Austrian Teenager Sues Parents For Posting Pictures From Her Childhood To Facebook

from the family-court dept

When we talk about young people filing lawsuits over "oversharing" of information and/or media on social media sites, schools are typically the targets of the suits. Inevitably, whether school personnel originally sought access to a student's social media accounts for good intentions or simply to be a slut-shaming dick, the contents within the accounts are then weaponized for humiliation purposes.

But a recent lawsuit filed by an eighteen year old woman in Austria must have parents the world over wincing. At issue wasn't some random person or school official attempting to shame the girl. It was just her parents' sharing photos of a family member and now they face a lawsuit.

A 18-year-old woman from Carinthia is suing her parents for posting photos of her on Facebook without her consent. She claims that since 2009 they have made her life a misery by constantly posting hundreds of photos of her, including embarrassing and intimate images from her childhood.

Legal expert Michael Rami was quoted by Austrian media as saying he believes she has a good chance of winning in court. The shared images include baby pictures of her having her nappy changed and later potty training pictures.

As a relatively new parent myself, I can assure you I'm paying attention. I haven't shared anything so intimate as potty-training photos of my two boys on social media, mind you, but who is to say what pictures my grown-up son might eventually come to feel is embarrassing? In the age of social media, I would think it's only pictures of our children that out-mass pictures of our food among those we share with our followers and friends. Well-meaning as we all might be, what happens if courts ill-prepared to tackle these kinds of disputes suddenly render this family sharing tortious?

To be fair to the young lady in question, it appears that her parents turned something of a deaf ear to her non-litigious complaints.

Despite her requests, they have refused to delete the photos - prompting her to sue them. "I'm tired of not being taken seriously by my parents", she said. Her father believes that since he took the photos he has the right to publish the images.

Because of our writing topics here at Techdirt, I'm basically thinking about intellectual property roughly all the time, but even I am having trouble imagining myself asserting this kind of defense as a father. I can imagine how frustrated the young lady must be at the callous attitude her parents have taken. But does it amount to something worthy of a lawsuit?

Well, Austrian law isn't as strict on matters of privacy and social media as other nations. As the article notes, the French government has gone so far as to warn parents against sharing photos of their children for fear of the social repercussions for them later in life. There's way too much hand-wringing in that kind of stance for my taste, but I can also see their point. I would hope, however, that the question comes down to delineating what qualifies as embarrassing content and what doesn't, rather than relying on any individual's interpretation. Otherwise, the courts could be a mess for a long time coming.

Filed Under: austria, children, parents, privacy, sharing, social media

Austrian Courts Uphold Creative Commons License Terms -- For Now

from the but-it's-not-over-yet dept

Last week, Mike wrote about an important case involving one of the Creative Commons licenses. The fact that some 15 years after the CC movement started and the courts are still trying to bring legal clarity to the use of CC licenses is further proof that the law tends to lag far behind technology. Given their rarity, it's interesting to see another recent case involving a CC license, this time in Austria, pointed out by Alan Toner on his blog.

As the timeline (in German) of the events indicates, the story began in January 2014, when thousands of left-wing protesters demonstrated against a ball organized by the far-right Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), held annually in Vienna. Following attacks on property and the police during the protest, one person was arrested, and in June 2014 his trial began.

The left-wing film collective Filmpiraten published a couple of short videos relating to the person involved. Shortly afterwards, the FPÖ used excerpts from the two Filmpiraten videos as part of a report published on its YouTube channel. The FPÖ video was released under the standard YouTube license, which claims full copyright in the material. However, both the Filmpiraten videos used a Creative Commons license -- specifically, the BY-NC-SA license. Under its terms, others may use the material free of charge, but are required to release the resulting work under the same CC license.

The FPÖ video did not respect that condition, so Filmpiraten's lawyers sent a letter asking for its material not to be used. The FPÖ responded by taking Filmpiraten to court, demanding €35,000 (about $40,000) in compensation for what it said were false accusations about its use of copyrighted material. The court case finally began in February 2015, and in July 2016 the judge ruled in favor of Filmpiraten, effectively upholding the Creative Commons license.

One worrying aspect of the case is that Filmpiraten struggled to find the resources to conduct such an expensive and time-consuming legal battle. As a spokesperson for the organization told the Austrian site futurezone, that may be why the FPÖ has adopted this approach -- and why it is now appealing to a higher court in an attempt to get the judge's ruling overturned.

