection.

Despite data protection safeguards that were included, resistance to bringing in this directive was fierce from many quarters. EurActiv says:

According to EU diplomats, the decision on air traffic passenger data was already a "big step" and that measure only applies to travellers going to or from third party destinations.

Against that background, asking the EU to extend the PNR scheme to include trains, buses and boats may be going too far, so to speak. Nonetheless, it's a bad idea that's now out there, and all-too likely to spread.

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Belgian Court Fines Microsoft For Failing To Comply With Its Impossible Order

Tim Cushing — Mon, 31 Oct 2016 06:32:12 PDT

You can't always get what you want. But if you try sometime, you just might fine... a company for being unable to deliver on the impossible.

Belgium has fined Skype €30,000 for failing to comply with a court request to intercept users' communications, something Skype claims was technically impossible at the time of the request.

According to Het Belang van Limburg, a Dutch-language newspaper in Belgium, the fine was delivered by the court in Mechelen because Skype had failed, in September 2012, to deliver up anything more than metadata in response to an investigation into a criminal organisation.

The court, failing to understand anything but its power to order people around, demanded that Skype turn over communications. Skype turned over the only thing it could actually obtain, explaining that its architecture didn't support the interception of calls. No dice. That only made the court angry.

The court was no more happy to have pointed out to it that Microsoft didn't actually fall under its jurisdiction. It maintains no data centers in Belgium, nor does it have anyone employed there. Microsoft suggested the court work with governments of countries where it actually maintains a presence and utilize their mutual assistance treaties.

None of these facts appear to have mattered. The court says Microsoft should be able to do the impossible because the law is the law.

Het Belang van Limburg quoted prosecutor Tim Hoogenbemt as saying: "Skype offers services in our country, so it needs to know the laws. And therefore know that the court may ask interception measures."

Sometimes the law isn't the law, though. Microsoft pointed out the law doesn't actually apply to it since it's a software provider, rather than a service provider.

And sometimes the law is an ass. The fine is still in place despite arguments of impossibility, illegality, and "not applicable" to the contrary. It may not stick. Microsoft is appealing the decision.

This isn't the first time Belgian courts have overreached. Back in 2009, Belgian officials blew off perfectly workable mutual assistance treaties, demanding user information directly from Yahoo's US headquarters. Yahoo, like Microsoft, pointed out that it has no data centers or employees in Belgium. Instead of rethinking its approach, the government took the company to criminal court. That court, like this one, decided to fine the company for doing the exact thing it was supposed to be doing: protecting its users' privacy.

And that's not the limit of Belgian exceptionalism. A "royal decree" from the Belgian government (which bypasses the Parliamentary approval process needed for actual legislation) forces ISPs to collect and store tons of info on their subscribers, including how many emails are sent, VoIP use (hello, Skype!), call metadata, etc. -- just in case law enforcement might need it. When it was pointed out this decree violated the EU's privacy directive, the government shrugged and called the agreement it signed "obsolete."

Given these decisions, it's not even useful advice to suggest just not doing business in Belgium. It quite obviously doesn't matter to the courts where the data or communications they're seeking are actually located.

EU-Canada Trade Deal Dodges Belgian Veto For Now, But Faces Multiple Legal Challenges

Glyn Moody — Fri, 28 Oct 2016 15:55:39 PDT

A few days ago we described how the Belgian region of Wallonia was holding up the official signing of the EU-Canada trade deal, CETA, in part because of the corporate sovereignty chapter it contains. Not surprisingly, given the high-profile embarrassment this caused -- Canada's prime minister, Justin Trudeau, was forced to cancel his planned trip to Europe at the last minute -- the Walloon politicians have been under intense pressure to change their minds in return for some concessions. This they have now done, and a document has been published spelling out the nature of the deal they have obtained (currently only available in French and Dutch). The Council of Canadians suggests that the EU has not solved the problem, just bought some time:

The proposed compromise would give any region of Belgium the right to walk out during any part of the ratification process [which is still required, even after CETA has been signed]. Four Belgian Parliaments (the Walloon region, the French community, the German community, and the Francophone community commission of the Brussels Capital region) have made it clear that they will never ratify the Investment Court System (ICS) -- the provision that allows foreign investors to sue governments -- in its current form.

Wallonia's minister-president, Paul Magnette, came away with something else, too: Magnette had also raised objections to the proposed court system for settling disputes between foreign investors and governments.

One concession he won means Belgium would be able to go to the European court of justice to determine whether the new investor-state special tribunals are compatible with EU law.
That's potentially big. Back in 2015, lawyers from the environmental group ClientEarth carried out an analysis of the corporate sovereignty approach -- both the older investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) and the re-branded ICS -- and found that: ISDS mechanisms would set up an arbitration system outside of, but binding on, the EU judicial system. Such mechanisms would introduce an additional judicial relief within the EU legal order that is independent of the EU courts. It would, in effect, be a system that would enable foreign investors to sideline the EU courts and resort to claims that are not available to domestic investors.

EU law, and settled case-law of the European Court of Justice (ECJ), suggest that such a system of external judicial control may be incompatible with the EU legal order because it would (1) undermine the autonomy of the EU legal order and the powers of the EU courts in particular and (2) negatively affect the completion of the internal market, and more specifically the EU competition rules.
Of course, some will dismiss that as simply the biased opinion of an activist organization. It's harder to ignore the views of 100 law professors from across Europe, who agree with ClientEarth, or the warning of the UN rights expert, Alfred de Zayas, not to sign the "flawed" CETA treaty, as he calls it. And "biased" certainly won't be something anyone could ever say about an ISDS ruling from the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), the EU's highest court, which will be definitive once it is handed down. It will also apply to any trade deal that includes corporate sovereignty, such as TAFTA/TTIP, which is why Magnette's last-minute haggling turns out to be so important. One hint of how the CJEU might view matters is provided by the following: ClientEarth recently launched a lawsuit against the Commission, because it refused to disclose official analysis of whether ISDS and ICS are legal. The Commission said sharing the legal reflections would undermine its negotiating position in trade agreements.
It's hard to see how an analysis that found ISDS and ICS were legal would weaken the EU's negotiating position. And it would surely be in the European Commission's interest to convince everyone that corporate sovereignty is, indeed, legal by releasing analyses supporting that view. So the fact the EU refuses to release them would naturally suggest that there is a problem somewhere, which presumably the CJEU will reveal when it comes to examine the issue.

