Showing posts with label spain. Show all posts
Showing posts with label spain. Show all posts

29 March 2017

The Copyright Industry's So-Called "Value Gap" Is Actually an Innovation Gap

The is a crucial year for the Internet in Europe, because 2017 will see key decisions made about the shape of copyright law in the EU. That matters, because copyright is in many ways the antithesis of the Net, based as it is on enforcing a monopoly on digital content, whereas the Net derives its power from sharing as widely as possible. The stronger copyright becomes, the more the Internet is constrained and thus impoverished.

There are three key areas in the proposed revision to the EU's Copyright Directive where the Internet and its users are under threat from attempts to strengthen copyright. First, there is the panorama exception, which allows people to take pictures in the street without needing to worry about whether buildings or public objects are subject to copyright. Despite this being little more than common sense – imagine having to check the legal status of everything in view before taking a photo – copyright maximalists are fighting to stop a panorama exception being added to EU law.

The second point of contention concerns the link tax, also known as the snippets or Google tax. The last of these explains the motivation: publishers want Google to pay for linking to their articles using snippets of text. Despite the obvious folly of charging for the ability to send traffic to your site, the copyright world's sense of entitlement is such that two countries have already introduced a link tax, with uniformly disastrous results.

When Spain brought in a law that required search engines to pay publishers for the use of snippets, Google decided to close down its Google News service in the country, which led to online publishers losing 10% to 15% of their traffic.

Similarly, in Germany, which also introduced a link tax, publishers ending up giving Google a free licence to their material, so great was the law's negative impact on their business when Google stopped linking to their publications.

The snippet tax is so manifestly stupid that it is unlikely to appear in the final version of the revised Copyright Directive. But the third area of concern stands a much better chance because of the clever way that the publishing world is dressing it up as being about a so-called "value gap." It's a very vague concept – see this new video that explores what it is - but it boils down to publishers being resentful because digital newcomers came up with innovative business models based around legal access to online music, and they didn't.

An interesting speech on the topic by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry's CEO in 2016 laments the fact that the "value" of the global music industry has recently declined 36% over 15 years. That's not really surprising: during this period the recording industry did everything in its power to throttle or stall new ways of providing access to music on the Internet.

What the so-called "value gap" is really about here is the long-standing innovation gap among recording companies, and their refusal to adapt to a changing world. Imagine if they had embraced the P2P music sharing service Napster in 2000 instead of suing it into the ground. Imagine if they had set up sharing and streaming servers themselves a decade and a half ago; imagine how much money they would have made from subscriptions and advertising, and how much their value would have grown, not fallen.

If this evident innovation gap only harmed the copyright companies themselves, it would not be a problem, so much as just deserts. But they are now lobbying to get the laws around the world changed in important ways purely in order to prop up their old business models in an attempt to compensate for this failure to embrace the Internet. In the EU, they are using the fallacious "value gap" concept to call for mandatory upload filters for all major sharing sites – effectively large-scale surveillance and censorship.

Given that one of the most important consequences of the Copyright Directive could be the curtailing of basic human rights in the EU, it is disappointing that a seminar run by the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) group in the European Parliament – supposedly made up of liberals in favour of such democratic freedoms – skews the debate so completely in favour of the copyright industry. Judging by the programme, there is not a single representative of the public speaking at the event – which is pointedly entitled "Copyright reform: Sharing of the value in the digital environment" - pretty much guaranteeing a biased and unhelpful discussion.

That failure by ALDE even to acknowledge that EU citizens have anything useful to contribute, or any right to speak here, does not bode well for the ultimate outcome of the Copyright Directive negotiations later this year. ALDE needs to start caring about and listening to the millions of citizens who voted for its MEPs. At the moment it seems to have uncritically swallowed the backward-looking copyright industry's framing of the problem as a non-existent "value gap", when the deeper problem is its continuing innovation gap. As a result, this year could see key aspects of the Internet's operation, to say nothing of privacy and freedom of speech, gravely damaged because of yet another expansion of copyright's reach and power.

19 September 2013

Clueless Spanish Politicians Want To Join The Government Malware Club

As we've noted before, when it comes to the Internet, governments around the world have an unfortunate habit of copying each other's worst ideas. Thus the punitive three-strikes approach based on accusations, not proof, was pioneered by France, and then spread to the UK, South Korea, New Zealand and finally the US (where, naturally, it became the bigger and better "six strikes" scheme). France appears to be about to abandon this unworkable and ineffective approach, leaving other countries to deal with all the problems it has since discovered. 

On Techdirt.