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Filed Under: austria, copyfraud, copyright, creative commons, filmpiraten, fpo, freedom party
Companies: filmpiraten, fpo

FBI's Hacking Tool Found To Have Compromised Dozens Of Computers In Austria

from the because-someone-in-Virginia-inadvertently-said-it-could-do-this dept

The FBI is already having problems here at home with the hacking tool it deployed during its dark web child porn investigation. A few judges have ruled that the warrant used to deploy the Network Investigative Technique (NIT) was invalid because the FBI's "search" of computers around the United States violated Rule 41(b)'s jurisdictional limits.

Now, we'll get to see how this stacks up against international law. It's already common knowledge that the FBI obtained user information from computers around the world during its two weeks operating as the site administrator for the seized Playpen server. More information is now coming to light, thanks (inadvertently) to a foreign government's inquiries into domestic anti-child porn efforts. Joseph Cox of Motherboard has the details:

Earlier this year, Austrian MPs sent a letter to the country's parliament, asking for more information on child pornography and sex tourism cases. In response, politician Johanna Mikl-Leitner wrote that Austrian authorities cooperated in Operation Pacifier, showing for the first time that the FBI hacked computers in the country.

According to her letter, a list of 50 Austrian IP addresses were evaluated by a federal intelligence unit and used to pursue suspects of possession and distribution of child pornography. The IP addresses led investigators to “countless child pornography files,” according to a translation of the letter, which is dated March 2016. “Extensive investigations are still underway,” it continues.

Local law enforcement appears to be unconcerned that the FBI has exceeded its Rule 41(b) grasp. It took the tips delivered to it by the FBI's NIT and has carried out investigations of its own, collaborating with Europol. Apparently, the FBI's lack of explicit permission -- either from the local US magistrate judge or from foreign governments -- isn't considered problematic when used to scoop up offenders few are willing to defend. Europol and the FBI have refused to comment on how far the Playpen/NIT net was cast, but it apparently includes Greece, Chile, Denmark, and Colombia -- along with possible (but unconfirmed) Playpen users located in Turkey and the UK.

Obviously, the Virginia magistrate who signed the FBI's warrant application had no idea how far its NIT would reach. To be fair, the FBI likely had no idea either, as it was dealing exclusively with users whose originating locations had been obscured by the Tor browser. That being said, the FBI gave no indication in its affidavit that it would possibly be carrying out extraterritorial searches, traveling far beyond the magistrate's jurisdiction and into computers located in multiple foreign countries.

To "fix" this limitation, the FBI is firmly behind the current, mostly-downhill push to strip jurisdictional limits from Rule 41, leaving it free to perform this hacking without being second-guessed by federal judges during prosecutions. That other countries are more than happy to partake in the results of possibly illegal actions doesn't say much about their willingness to protect their own citizens from US law enforcement overreach. Or, at least, it shows there are certain suspects they're not interested in protecting -- even if it means creating a slippery slope they may regret later, when the FBI starts coming after alleged criminals not so universally reviled.

Filed Under: austria, borders, fbi, hacking, malware, nit, rule 41

Europe Is About To Create A Link Tax: Time To Speak Out Against It

from the speak-up dept

We've written plenty of times about ridiculous European plans to create a so-called "snippet tax" which is more officially referred to as "ancillary rights" (and is really just about creating a tax on Google). The basic concept is that some old school newspapers are so lazy and have so failed to adapt to the internet -- and so want to blame Google for their own failures -- that they want to tax any aggregator (e.g., Google) that links to their works with a snippet, that doesn't pay for the privilege of sending those publishers traffic. As you may remember, Germany has been pushing for such a thing for many, many years, and Austria has been exploring it as well. But perhaps the most attention grabbing move was the one in Spain, which not only included a snippet tax, but made it mandatory. That is, even if you wanted Google News to link to you for free, you couldn't get that. In response, Google took the nuclear option and shut down Google News in Spain. A study showed that this law has actually done much to harm Spanish publishers, but the EU pushes on, ridiculously.