Although the most important, the referral to the CJEU is not the only legal challenge that CETA is facing. There's one in Canada, too:

Canada's longest-serving member of the Queen’s privy Council, the Honourable Paul Hellyer, P.C., along with two co-plaintiffs, Ann Emmett and George Crowell, both prominent members of the Committee on Monetary and Economic Reform ("COMER"), launched a constitutional challenge against the much-maligned Canada-Europe Trade Agreement ("CETA"), at the Federal Court of Canada today.

Here's what they hope to obtain: In addition to seeking several declarations, to clarify the Constitutional authority of the Executive branch of government to do this, the Plaintiff's also seek interim injunctions to prevent the federal government from signing, ratifying and implementing the CETA.
Finally, it's worth noting that there is also a constitutional challenge to CETA in Germany. On that front, the following happened a couple of weeks ago: In its judgment pronounced today, the Second Senate of the Federal Constitutional Court rejected several applications for a preliminary injunction directed against the approval by the German representative in the Council of the European Union of the signing, the concluding and the provisional application of the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), which the Council of the European Union is expected to decide upon on 18 October 2016.
However, that's not as bad as it might seem at first sight. First, Germany's constitutional court imposed some quite stringent constraints on the German government. The most important of these is that the official signing of CETA will not cause the entire text to be applied provisionally, as the European Commission had originally hoped. Instead, some parts must wait until all 28 member states ratify the deal through votes in their national parliaments. That's going to take quite a while -- perhaps years -- and there's no guarantee that every country will ultimately ratify CETA. The corporate sovereignty provisions are one of the elements that will not come into force until after full ratification, something also agreed with Magnette. This means it's quite likely that the CJEU will hand down its verdict on the legality or otherwise of ICS before that, possibly killing it forever.

The other important point about the German constitutional court's decision is that it only rejected a request for a preliminary injunction, which it deemed unnecessary. The German court's full consideration of whether CETA is constitutional or not continues. The European Commission may have postponed the Wallonian problem but there are plenty of others on both sides of the Atlantic that could still stop CETA, and definitively.

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Corporate Sovereignty Helps To Bring EU-Canada Trade Deal To Brink Of Collapse

Glyn Moody — Mon, 24 Oct 2016 22:58:44 PDT

The trade deal between the EU and Canada, known as CETA -- the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement -- is remarkable for the fact that it has still not been signed and ratified, even though its completion was "celebrated" over two years ago. That's partly because of growing resistance to the inclusion of a corporate sovereignty chapter -- also known as investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS). In an attempt to head that off, the European Commission persuaded Canada to swap out vanilla ISDS for a new, "improved" version called the Investor Court System (ICS). As Techdirt noted before, this is really just putting lipstick on the pig, and doesn't change the fact that companies are being given unique privileges to sue a country for alleged harm to their investments using special tribunals, as well as in national courts.

CETA has faced other problems, notably from Bulgaria, Romania and Belgium. The first two said they wouldn't sign because of Canada's refusal to lift visa requirements for their citizens. That blackmail seems to have paid off. The Sofia Globe reports that Canada has agreed to remove the visa requirements from December 2017, and Bulgaria and Romania now say that they will sign CETA.

That leaves Belgium, or more precisely, the French-speaking Belgian region of Wallonia, which, as we noted back in April, was not happy with CETA. A couple of weeks ago, the Walloon parliament confirmed that it would refuse to give its permission for the central government to sign CETA in its name (original in French). Because of the way the Belgian political system works, that meant that Belgium would not be able to sign CETA on October 27, as the European Commission had originally hoped.

That, in its turn, meant that the European Union as a whole would not be able to sign CETA on that day. That's because back in July, European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker agreed to treat CETA as a so-called "mixed agreement," a deal that must be ratified by all of the EU member states' national assemblies, as well as by the bloc. If Belgium can't do that because of Wallonia, CETA is blocked.

As you might imagine, the Walloons have come under intense pressure to change their mind, from just about the entire EU and Canadian political establishment. Last Friday, Wallonia's Minister-President Paul Magnette told the regional parliament that he still refused to allow Belgium to sign, despite that pressure. As well as being worried about the impact of Canada's agricultural products on Walloon farmers, Magnette singled out corporate sovereignty as a particular worry for him and his colleagues.

The fact that CETA's ISDS/ICS remains the most problematic area can be seen from a fascinating CETA document (pdf) that was recently leaked. It's called the "Joint Interpretative Declaration on the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) between Canada and the European Union and its Member States," and is an attempt to offer additional guarantees that are enough to convince Magnette and other CETA skeptics to allow its signing and ratification:

This interpretative declaration aims to provide a clear and unambiguous statement of what Canada and the European Union and its Member States agreed in a number of CETA provisions that have been the object of public debate and concerns. This includes, in particular, the impact of CETA on the ability of governments to regulate in the public interest, as well as the provisions on investment protection and dispute resolution, and on sustainable development, labour rights and environmental protection.

The section on Investment Protection is by far the longest, reflecting the seriousness of the problems there. Here's a key paragraph: CETA clarifies that governments may change their laws, regardless of whether this may negatively affect an investment or investor's expectations of profits. Furthermore, CETA clarifies that any compensation due to an investor will be based on an objective determination by the Tribunal and will not be greater than the loss suffered by the investor.
As that demonstrates, there is nothing new in the declaration. Nobody is claiming that CETA will stop governments changing their laws, just that the massive fines that can be imposed by supra-national tribunals are likely to discourage them from doing so. Similarly, claiming that those fines will be "based on an objective determination by the Tribunal and will not be greater than the loss suffered by the investor" simply confirms the untrammelled power of the tribunal to impose whatever fine it thinks is appropriate.

As of this weekend, Magnette was still holding out for more guarantees. He has said that he is not against CETA in principle, but does want improvements to it, which offers the European Commission a way out of this crisis that they will surely try to seize. If the interpretative declaration is changed sufficiently, Magnette may be willing to give permission to Belgium to sign.

However, there's another factor. In the face of the continuing problems on the EU side, the Canadians seem to be close to calling the whole thing off. As the Guardian reported:

A landmark trade deal between the European Union and Canada is in meltdown, after Canada's trade minister walked out of talks with the Belgian regional parliament that has been blocking the deal.

The Canadian trade minister, Chrystia Freeland, was on the verge of tears on Friday as she announced the "end and the failure" of talks with the Walloon government.

However the head of the European parliament said late on Friday he would hold emergency talks in a bid to save the deal.

As that indicates, EU politicians are still trying to patch things up, but it's unlikely that Canada will be willing to make yet more concessions to satisfy Magnette. For his part, he said on Sunday night that he was "disappointed" with the Commission's latest attempt to convince him to accept CETA's ISDS (original in French). In any case, it looks increasingly likely that CETA will not be signed on October 27, and that Canada's prime minister, Justin Trudeau, will not be traveling to Europe to do so, which would be a huge diplomatic embarrassment for the European Commission. Corporate sovereignty may not be the only reason CETA is falling apart, but it is certainly one of the main ones. The twists and turns of the Walloon saga confirm just how politically toxic it has become.