31 March 2013

Has Spain Just Slammed On The Brakes For Europe's Unitary Patent Plans?

Although the European Union finally approved the continent-wide Unitary Patent in December 2012, after decades of discussions, the story is by no means at an end. Science describes the root of the problem

On Techdirt.

17 March 2013

Spain Considers Making Digital Copyright Law Worse: Pleasing The US Again?

We wrote a couple of weeks ago how some were arguing that Spain ought to go back on the "naughty" Special 301 list for failing to show any "positive developments" on the copyright front recently. By an interesting coincidence, the Spanish Internet Association has just published a leaked draft of proposals to make digital copyright law in Spain even harsher. Here's how the Web site ADSL Zone describes them (original in Spanish): 

On Techdirt.

09 March 2013

IIPA Wants Canada And Spain On The 'Naughty' Special 301 List Even Though They Brought In Tough New Copyright Laws

Here on Techdirt, one of the things we look forward to each year is the comedy production known as the 301 Report, where the US makes the world line up in a row, and then names and shames all the naughty countries whose intellectual monopoly laws aren't outrageous enough. In advance of the official naughty list, there are helpful suggestions from the fans of monopoly maximalism, including the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), which has just released its 2013 demands. Mostly it's the usual suspects -- China, India, Russia etc. But there's an interesting change from the previous year's list: Canada has moved from the really naughty "Priority Watch List" to the only slightly naughty "Watch List". 

On Techdirt.

10 February 2013

Danish Court Orders Spanish Site Blocked Because It Uses Trademarked English Word 'Home' As Part Of Its Name

Daft trademarking stories are common enough, but it's always fun to come across new variations on the theme. Netzpolitik points us to this story from Denmark, where a Spanish-owned property site called HomelifeSpain.com ran into trouble because the word "home" was trademarked in Denmark by the Danish property site home.dk. This resulted in the rather incredible remedy of the website itself being banned entirely. As Netzpolitik notes, this is classic function creep: such web blocks were introduced to fight -- you guessed it -- child pornography, and yet here they are being applied in the rather less serious matter of trademark infringement. 

On Techdirt.

08 December 2012

Spain Too Requires RF for Open Standards

Last week I wrote a piece suggesting that FRAND is dying. It was written in the wake of the major UK decision on open standards, and was mostly based on odd bits of anecdotal evidence. So I was rather pleased to learn from Techrights that Spain made a similar decision some years back, something I missed at the time.

On Open Enterprise blog.

29 September 2012

Old Lady Ruins Fresco, Claims Copyright, Demands Money

Remember that sweet octogenarian lady in Spain who tried to restore a 19th-century fresco "Ecce Homo" and ended up producing something that the BBC's Europe correspondent described as "a crayon sketch of a very hairy monkey in an ill-fitting tunic"? Remember how the poor woman had an anxiety attack as a result of the criticism she received, but that everything worked out fine when her work became an Internet meme, and sightseers started flocking to see it

On Techdirt.

07 March 2012

Hacktivist Judo: Musician Exploits New Spanish Law To Overwhelm System With Legitimate Infringement Complaints

As Techdirt reported earlier this year, Spain's Sinde Law, designed to combat file sharing by blocking sites with allegedly infringing material, has an extremely complex history. It finally went into effect on 1 March, and was immediately met with a clever denial of service attack from a Spanish group with the self-explanatory name "Hackivistas". As TorrentFreak explains: 

On Techdirt.

02 November 2011

Spanish Judge Gets It: Pirated Copies Not Necessarily Lost Sales, May Boost Purchases Later

One of the favorite assumptions of industries based around copyright used to be that every pirated copy is a lost sale. More recently, that rhetoric has been moderated somewhat, as a review of the area in the report "Media Piracy in Emerging Countries" shows, but a variation of that fallacy lives on, expressed now as vague "losses" caused by piracy. 

On Techdirt.

29 April 2011

Who Was Really Behind the Digital Economy Act?

It was just over a year ago that the Digital Economy Act was passed. Of course, the battle to stop this insanity goes on, although the recent verdict against BT and TalkTalk does not bode well. But rather than re-visit all that is wrong with the bill, I want to talk about how it was passed.

On Open Enterprise blog.

24 December 2010

A World-Beating Report on Global Open Source

Something entitled “Report on the International Status of Open Source Software 2010” sounds pretty dry, as does its summary:

The objective of this report is to understand the role played by open source software in the Information and Communications Technologies sector around the world, and to highlight its economic and social impact, on both advanced economies and emerging countries, by analysing the ecosystems that foster the development of open source software: the Public sector, the Private sector, Universities and Communities of Developers.