As discussed a year ago, some in the EU Commission are all for creating an EU-wide snippet tax, and as ridiculous and counterproductive as that is, the Commission is about to make a decision on it, and the public consultation on the issue is about to close (it ends tomorrow). Thankfully, many, many different groups have set up nice and easy systems to understand and respond to the consultation -- which you should do. Here are just a few options:

• The EU Commission's own consultation platform (this one is messy, buggy, and annoying, but it's the official one).
• The site FixCopyright.eu has a well done "answering guide" that helps you through the consultation and explains the details behind many of the questions in the consultation.
• SaveTheLink.org from OpenMedia has a simple signup form that just adds your name to a letter.
• The group Allied for Startups has another good sign on letter Stop the link tax

There's also a good detailed discussion of why this snippet tax is the wrong solution from European copyright lawyer Remy Chavannes. Here's just a... um... snippet (that I didn't pay for):

In fact, there is precious little indication that the challenges currently being faced by press publishers are due to the lack of sufficiently broad intellectual property rights. And if insufficient IP rights are not a significant part of the problem, increasing IP rights is unlikely to be a significant part of the solution. At a recent conference in Amsterdam, speakers from publishers, academia, politics, civil society and the internet sector were in near-total agreement that a neighbouring right for publishers would solve nothing at best. It would seem more fruitful to investigate other ways in which the position and prospects of publishers of quality journalism can be increased, e.g. via subsidies, tax facilities, the partial repurposing of public broadcasting funds, or other measures that reflect the significant value to a democratic society of having a vigorous, free and independent press.

Implementation of a neighbouring right would bring significant uncertainty, costs and risks, not just to authors and publishers, but also to the eclectic group of platforms, intermediaries and other service providers that play a role in facilitating the publication, discovery and consumption of press content. Larger, existing broad-based platforms will be incentivised to reduce or remove service features that might trigger the new neighbouring right. New entrants are likely to be discouraged, particularly new entrants who want specifically to serve the market for finding and consuming press content. Depending on the scope of any neighbouring right, moreover, it could also negatively impact providers of social networks as well as providers of access, caching and hosting services. Increasing costs, complexity and uncertainty for such a broad category of service providers threatens the free flow of information and investment in – and availability of – innovative digital services, as well as the commercial prospects for publishers and authors.

Good stuff, and I urge you to read the whole thing -- and to respond to the consultation before the EU Commission destroys the link.

Filed Under: ancillary copyright, austria, copyright, eu, eu commission, germany, link tax, news, snippet tax, spain

Austrian Ruling Likely To Have Big implications For Copyright Levies Across EU

from the game-on-for-GEMA? dept

Techdirt has been following for a while the copyright levy system in the European Union as it slowly descends into complete chaos, unable to reconcile its analog origins with a digital world where it just makes no sense. A post on the IPKat blog offers something very interesting in this context : a court case that not only quashes Austrian law on private levies, but one that is likely to have important knock-on effects in other EU countries. As the blog post explains, the decision by the Commercial Court in Vienna is just the latest chapter in a long-running saga involving the Austrian collection society, Austro Mechana, and Amazon:

Austro Mechana initiated the proceedings against a number of Amazon entities in October 2007. The main request of Austro Mechana was to oblige Amazon to pay copyright levies for all storage devices sold to customers in Austria. Austro Mechana also filed an information request regarding the quantity and type of storage devices sold to customers in Austria.

Amazon lost at both first instance and in appeal. After that, as suggested by Amazon, the Austrian Supreme Court submitted a request for a preliminary ruling to the CJEU [Court of Justice of the European Union] (September 2011). Amazon had argued that the Austrian law on copyright levies and the procedures implemented by Austro Mechana for the collection of copyright levies complied with neither the [EU's] InfoSoc Directive nor the jurisprudence of the CJEU.

Europe's highest court, the CJEU, handed down its opinion back in 2013. It was largely in favor of Amazon, so the Austrian Supreme Court cancelled all the previous rulings, and sent the case back to the Vienna Commercial Court to consider in the light of the CJEU guidance. The Court of Justice of the European Union does not rule on particular cases, but considers the larger questions of law that are involved, leaving it to local courts to use its published guidance in their subsequent judgments.

There were three main grounds why the Austrian Commercial Court ruled that the entire Austrian copyright levy system had to go. First, it did not provide a proper re-imbursement right: if storage devices are not used for private copying, there must be an "effective" mechanism that allows for re-imbursement of the levy. Austria's system didn't. Secondly, there was no distinction between lawful and unlawful sources for private copying, something else that was required by the InfoSoc Directive. Finally, half of the monies raised by copyright levies were distributed to "social and cultural institutions", rather than to the artists, and that fell foul of the CJEU ruling too.