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EU-Canada Trade Deal Still Struggling, As Romania And Belgium Say They Won't/Can't Ratify Treaty

Glyn Moody — Tue, 19 Apr 2016 03:27:00 PDT

Alongside the better-known trade deals that aren't really trade deals, TPP and TAFTA/TTIP, the smaller one between the European Union and Canada, CETA, is still trapped in a strange kind of political limbo. It was "celebrated" way back in October 2014, and has been officially in the "legal scrubbing" phase where the text is tidied up and translated into all the relevant languages (lots of them for the EU). Cleverly, the EU has used this period to sneak in the "lipstick on a pig" version of corporate sovereignty in an attempt to head off revolts among EU nations worried about growing public resistance to the idea. But just when the European Commission thought it had everything nicely sewn up, this happens:

Romania will not ratify the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) between the EU and Canada which was concluded in 2014, as an angry reaction to the refusal by Ottawa to lift the visa requirement of its nationals, but also for the lack of EU solidarity for solving the issue.

As EurActiv explains, Romania is upset because Canada is requiring Romanian (and Bulgarian) citizens to obtain a visa before visiting Canada, whereas everyone else in the EU can get in without one. As a result: A Romanian government official who asked not to be named said that Romania would "veto" the CETA ratification.

Normally the ratification of CETA should conclude by the end of 2016 or 2017. Romania however will not ratify the agreement, EurActiv was told.
If that were the only problem with ratifying CETA, it might be possible to resolve with some judicious arm-twisting by the European Commission. But it's not, because SputnikNews is reporting the following: The government of the French-speaking Belgian region of Wallonia has refused to ratify the EU-Canada free trade agreement approved by the Belgian cabinet, the region's minister-president said.
Belgium may be a fairly small country, and Wallonia an even smaller part of it, but if the regional government doesn't agree, it would seem that Belgium can't ratify CETA, and without Belgium's OK, the whole CETA agreement might unravel. In truth, nobody really knows -- and that's why these unexpected developments are so worrying for the European Commission. It is uncharted legal territory for EU countries like Romania and Belgium to be unwilling or unable to ratify international trade agreements the Commission has negotiated. One thing is certain: CETA ain't over until it's really, absolutely, definitively over. Until then, grab the popcorn.

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Not 'Going Dark': 15 Out Of 15 Most Recent EU Terrorists Were Known To The Authorities In Multiple Ways

Glyn Moody — Mon, 4 Apr 2016 12:46:00 PDT

Important information about recent terrorist attacks in Europe continues to emerge. Here's the latest news from Brussels, as reported by the Guardian:

Plans and photographs of the home and office of Belgium's prime minister, Charles Michel, have been found on a computer abandoned near a terrorist hideout in Brussels, according to Belgian sources.

The laptop was found in a bin near a flat in the Schaerbeek district that had been a makeshift bomb factory for the terrorists who killed 32 people and injured at least 340 in last week's suicide bombings at Brussels airport and the city metro.

Not unnaturally, perhaps, most commentary has been about the fact that Belgium's prime minister was apparently being considered as a target. But there's something else in this story that's interesting, not least because it's not explicit. The Belgian sources for this story have revealed that "plans and a photograph" were found on a computer. Assuming the laptop did indeed belong to the terrorists, that means one of two things: either the system did not use encryption at all, or that it was possible to bypass the protection. In either case, it looks like this is yet another demonstration that things are not "going dark" when it comes to terrorism, despite continued claims to the contrary.

Given how details about the attackers are coming through very sporadically, it can be hard to see the bigger picture. To address that issue, the German journalist Sascha Lobo has pulled together all the information he could find about lethal terrorist attacks carried out by Islamists over the last two years in Europe. Specifically, these were the attack on the Jewish Museum in Brussels in May 2014; the Paris attack on Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket in 2015; the attack on a cultural center and synagogue in Copenhagen in 2015; the second attack in Paris in November last year; and the recent attacks in Brussels.

The results of his research appear in the German news magazine Der Spiegel, but fortunately he has produced a tabulated form (with references) that doesn't require any knowledge of the German language to grasp. A glance is enough to see that every single one of the 15 attackers who have been identified was known to the authorities, often for multiple reasons. Indeed, as Lobo writes, it's even worse than it seems at first sight:

All 15 identified attackers were on terror warning lists or "Islamist instigator" lists in at least one European country. In addition, most were on other lists, such as no-fly lists. All 15 had been classified as violence-prone. 14 had known contacts with other radical Islamists (one of them was apparently radicalized only via the Internet). Twelve had taken trips to the "Islamic State" in Syria, or to al-Qaida in Iraq or Yemen. Ten had criminal records, most of them for violent crimes.

This is not a terrifying world where things are "going dark" for the authorities. This is not a situation where strong crypto made it impossible to know who was doing what. This is a world of persistent failure by the intelligence agencies and police to use the information they already had at their disposal. This is a world that wants to shift the blame to evil encryption, rather than admit that mass surveillance doesn't work, and is the wrong approach. Lobo offers a plausible explanation why this is still happening, despite the manifest inability of blanket snooping to spot obvious connections and use them to stop attacks: Comprehensive surveillance appears as seemingly inexpensive because it is a solution that scales thanks to technology: troubleshooting at the press of a button. Directly linked with the aim of saving more and more, just as with the State in general. But classic investigative work, which is proven to work, is expensive and labor intensive. This leads to a failure by the authorities because of a faith in technology that is driven by economics.
In other words, it's much cheaper to call for even more automated mass spying than to address the problem properly by bringing in more trained personnel to carry out targeted surveillance of people who are known threats.

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Belgian Collection Society Wants To Extend Its 'You Must Be A Pirate' Tax To Cover All-In-One Printers

Tim Cushing — Thu, 6 Aug 2015 11:02:22 PDT

We've covered copyright levies (a.k.a., "you must be a pirate/thief" taxes) several times here at Techdirt, with a majority of them pertaining to the cassette tapes of the digital world: blank CDs/DVDs, hard drives, removable storage, cell phones, internet connections, etc. The theory is that the only reason anyone buys storage of any kind is to have some place to put all their pirated goods. Hence, they must pay a "tax" to compensate artists for all the creative works they've ripped off.