On Open Enterprise blog.

05 March 2010

UrbanLabs OS: Not What You Think...

How about this: an open operating system for a *city*?

Misión: idear, desarrollar, testear, implementar y difundir componentes de un nuevo sistema operativo de ciudad, que mejore los procesos de comunicación, participación y consumo bajo parámetros abiertos, eficientes y sostenibles. Se deberán diseñar y/o reutilizar diferentes tipos de interacciones y de redes entre tecnologías y personas en el espacio urbano, así como mecanismos de visualización, difusión y mejora de cada uno de los componentes del sistema. UrbanLabs OS se puede componer de diferentes proyectos autónomos que obedezcan a estos objetivos, potenciando el desarrollo de los mismos de manera transversal.

[Via Google Translate: Mission: To devise, develop, test, deploy and diffuse components of a city's new operating system, to improve communication processes, participation and consumption parameters under open, efficient and sustainable. Should be designed and / or reuse different types of interactions and networking technologies and people in urban space and display mechanisms, diffusion and improvement of each of the components of the system. UrbanLabs OS can be composed of several autonomous projects which respond to these objectives, encouraging the development of them in a cross.]

Very cool idea.

Update: there's now an English intro.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

18 August 2009

The Pain in Spain Falls Mainly in the Plan

in January 2010, Spain will take over the Presidency of the European Community. Spanish Government has already announced that one of their flagships will be reinforcing the control of the Internet and criminalizing the sharing culture in the digital environment. The consequences of those decisions will be noticed in the rest of the world.

This is the first I've heard of this: bad news if true. Anyone have any more details?

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter and identi.ca.

01 May 2009

The Shame in Spain

I've written a number of times about Spain's use of free software, notably at the provincial level. There's even a handy - if rather out-dated - map that shows the extent of Penguin love there. Sadly, it looks like Microsoft is making the Spanish government an offer it thinks it can't refuse:

According to a press release from HispaLinux, Spain's national Linux association, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's government is finalizing a plan that would supply all children who attend state schools with personal computers with touch-screens so to "promote awareness within families of the usefulness of information and communication technologies and encourage their use." Specifically, we're talking about Microsoft technologies.

Despite the enormous load this plan would have on the budget of each autonomous region (which would have to foot the bill), and hence, on the taxpayer, not a cent would find it's way back to any Spanish company. The Spanish Ministry of Education has not considered any other vendor apart form Microsoft, there hasn't been a public contest, and the media and other vendors were not informed about the pilot program until it was over. Furthermore, no other alternative has been considered.

If the plan gets the green light, it would have dire consequences for the communities of Andalucía, Castilla-La Mancha, Extremadura, Valencia, and all the other autonomous regions that already have a Linux-based IT infrastructures, which have already been paid for and are in use, in place within their school systems.

This is really scandalous on so many levels.

It's clearly born of ignorance about what is really being offered - lock-in to Microsoft's systems - in the naive belief that touch-screens are somehow the future, probably just because the iPhone has one.

It is born of arrogance that the government knows better, and therefore needn't consult with others that might have a view or - heaven forfend - knowledge on the subject.

And it's born of sheer stupidity, throwing away the huge lead that Spain had in this area, forcing local governments that had saved money by opting for GNU/Linux to waste money on an unnecessary and doubtless insecure solution from Microsoft, and as a result making the country dependent on a foreign supplier when it could have nurtured its own domestic software industry.

Shame on the Spanish government.

25 November 2008

Homage to Catalonia

There is something of a battle going on over the use of open source by local and national governments. Mostly, this centres on cost, together with various technical issues. But one area that is frequently overlooked is the fact that open source software that is created by such bodies can also be used free of charge by businesses. In other words, there may be knock-on benefits that would never be produced through the use of broadly equivalent proprietary solutions....

On Open Enterprise blog.

30 September 2008

Viva España Libre!

Most people know that the Estremadura region in Spain is a pacesetter in terms of deploying free software, but here's a handy map that shows how it and everyone else is doing in that country.

12 February 2007

La Seconde Vie, Das Zweite Leben

Now what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life.

To say nothing of Second Life. And here are some juicy ones (as an Excel workbook, alas, but it opens perfectly well in OpenOffice.org.). Here's one in particular I found significant:

Active % of residents in the top 100 countries

United States 31.19%
France 12.73%
Germany 10.46%
United Kingdom 8.09%
Netherlands 6.55%
Spain 3.83%

That is, Europeans already outnumber Americans in Second Life (and I'm sure that Europeans will soon be outnumbered by those from the rest of the world soon).