As the IPKat points out, it is likely that all of these issues affect Germany's copyright levy system, too, so we can probably expect a legal challenge there to be successful. And there's a delightful sting in the tail of the blog post:

The ruling of the Commercial Court of course also raises the question whether dealers, manufacturers or importers may have a claim for repayment of the levies on the principles of unfair enrichment. If such requests would to be made, they might well jeopardise the very existence of Austro Mechana.

Presumably the same would be true in Germany, which would leave the central collecting organization there, the ZPÜ (the Zentralstelle für private Überspielungsrechte) exposed as well. One of the founders of the ZPÜ, and presumably still one of its most important members, is GEMA, well known to Techdirt readers. The possibility that a future court case might force GEMA to pay back a good chunk of all the copyright levies it has received is, of course, a tantalizing prospect.

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Filed Under: austria, cjeu, copyright, copyright levies, eu, eucj, european court of justice

Austria Wants To Bring In Google Tax For Snippets -- Including Single Words

from the how-low-can-you-go? dept

Here on Techdirt, we have been following with a certain bemusement attempts by a number of European governments to bring in laws that would grant newspaper and magazine owners a special "ancillary" copyright over snippets -- actually a thinly-disguised attempt to tax Google. Despite the miserable failure of this ploy, Austria has decided it wants to join the club, as reported here by the Initiative Against Ancillary Copyright site:

The Austrian proposal is very similar to the German law. Producers of "newspapers and magazines" shall be granted an exclusive right only against commercial providers of search engines and news aggregators. As in Germany, this right is also supposed to only last for one year. But there remains one big difference: The draft does not include an exception for "single words and shortest text-snippets" which expands the scope of the right tremendously!

That's something of an understatement.

Assuming Austria goes ahead and brings in this change (it's currently a draft amendment to the country's copyright law), it will surely learn the hard way that it doesn't help publishers. What's more worrying is that there is an amendment (number 204 - pdf) to the proposed revision of the EU copyright directive, that seeks to bring in this crazy idea across all 28 member states:

Notes that the current legal framework provides for neighbouring rights for performers, phonogram producers, film producers and broadcasting companies, but not for press publishers; calls on the Commission, therefore, to analyse whether neighbouring rights for press publishers can provide appropriate protection and remuneration for their work in a digital media world;

There's an important vote on Tuesday that will determine whether that amendment is adopted, along with some of the hundreds of others that have been proposed. Let's hope that the European politicians bear in mind how badly the idea has turned out every time it has been tried before.

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Filed Under: aggregators, ancillary, ancillary rights, austria, copyright, germany, google tax, snippets
Companies: google

All Parties In Austrian Parliament Support Resolution Calling For Action Against NSA And GCHQ Spying

from the largely-symbolic,-still-significant dept

However much the US government might hope otherwise, there is still widespread concern in Europe about the activities of the NSA and its Five Eyes friends. Here's the latest proof of that: a joint motion signed by all political parties in the Austrian parliament, against illegal surveillance (via Netzpolitik). The Parliament's own summary of what the motion contained reads as follows (original in German):

The recent revelations of the US whistleblower Edward Snowden have now acted as a call to action for the six parliamentary groups. In a resolution introduced jointly, they express their support for tackling seriously the illegal spying by the US foreign intelligence NSA, its British counterpart GCHQ and other foreign intelligence services. In their opinion, the [Austrian] government should exhaust all available diplomatic options, and diligently pursue violations of the Austrian Criminal Code. In addition, the MPs urge taking steps at the European level to promote the technological independence of Europe in the field of information and communication technology.

In the justification for the motion, reference was made to the recently-discovered "cyberbug", presumably attributable to the NSA. With this new malware, which cannot be detected by anti-virus software, and can even survive wiping the hard disk undamaged, it is possible for encryption to be circumvented, for example. The Members find equally worrying the theft of millions of electronic encryption keys from the Dutch SIM card producer Gemalto.

Although the motion in itself is unlikely to achieve much, it's a clear indication of continuing anger among European politicians at the activities of the NSA and GCHQ in spying on innocent members of the public, and undermining key elements of telecommunications infrastructure. If nothing else, it's a timely reminder that there are plenty of unresolved issues here, and that they are likely to have serious ramifications on US-EU relations in the future, not least in areas like Safe Harbor and TAFTA/TTIP.