This sort of taxation is stupid, but governments often fall for it because it's obvious that, yes, some people do store their pirated goods this way. That a large majority of people don't doesn't seem to matter. They, too, must pay a tax for the overall good of the creative world -- a "world" that is basically a bunch of industry groups and collection societies when you get right down to it. They're the ones pushing these levies, and they're the ones that derive the most benefit from them.

But Reprobel, a Belgian collection society, is currently going after Hewlett-Packard's Belgian wing, claiming that the company should be forced to pay a levy on the sale of… all-in-one printers.

Reprobel, a collecting society, had asked HPB to pay a levy for the sale of multifunction printers. Such a levy is due as fair compensation to authors for the copying of their work using the devices. Since Reprobel and HPB did not reach an agreement on the amount to be paid, HPB sued Reprobel so as to obtain legal certainty on the royalties due.

Reprobel's theory is more than a bit shaky. It assumes multifunction printers are used to copy hard copy books (and convert them to digital/physical form). Reprobel doesn't explicitly spell out the "harm" it is seeking compensation for (at least not in this article by Peter L'Ecuse), but it's assumed that copying and printing both theoretically aid in the pirating of printed material.

What's more surprising than this leap of logic is the fact that such a levy is already being collected.

Under Belgian law, the fixed part of the levy is paid by manufacturers/importers (Article XI.235 of the Code of Economic Law and is based on potential harm caused to the author. According to the Advocate General, such a levy is proportionate and the criteria used to determine the levy (i.e., the maximum speed for copying in black and white) objectively reflect the ability of the equipment to potentially prejudice authors.

So, the Belgian courts have already found in favor of these sketchy assumptions and have applied them to sales of standalone copiers. Reprobel is seeking the application of this levy to printers that also make copies. In addition, it's seeking another levy, supposedly based on "actual harm." (The current levy is based on "potential harm.")

The Belgian Advocate General is at least questioning a few of Reprobel's assertions.

[T]he Advocate General pointed out that it is likely that a private person using a multifunctional printer for his own personal use will cause less harm to authors than printers of the same speed used in libraries or copy shops. The Advocate General therefore believed that the fair balance would be better guaranteed if criteria other than the maximum speed were also taken into account.

Of course, the Advocate General's questioning begins with a questionable assumption: that printers/copiers are used to facilitate enough infringement that a levy is somehow justified. If Reprobel's worry is the mass copying of physical books, then it has had several years to gather data that supports its assertions about copyright infringement. Nothing in this report or the comments by the Advocate General suggest it has presented anything of the sort.

Using an all-in-one printer to make infringing copies of digital books is about the least efficient form of piracy imaginable. Using off-the-shelf all-in-ones to scan books into PDF form for distribution across the web is only slightly more efficient. And even if it's the latter form that concerns Reprobel more, there's evidence out there that suggests there's very little demand for pirated books.

Just 1% of UK internet users aged 12 and over read “at least some” ebooks illegally between March and May 2015, according to the Intellectual Property Office’s study into the extent of online copyright infringement in the UK. This compares favourably to other forms of entertainment, with 9% accessing some of their music illegally, 7% television programmes, 6% films, and 2% computer software and video games.

When researchers looked at “all internet users who consumed content online over the three-month period,” (rather than all internet users over 12), they found that 31% accessed at least one item illegally. Readers, however, still had the lowest incidence of illegal access, at 11%, compared to 25% for people watching films and 26% for people listening to music.

“More ebook consumers paid for some content (69%) and for all of their content (47%) than consumers of any other content type”, the survey found.

Reprobel appears to be interested in collecting fees (this is honestly where this sentence should end, but…) on the sort of infringement that went out of vogue well before all-in-one printers became mainstream.

The Advocate General does raise a couple of good points during its consideration of Reprobel's plea, despite giving far too much credence to its assertions.

[T]he Advocate General expressed doubts as to the admissibility of the dual fixed and proportionate levy. Indeed, given that the proportionate levy paid by the user is deemed to compensate for the actual harm, the Advocate General sees no reason to add a fixed levy to be paid by the manufacturer/importer to compensate for a potential harm caused by the same equipment.

If a proportionate levy is granted, the AG suggests that any compensation demanded by Reprobel for actual use should have any levies collected for potential use deducted. This will prevent Reprobel from doing too much double-dipping, even though the proposed levy is a double-dip in and of itself.

Furthermore, the Advocate General reminds Reprobel that not all copies of copyrighted content are infringing.

In particular, the Advocate General held that the system does not distinguish between copies of works that fall under the fair compensation scheme and works for which no levy is due because of an exemption foreseen by the InfoSoc Directive (e.g. sheet music copies can be made without any fair compensation being due).

Beyond the Belgian version of "fair use," there's the question of how Reprobel expects to apply a proportionate levy based on actual usage -- at least not one anyone's going to agree with. What percentage of actual usage is it going to automatically assume is infringing? And how is it going to collect this data?

The Advocate General says the fee could change depending on the end user's level of cooperation with Reprobel in the assessment of the levy. This would basically turn Reprobel into the BMI of the printed world -- an entity that demands fees from businesses utilizing multifunction printers. It would give it the power to basically charge a licensing fee for printer/scanner/copier operation. The AG's echoing of Reprobel's assertion that every sold multifunction printer will generate some sort of actual harm points towards Reprobel being granted this power. If this goes Reprobel's way, there will no need for it to prove actual harm. It will be free to collect on its assumptions.

Will Corporate Sovereignty Disputes Lead To Wars One Day?

Glyn Moody — Tue, 23 Jun 2015 01:06:00 PDT

Last August, we wrote about the most egregious corporate sovereignty award (so far): $50 billion against Russia, under a treaty that it never even ratified, in favor of the major shareholders of the Yukos oil company. Of course, as everyone pointed out, being awarded $50 billion was one thing, collecting it, quite another. Most people probably assumed that it would be practically impossible to squeeze that money out of a recalcitrant Russia, but we now learn that some serious steps towards that goal have recently been taken, as reported by Der Spiegel (original in German). In Belgium, the bank accounts of the Russian embassy were frozen, as were those of Russia's EU and NATO missions, while in France, something similar happened, with Russian accounts blocked at 40 banks.

Understandably, this did not go down well with the Russian government. The country's deputy foreign minister warned, "whoever dares to do that must understand that it will lead to reprisals," something his boss, Sergei Lavrov echoed. Meanwhile, Lavrov's own boss, Vladimir Putin, was also well aware of the situation, and was quoted as saying: "we will defend our interests using legal means."

A story on France 24 reports that Russia has already threatened to retaliate against state-linked foreign firms operating in the country, so that's one way that things could escalate. But more seriously, the relations between Russia and EU nations are extremely strained over the conflict in eastern Ukraine; the last thing the situation needs is additional tension caused by arguments over a massive fine. Even if corporate sovereignty doesn't actually cause a war -- well, let's hope not -- the Yukos award may turn into a hindrance to resolving an existing conflict. That's yet another reason to get rid of the whole deeply-flawed system before it causes more serious damage.

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Court Rejects Argument That The Music Industry Deserves 'Pirate Tax' On Every Internet Connection

Mike Masnick — Tue, 17 Mar 2015 10:35:00 PDT

The legacy recording industry continues to seek any possible way to force people to pay, now that many people see no reason to continue to fork over money to the old gatekeepers. After years of seeking increasing "you must be a criminal" levies on hard drives, blank CDs and other media, there has been a more recent focus on just trying to get broadband access providers to add a "piracy tax" to all internet connections. Over in Belgium, the collection society SABAM has been leading this charge. Back in 2011, it suddenly started demanding 3.4% of all internet connection fees from ISPs in Belgium. When the broadband providers refused to just pay up, SABAM sued in 2013. And it's not going particularly well. The court has now rejected SABAM's claims, noting (correctly) that internet access providers are mere conduits and shouldn't have to pay for the actions of their users.

This is the right decision, though there's a decent chance that SABAM will appeal. Either way, this shows the incredible entitlement felt by some in the industry. They feel that if people no longer want to pay them, that everyone should be forced to pay. That's really quite incredible when you think about it. In most businesses, if customers are no longer interested in buying what you're selling at the price you're offering, you have to learn to adapt. But the legacy recording industry still seems to think the problem is with the public, rather than with its own business model.

Facebook's Updated Privacy Policy Breaches EU Law, Belgian Study Claims; Other Countries Investigating

Glyn Moody — Wed, 25 Feb 2015 00:54:11 PST

Europeans have a rather ambivalent attitude to Facebook. On the one hand, millions of them love using it. On the other, many people are worried about the huge stores of personal information it is building up on its users -- and what it does with it. This has led to various attempts by the Austrian Max Schrems to find out what Facebook knows about him -- and to establish whether its handling of his data is compliant with EU data protection laws. Separately from those efforts, the Belgian privacy commission has been investigating Facebook's privacy policy. It asked researchers at a pair of local universities to provide an analysis. Here's what they found, as reported by the Guardian:

A report commissioned by the Belgian privacy commission has found that Facebook is acting in violation of European law, despite updating its privacy policy.

Conducted by the Centre of Interdisciplinary Law and ICT at the University of Leuven in Belgium, the report claimed that Facebook's privacy policy update in January had only expanded older policy and practices, and found that it still violates European consumer protection law.

The report runs to over 60 pages (pdf). The key findings are as follows: To be clear: the changes introduced in 2015 weren't all that drastic. Most of Facebook's "new" policies and terms are simply old practices made more explicit. Our analysis indicates, however, that Facebook is acting in violation of European law. First, Facebook places too much burden on its users. Users are expected to navigate Facebook's complex web of settings (which include "Privacy", "Apps", "Adds", "Followers", etc.) in search of possible opt-outs. Facebook's default settings related to behavioural profiling or Social Ads, for example, are particularly problematic. Moreover, users are offered no choice whatsoever with regard to their appearance in "Sponsored Stories" or the sharing of location data. Second, users do not receive adequate information. For instance, it isn't always clear what is meant by the use of images "for advertising purposes". Will profile pictures only be used for "Sponsored Stories" and "Social Adverts", or will it go beyond that? Who are the "third party companies", "service providers" and "other partners" mentioned in Facebook's data use policy? What are the precise implications of Facebooks' extensive data gathering through third-party websites, mobile applications, as well recently acquired companies such as WhatsApp and Instagram?
Unfortunately for Facebook, this is just the start of a much wider investigation across Europe: The Belgian Privacy Commission is also part of a European task force, which includes data protection authorities from the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. [Leuven University's] ICRI/CIR and [Vrije Universiteit Brussel's] iMinds-SMIT will continue to support the Privacy Commission in the context of its investigation and future updates to the report will also be shared with their German and Dutch colleagues.
The Guardian notes that other European groups are scrutinizing Facebook's privacy policy: Facebook is already being investigated by the Dutch data protection authority, which asked Facebook to delay rollout of its new privacy policy, and is being probed by the Article 29 working party formed of data regulators from individual countries across Europe, including the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office.
Looks like Facebook has a busy few years ahead of it -- and what applies to Facebook is also likely to apply to a host of other companies that offer online services based on gathering large amounts of personal data in Europe.

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Belgian Prosecutor Looking Into Reports That NSA/GCHQ Hacked Well-Known Belgian Cryptographer

Mike Masnick — Tue, 4 Feb 2014 03:42:00 PST

Last year, we wrote about the NSA and GCHQ hacking into Belgian telco Belgacom using a "quantum insert" via man-in-the-middle attacks using "fake" Slashdot and LinkedIn pages. It has now come out that Belgian prosecutors are looking into reports that one of those attacks was directed at well-known Belgian cryptographer, Jean-Jacques Quisquater. According to David Meyer at GigaOm:

The Universite catholique de Louvain professor apparently fell victim to a “quantum insert” trick that duped him into thinking he was visiting LinkedIn to respond to an emailed “request” when he was actually visiting a malware-laden copy of a LinkedIn page.

“The Belgian federal police (FCCU) sent me a warning about this attack and did the analysis,” Quisquater told me by email. As for the purpose of the hack: “We don’t know. There are many hypotheses (about 12 or 15) but it is certainly an industrial espionage plus a surveillance of people working about civilian cryptography.”

Of course, looking into it doesn't mean very much at this point. There had been serious concerns about how the NSA and GCHQ used the attacks on Belgacom to then bug systems at the EU Parliament in Brussels. Whether or not they'll do something in response to "just" hacking a cryptographer remains to be seen -- but it should remind basically everyone in the world that the NSA/GCHQ don't seem to have any hesitation about hacking just about anyone.

Update: As noted in the comments, there are good reasons to believe this was not the work of the NSA/GCHQ, but potentially other government attacks...

Royalty Collection Agency SABAM Sued By Belgian Government Over 'Piracy License' Plans

Glyn Moody — Fri, 15 Nov 2013 00:10:18 PST

Back in May, we wrote about how the Belgian music royalty collection agency SABAM was taking ISPs there to court over its demand for 3.4% of Internet subscriber fees as "compensation" for online piracy in Belgium. In yet another slapdown for SABAM -- it had previously failed in its attempt to turn ISPs into copyright cops -- the Belgian regulator says SABAM's plan falls foul of the EU's e-commerce directive, as IT World reports:

the Belgian government's FPS Economy (Federal Public Service Economy) agency, which has regulatory power, believes that Sabam is wrongly asking providers for compensation, said Chantal De Pauw, an agency spokeswoman.