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Filed Under: austria, austrian parliament, gchq, nsa, privacy, surveillance

Austrian ISPs Sued For Actually Wanting A Court Order Rather Than Just Blocking Websites Based On Entertainment Industry's Requests

from the due-process-means-something dept

For years now, the entertainment industry's dream is that it should be able to point to certain websites and say "bad website" and have the rest of the world make that website disappear. The fact that the industry has a dreadful history of falsely accusing perfectly legitimate sites as infringing, leading to bogus takedowns that are destroying perfectly legitimate businesses, either by shutting them down without any evidence, or involving them in extended legal battles, apparently never enters the equation. The entertainment industry still insists that when it points to a site and says "bad" that the site should immediately be forced to disappear.

Furthermore, the industry seems to believe that everyone else has a legal responsibility to carry out its wishes once it declares a site as bad. It thinks hosts should take down sites, search engines should stop linking to them, advertisers should block ads, registrars should pull domain names and ISPs should block access. You'd think that maybe actually adapting to new technologies and giving people more of what they want might be a more compelling strategy, but the legacy entertainment industry prefers demanding that everyone else go out of their way to protect the legacy industry's obsolete business model, without the industry itself doing anything more than pointing at sites (often incorrectly).

The latest battle ground for this appears to be in Austria, where an "anti-piracy" group representing the movie industry, VAP, has sued four local ISPs (UPC, Drei, Tele2 and A1) for failing to block access to two sites based entirely on VAP's say so. That is, there is no court case or court order saying that the ISPs need to block Movie4K.to and Kinox.to. It's entirely VAP saying so (it also asked for the ISPs to block The Pirate Bay, but for some reason left that one out of the eventual lawsuit). When the ISPs quite reasonably said, "Uh, where's the court order?" rather than go to court against the sites in question, VAP sued the ISPs. That seems tremendously questionable.

Either way, it appears that IFPI is jumping in on the action too. You may recall just a few weeks ago the head of the IFPI in Austria, Franz Medwenitsch, foreshadowed this move by claiming that it's not censorship to block sites that he, personally, doesn't like. It's only censorship when you block sites he likes, you see? And he doesn't like The Pirate Bay. So, he's going to sue ISPs to block it and other sites as well.

The idea that entire websites should be completely inaccessible based entirely on the say so of a particular industry (with a very long history of attacking any new innovation) seems immensely worrisome if you believe in an open internet or basic principles of innovation. Giving the legacy film or music industry a "veto" on innovation merely by declaring a site "rogue" is a very dangerous idea. The ISPs are right to stand up and demand more than just those industry groups' say so, and hopefully courts will agree.

Filed Under: austria, blocking, court orders, entertainment industry, filters, websites
Companies: ifpi, vap

Austrian Tor Exit Node Operator Found Guilty As An Accomplice Because Someone Used His Node To Commit A crime

from the bad,-bad-news dept

Three years ago we wrote about how Austrian police had seized computers from someone running a Tor exit node. This kind of thing happens from time to time, but it appears that folks in Austria have taken it up a notch by... effectively now making it illegal to run a Tor exit node. According to the report, which was confirmed by the accused, the court found that running the node violated §12 of the Austrian penal code, which effectively says:

Not only the immediate perpetrator commits a criminal action, but also anyone who appoints someone to carry it out, or anyone who otherwise contributes to the completion of said criminal action.

In other words, it's a form of accomplice liability for criminality. It's pretty standard to name criminal accomplices liable for "aiding and abetting" the activities of others, but it's a massive and incredibly dangerous stretch to argue that merely running a Tor exit node makes you an accomplice that "contributes to the completion" of a crime. Under this sort of thinking, Volkswagen would be liable if someone drove a VW as the getaway car in a bank robbery. It's a very, very broad interpretation of accomplice liability, in a situation where it clearly does not make sense.

Tragically, this comes out the same day that the EFF is promoting why everyone should use Tor. While it accurately notes that no one in the US has been prosecuted for running Tor, it may want to make a note about Austria. Hopefully there is some way to fight back on this ruling and take it to a higher court -- and hopefully whoever reviews it will be better informed about how Tor works and what it means to run an exit node.

Filed Under: accomplice, aiding and abetting, austria, secondary liability, tor, tor node

Austrian Collection Society Pushing Members To Support Collecting Fees For Every Embedded Video

from the the-front-rent-and-the-back-rent dept

The EU Commission has just extended its deadline for comment on its copyright review/reform for an extra 30 days. Those possibly affected by any changes routed through this would do well to add their input, especially as a couple of the issues being considered would turn normal internet sharing into copyright infringement.