While the FPS opposes any kind of illegal downloading, Sabam's solution penalizes Internet users and this is against the E.U.'s e-commerce directive, according to the authority. Providing Internet access is not the same as publishing protected works, the FPS said in a news release, adding that there are other ways to fight illegal downloads than posing levies on ISPs.

Even more dramatically, FPS is taking legal action against SABAM to stop it proceeding with its own lawsuit: The FPS has ordered Sabam to stop its lawsuit, but the association has argued that they are operating within the bounds of the law, said De Pauw. FPS has therefore decided to sue Sabam in October to force it to stop its legal procedures against the ISPs, De Pauw said. If FPS wins the suit, Sabam faces penalties of up to €100,000 (US$137,600) per day if it continues its quest, she added.
SABAM has always been frustratingly out-of-touch with reality in its demands, but now that it is being sued by its own government, perhaps it will finally take the hint and drop its ridiculous and unjustified scheme.

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Belgian 'Royal Decree' Requires ISPs To Log All Sorts Of Info For A Year

Mike Masnick — Wed, 9 Oct 2013 08:42:26 PDT

Theo Lietaert alerted us to the very troubling news out of Belgium, that a "royal decree" has been passed requiring Belgian telcos, internet service providers, information service providers, email providers, etc. to log a ridiculous amount of metadata for a year. The full decree (in French) includes an awful lot of information that will be tracked (though it's been published in a manner that's nearly impossible to read). Among the examples listed: how many emails you send, if you use a VoIP provider (like Skype), how long your calls are, how you pay your bills -- basically any and all (non-content) data that ISPs can collect, they are required to keep. And then they need to make it available to basically all law enforcement. That is, this is not just for anti-terrorism purposes, but for any government purpose under the sun, allowing them to troll through basically all of your internet activity.

The justification for all of this? Because law enforcement "needs" this data do their job better. This is not all that different than the excuses we've heard from those defending NSA surveillance, that this data is somehow "needed" because it might stop "bad guys." But that turns the privacy questions upside down entirely. As we've noted, law enforcement would, most likely, be able to stop a lot more crime if we were all required to have video cameras hooked up to a giant database installed in every room in every home. But we don't do that because it's a massive breach of privacy.

The ministers behind this abomination, Johan Vande Lanotte and Annemie Turtelboom appear to recognize that this goes "far beyond" what's allowed under the European privacy directive, but they don't seem to care, claiming that the privacy directive is "obsolete." The whole situation is fairly sketchy as well, since it was done by royal decree, allowing them to totally bypass Parliament, but is equally binding. I guess they're worried that Parliament (*gasp*) might actually protect the rights of the people.

This seems like a horrifyingly broad attack on privacy rights in Belgium, and while the Privacy Commission is reviewing the issue, it's possible that this will be considered the law in Belgium. If you're a VPN vendor, it would seem like a marketing campaign in Belgium might be appropriate just about now.

Royalty Collection Agency SABAM Sues Belgian ISPs In Pursuit Of Its Fantasy 'Piracy License'

Glyn Moody — Tue, 7 May 2013 07:37:42 PDT

Back in November 2011, we wrote about the Belgian music royalty collection agency SABAM's demand for 3.4% of Internet subscriber fees as "compensation" for online piracy in Belgium. As Tim Cushing explained back then, this was ridiculous on just about every level. But SABAM doesn't let little things like that get in the way of its desperate attempt to avoid moving with the times and coming up with new business models. So after failing dismally to convince Europe's highest court that it could force ISPs to spy on their customers, SABAM has now moved on to suing ISPs instead, as TorrentFreak reports:

This week SABAM sued the Belgian ISPs Belgacom, Telenet and Voo, claiming a 3.4 percent cut of Internet subscriber fees as compensation for the rampant piracy they enable through their networks.

SABAM argues that authors should be paid for any "public broadcast" of a song. Pirated downloads and streams on the Internet are such public broadcasts according to the group, and they are therefore entitled to proper compensation.

One of the ISPs being sued, Belgacom, has a better analogy for what's going on here: "A postman doesn't open letters he delivers. We are also just transporting data, and we are not responsible for the contents," Belgacom says.
That's the "mere conduit" principle, and as TorrentFreak points out, if that defense is overturned here, and the "piracy license" is imposed, the cost will inevitably be passed on to users, which means that people who buy music legally will be paying twice for the privilege. And of course, it wouldn't just be SABAM: the other copyright industries -- films, books, photos, software, games -- will doubtless all line up for their free handout, making online access prohibitively expensive in Belgium.

But along with all the other problems mentioned by Tim back in his 2011 post, there's another major flaw in SABAM's logic. According to recent work carried out by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre, it's not even clear that the recorded music industry is being hurt by unauthorized downloads:

Perhaps surprisingly, our results present no evidence of digital music sales displacement. While we find important cross country differences in the effects of downloading on music purchases, our findings suggest a rather small complementarity between these two music consumption channels. It seems that the majority of the music that is consumed illegally by the individuals in our sample would not have been purchased if illegal downloading websites were not available to them. The complementarity effect of online streaming is found to be somewhat larger, suggesting a stimulating effect of this activity on the sales of digital music.

That is, streaming sites might even promote digital music sales; so maybe SABAM should be giving money to the ISPs, not asking for it....

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Belgium: We Want To Be The Champagne Of Chocolate

Timothy Geigner — Tue, 2 Apr 2013 19:59:13 PDT

There have been attempts in the past to apply intellectual property protection to specific foods and drinks. Champagne sparkling wine is one of the more well-known examples of this and its application has resulted in problems in the past. Not terribly long ago, Lebanon took permission culture to the extreme and claimed they owned food copyrights (which don't exist) on ethnic foods like falafel and hummus, going so far as to plan to sue Israel for selling those same kinds of foods. This seeking to lock up widely known terms is quite depressing, since it's so often only about profiting by way of removing competitors. So depressing, in fact, that it makes me want to have a piece of chocolate to help me feel better.

But if it's Belgian style chocolate I'm looking for, my options may become limited if Belgian chocolate makers get their way. Their industry federation is seeking to have the EU protect the word Belgian, their flag, and their packaging from horrible, awful, foreign competitors, using a lesser-known form of IP, geographical indication.

They want the term "Belgian chocolate" to be their exclusive preserve and also want to crack down on foreign rivals dressing up their products as "Belgian style" or of a "Belgian recipe".

Geographical indication is something of a European thing, mostly, and one which the United States has actually pushed back on. One of the conditions a term must meet in order to be granted a GI is that it cannot be in common use already. Given that this entire story is all coming about as a result of foreign companies producing Belgian chocolate to meet high demand throughout the world seems to negate the entire endeavor on its face. Even more hilarious are the comments coming from these Belgian chocolate producers, who claim this is some matter of principal rather than profit.

"What makes us sad is that very often the copies are not up to the standard of the originals," Jos Linkens, chief executive of Neuhaus, told Reuters in an interview. "If top chocolatiers around the world copied us, perhaps we would be happy. We don't want the image of quality to suffer."

Uh huh. First off, that simply isn't a believable statement, given how much of the Belgian chocolate business growth has occurred in markets like Asia, where suddenly there are more competitors popping up to meet rising demand. This seems like a clear attempt to limit that competition. Secondly, if the quality of the so-called imposters aren't up to snuff, then your chocolate should win out anyway. Thirdly, if this idea that one had to protect certain styles or kinds of food on the basis of their reputation, the entire nation of Italy should have fire-bombed every Pizza Hut in existence long ago. They haven't, because the truth is that if you want good pizza, you go to the people who know what they're doing.

And if you want Belgian chocolate, you go to whoever makes it the best.

Is Google Regretting Paying Off Belgian And French Newspapers Yet? Other Newspapers Demand Their Cut

Mike Masnick — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 03:52:01 PDT

For years now, we've talked about how various newspapers (and local governments) around the globe were arguing that Google News was somehow unfairly cheating them out of revenues (even as they sent a ton of traffic to those sites, often to visitors who wouldn't have visited the pages at all otherwise). Back in December, we saw that Google "settled" a long running dispute with Belgian newspapers, with part of it being an "agreement" to buy a bunch of advertising to effectively pay off the newspapers. Then, in February, Google did a similar deal in France, this time to the tune of $82 million. Of course, it didn't take long for people to point out that this sets an awful precedent for the internet, as these legacy publishers now believe they have a legitimate argument that sites should pay to link to them.

And, of course, newspapers in lots of other countries were paying attention. While Google has insisted that those two deals "won't be replicated" elsewhere in Europe, it appears that newspaper publishers elsewhere in Europe would like to test that claim. Media companies in Portugal are first up to the plate, demanding that Google pay up:

"Our position is that the content has to be paid for ... We showed that our focus is to be paid for Google News using our news," he said, adding that the two sides planned to continue regular meetings.

A Google spokeswoman said the company "does not comment on private meetings held by its teams".

Maybe, next time, Google should stand up for its principles on deals like this, even in the face of political pressure. Because giving in and paying up only means that pretty much every country with a struggling media business (meaning, most countries) is going to come calling before too long...

Belgian Newspapers Agree To Drop Lawsuit Over Google News After Google Promises To Show Them How To Make Money Online

Mike Masnick — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 13:29:33 PST

As we've been reporting, there's been a movement underway in many countries to argue that something like Google News -- which displays headlines, brief snippets and links to full news stories on newspapers' own websites -- somehow violates newspaper copyrights. This makes no sense logically, especially given just how much those same sites likely spend on "search engine optimization" to try to get better ranked in search engines. The only explanation for it that makes sense is the most obvious one: the newspapers are struggling to find ways to make money these days, and they see that Google is making a lot. Hence: come up with a plan to force Google to fork over some of that revenue. Of course, the very first to do this -- years before Germany and France and others got into the game -- was a group of Belgian newspapers who sued Google for sending them traffic. Amazingly, a local court agreed with the newspapers and told Google to pay up. Following this, Google removed those newspapers from its index, leading the newspapers to freak out and demand to be put back in.

The somewhat acrimonious legal dispute continued, until now. Google has announced that the news publishers have agreed to a "settlement," where the terms are somewhat hilarious. Basically, it looks like they've agreed to drop the lawsuit... if Google will teach them how to make money online:

Promote both the publishers’ and Google’s services - Google will advertise its services on the publishers’ media, while the publishers will optimise their use of Google’s advertising solutions, in particular AdWords to attract new readers.

Increase publishers’ revenue - by collaborating on making money with content, both via premium models (paywalls, subscriptions), and via advertising solutions such as the AdSense platform and the AdExchange marketplace;

Increase reader engagement - by implementing Google+ social tools, including video Hangouts, on news sites, and launching official YouTube channels;

Increase the accessibility of the publishers’ content - by collaborating on the distribution of the publishers original content on mobile platforms, in particular smartphones and tablets;

It's good to see the whole thing settled, but, really, the settlement itself seems somewhat silly. Google's agreement to buy advertising with those publishers is the "payoff" bit (apparently to the tune of approximately $6 million -- and which allows both sides to claim "victory"), but the focus on effectively teaching the publishers how to "do internet stuff" just shows how ridiculous the original lawsuit was in the first place.

Double Standards: EU Commissioner De Gucht Is 'Innocent Until Proven Guilty'; EU Citizens Are 'Guilty Until Proven Innocent'

Glyn Moody — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 01:06:00 PDT

The Belgian EU Commissioner Karel De Gucht is the driving force behind ACTA, and is apparently really keen to combat crimes like counterfeiting and piracy. It also seems he has a slight problem with the tax authorities: Belgium’s Tax Inspection Service has accused European Commissioner Karel De Gucht of tax fraud. The service says that Mr De Gucht and his wife failed to declare the profit that they made on the sale of shares of the Vista group on which tax was due.
"Politician accused of tax fraud" is hardly news; but what is more interesting is the European Commission's reaction. Here's what it said according to the Dutch language version of the story on the site quoted above: The Commission adds to this that De Gucht "not guilty until proven to the contrary."
Of course, you might say; after all, surely everyone is innocent until proven guilty? In fact, no: A Party may provide, in accordance with its laws and regulations, its competent authorities with the authority to order an online service provider to disclose expeditiously to a right holder information sufficient to identify a subscriber whose account was allegedly used for infringement
Note the word "allegedly" -- not much presumption of innocence there when your details must be disclosed "expeditiously." That comes from Article 27 of ACTA, currently being pushed by the European Commission with all its might in a desperate attempt to get it ratified by the European Parliament next month.

So on the one hand, we have someone who allegedly failed to declare profits of 1.2 million euros (about $1.5 million), and who must be assumed innocent; while on the other, we have someone who allegedly infringes on someone's copyright -- perhaps by sharing a single mp3 file -- and who, by contrast, is assumed guilty. Double standards much, European Commission?