Jakob Kucharczyk at Project DisCo (Disruptive Competition) points out two particularly troubling questions under consideration.

How about this question:

“Should the provision of a hyperlink leading to a work or other subject matter protected under copyright, either in general or under specific circumstances, be subject to the authorization of the rightholder?”

A similarly pivotal one:

“Should the viewing of a web-page where this implies the temporary reproduction of a work protected under copyright on the screen and in the cache memory of the user’s computer be subject to the authorization of the rightholder?”

One could simply paraphrase these questions into: would you like to break the Internet as we know it and criminalize Internet users for viewing a web-page? These questions are not theoretical; they are currently in front of the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU).

If these are codified, embedding a video on a third-party site would trigger a licensing fee. This isn't just a concern for bloggers or others who operate websites. This would affect everyone. Post a link or a video via Facebook or Twitter? That's infringement. Sure, larger sites would probably be covered by blanket licenses, but that's of very little comfort. Throwing permission/licenses into the third-party mix would create problems everywhere.

The second question is even worse. Now, even those simply viewing the posts of others would be infringing simply because a temporary cache copy has been created for the duration of the viewing.

To any reasonable person, both questions are patently ridiculous. For one thing, attempting to extract fees for embedding or linking to content is double-dipping. YouTube and others already pay licensing fees for content hosted at their sites. Attempting to add a layer of "permission" on top of third-party postings not only creates a legal nightmare for social media services, but also creates the very real possibility of encouraging copyright trolling. Anyone posting a link/embedding a video or simply viewing copyrighted content becomes a potential lawsuit target.

Neither of these questions should be answered "yes," not even by the most diehard copyright maximalist. But that's exactly what an Austrian collection society (AKM) is pushing for, according to this report sent in by Techflaws.

AKM has sent a letter to its 20,000 members, asking for them to comment on the EU Commission's copyright reforms. All well and good, except that AKM seriously wants the first of these considerations to become EU law and has apparently altered the EU Commission's questionnaire in hopes of adding 20,000 supporters' "voices" to the collected comments.

The original questionnaire looks like this:


According to FutureZone, AKM sent this out, but removed everything but the "Yes" option from this question. It also added some canned wording in the explanation area, suggesting "reasonable compensation" for the embedding of music videos.

AKM fortunately didn't make up its members' minds on cached copies, but it still assumes an embedded video should be subject to double-dipping -- once from the original host and once more from anyone embedding it.

AKM's statement on its site (posted Feb. 5th) expresses its displeasure with the EU Directive, which it obviously feels offers inadequate compensation.

The EU Directive does not create a fair, level playing field and does not match Austrian standards.

"Fair and level" isn't really what AKM is looking for. That much is apparent in its alteration of the original EU Commission questionnaire.

AKM's stance is being embraced by perhaps the most infamous of collection societies, GEMA. Spokeswoman Ursula Goebel said GEMA was aligned with AKM. Hyperlinks and cached copies aren't necessarily an issue (or at least one neither collection society feels it can safely approach at this time) but embedded videos are. According to Goebel, embedded videos should be licensed because the end user isn't aware of where the videos originate. In other words, those embedding videos should pay a fee because viewers might think the blog, etc. is the originating source. Taxing one person for someone else's ignorance hardly sounds like a logical reason for adding licensing fees to embeds. The article goes on to question how GEMA hopes to avoid double-dipping on licensing fees (it doesn't -- see below) while noting that this is perfectly in line with GEMA's business model, which is predicated on the assumption that any sharing of content should be subject to licensing fees. (A hearty thank you to Jakob Kucharzyk for his translation help.)

GEMA isn't shy about its double-dipping aspirations and has been fighting YouTube for a higher fees for several years now. To date, the end result has been little more than the endless aggravation of German YouTube viewers, who are greeted with the quizzical "Sorry" faces at a disproportionately higher rate than any other nation in the world.

The upside is that the comment period has been extended. The most hardline collection societies don't appear to be overly eager to shatter the web in search on income, but AKM's apparent "remix" of the EU Commission's questionnaire (and GEMA's thumbs-up) shows how far they're willing to go to "tax" a stream both coming and going.

Filed Under: austria, collection society, copyright, embedding, eu commission