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Collection Society To Libraries: No Story Time For Kids Unless You Pay To Read Aloud

Glyn Moody — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 10:01:00 PDT

If there's a common trait of the various rightsholders groups around the world, it is their sense of entitlement. If anyone does anything with a work under copyright, they feel they have a right to regulate it and be paid for it. A good example is the claim by the Authors Guild that owners of Kindles weren't allowed to use an experimental text-to-speech feature, since that would infringe on the entirely made up concept of "audio rights" -- and hence, presumably, require further payment.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the Belgian rights group SABAM has already established itself as a copyright hardliner with its attempts to force ISPs and social networks to set up monitoring and filtering systems to combat copyright infringement. Its latest demand shows the same apparent indifference to the negative consequences of its action:

Twice a month, the library in [the Belgian town of] Dilbeek welcomes about 10 children to introduce them to the magical world of books. A representative of the library in question is quoted in the De Morgen report as saying there’s no budget to compensate people who read to the kids, relying instead on volunteers (bless them).

SABAM got in touch with the library to let them know that it thinks this is unacceptable, however, and that they should start coughing up cash for reading stories from copyrighted books out loud. The library rep calculates that it could cost them roughly 250 euros (which is about $328) per year to pay SABAM for the right to -- again -- READ BOOKS TO KIDS.

It's worth emphasizing that these are volunteers, so this is in no sense a professional "performance". It's just public-spirited people generously doing exactly what parents do when reading to their own children. Indeed, it's not hard to imagine SABAM trying to claim money for that too, one day.

Of course, if SABAM refuses to back down here, the likely outcome will be that many libraries throughout Belgium will cancel these reading sessions for children. As a result, fewer young people will be introduced to the world of reading, fewer of them will grow up to be readers, and writers will have fewer fans and less money. In other words, SABAM's attempt to extend its reach to new areas will harm not only children -- about whom it is obviously indifferent -- but also the very people it purports to serve.

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Belgian Anti-Piracy Group Facing Copyright Fraud, Embezzlement & Money Laundering Charges

Mike Masnick — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 07:29:59 PST

The Belgian anti-piracy group, SABAM, has been one of the most aggressive anti-piracy groups out there. The group recently lost two huge court cases in which it tried to get courts to force ISPs and hosting firms to put in place filters to stop infringement. Perhaps more controversially, the organization has tried to require social networks to pay a flat fee for all the infringement happening on their networks. A year ago, there was a story of SABAM taking cash for a band they didn't represent after a TV show played a "joke" on the group.

However, in what appears not to be a joke, it looks like SABAM and some of its execs are facing some pretty serious charges, including "falsifying accounts to cover up bribe payments, abuse of trust, copyright fraud and embezzlement," according to TorrentFreak. Apparently, according to the charges, SABAM wasn't very good at actually distributing the money it was supposed to distribute to artists. Things to keep in mind every time one of these groups insists it's looking out for the interests of artists...

Belgian Anti-Piracy Group Threatens To Take ISPs To Court If They Don't Block The Pirate Bay; Pirate Bay Traffic From Belgium Increases

Mike Masnick — Wed, 7 Dec 2011 08:31:11 PST

It really was just a couple weeks ago that the European Court of Justice ruled that requiring ISPs to filter the internet was not reasonable. That ruling was on a specific case coming out of Belgium, but it's apparently not stopping a Belgian anti-piracy group (not a party to that original case), called BAF, the Belgian Anti-Piracy Federation, from sending letters to every ISP in Belgium, threatening to take them to court if they don't block access to The Pirate Bay.

This is because a court did rule that two Belgian ISPs had to block access to 11 of TPB's domains. BAF is now warning other ISPs that if they don't do the same, it'll take them to court over the same issue, and some are already complying. Of course, as with pretty much any other block, this effort appears to be having the opposite effect. TorrentFreak asked someone from TPB about all of this:

�This will just give us more traffic, as always. Thanks for the free advertising,� we were told.

And he appears to be right.

A few days after the verdict was announced The Pirate Bay registered depiraatbaai.be, a new domain not covered by the court order. Today, just a few weeks later, this domain is already the 124th most-visited in Belgium, on its way to enter the top 100.

Indeed, the years of legal procedures and subsequent blackmailing are easily circumvented by registering a $15 domain.

It's kind of amazing that the "anti-piracy" folks still haven't figured this out yet.

Royalty Collection Agency SABAM Demands 3.4% 'Piracy License' From Belgian ISPs

Tim Cushing — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 12:59:09 PST

It's been a rather quiet few months for SABAM, the Belgian music royalty collection agency perhaps best known (around here, anyway) for its outlandish tactics, including attempting to charge truck drivers a licensing fee for listening to the radio in their cabs and collecting fees for completely fictional bands.

SABAM has thrust itself back into the news today with a return to form, having issued an announcement stating that it will be charging internet service providers for what is, in essence, a "piracy license:"

The music group is claiming 3.4 percent of Internet subscriber fees as compensation for the rampant piracy that they enable through their networks.

SABAM pulls this 3.4% figure from an interesting source:

Sabam base their claim on a provision in the Copyright Act of 1994, which states that authors should be paid for any "public broadcast" of a song. According to Sabam, downloads and streams on the Internet are such public broadcasts, and they are therefore entitled to proper compensation. This 3.4 percent share is the same amount as the copyright fees on cable television.

Of course, this just means that all internet users, whether they infringe or not, will be charged extra for their internet service. Not only that, but a 3.4% flat rate assumes every transmission over the internet involves copyrighted material under SABAM's control. And SABAM has made it clear that, although it is using this fee as some sort of "piracy license," it is by no means saying that all users are now free to start (or resume) pirating content.

But even in the event they begin to receive payments, Sabam stresses that any compensation would by no means legalize piracy. The license fee is only meant to legitimize the ISPs part in transferring these unauthorized files.

Of course, this sort of action, if approved, would open the doors for nearly every other group of rights holders to pile on, turning the Belgian internet service into an incredibly expensive luxury, one that punishes the entirety of the population for that actions of a minority.

Even worse, it appears that SABAM is only pushing this "license" forward because it would rather just collect money than explore new options:

The decision of the music rights group to claim a share of subscriber fees comes after they were unable to reach a workable solution in direct talks with ISPs. The ISPs say they would rather focus on offering legal alternatives than quibble over piracy, a point also noted by Minister of Economy Vincent Van Quickenborne.

“The timing is unfortunate, just as Belgacom and others come to the market with a range of legal streaming services,” a spokesman for the Minister said, adding that his department would look into the legal issues.

This is just another example of the "take it out on the ISPs" thinking that tends to rise to the surface way too often with certain rights holders. Ultimately the costs will be passed on to the end user, which turns this from "us vs. the ISPs" into "us vs. our customers," and is that any way to build a relationship?