French Government Takes 172 Million Euros From Citizens To Pay Publisher For Access To Research Public Already Paid For Once

from the and-slashes-public-education-funding-on-top-of-it dept

It's all about priorities. Those providing the valuable research will have to learn to do without because the publishers must be paid.

France may not have any money left for its universities but it does have money for academic publishers. While university presidents learn that their funding is to be reduced by EUR 400 million, the Ministry of Research has decided, under great secrecy, to pay EUR 172 million to the world leader in scientific publishing Elsevier.

If the name Elsevier rings a bell, it's because the academic publishing giant has dragged its own dubious reputation through the mud with alarming frequency over the past several years. It has charged for access to open-access documents, despite being repeatedly informed of this "oversight" in its purchasing system. At one point it had a division dedicated to cranking out fake medical journals for use by pharmaceutical companies to buttress iffy claims about medicinal effectiveness. It was also engaged in ghostwriting copy for these same companies in order to downplay disagreeable research findings. It has also routinely targeted researchers who have posted copies of their own work on personal sites or to freely-accessible university online libraries.

As the Open Knowledge Foundation points out, France is paying multiple times for the same documents -- documents created for "free" by university researchers who don't see a cent of Elsevier's profits.

The scientific publishing market is an unusual sector, those who create value are never remunerated. Instead, they often pay to see their work published. Authors do not receive any direct financial gain from their articles, and the peer review is conducted voluntarily. This enormous amount of work is indirectly funded by public money. Writing articles and participating in peer review are part of the expected activities of researchers, expected activities that lead to further research funding from the taxpayer.

So, in response to demands from Elsevier, France is cutting the financing that generates the research locked up by academic publishers and increasing its contributions to a company that enjoys a 30-40% profit margin on documents it is often paid (by researchers) to resell.

This published research was mainly financed by public funds. Therefore in the end, we will have paid to Elsevier twice: once to publish, a second time to read.

When the Open Access Foundation says "we," it means French citizens. And despite being double-dipped by their government, a large majority of French citizens will still have no access to the research locked up by Elsevier. Publicly-funded research resides behind the publisher's paywall, limited to certain people within the 476 institutions included in the agreement. While Elsevier did offer the French government a "discount" of nearly 16 million EUR, this price cut is due to the withdrawal of over 150 institutions from Elsevier's licensing scheme.

That's a lot of money being spent to benefit only a small percentage of French citizens. And, as the article points out, it's only one of several similar agreements with other academic publishers. These closed markets provide for constantly increasing prices, even as digital storage and distribution continue to decrease costs. And let's not forget the fact that those creating these works are also paying to have them included in academic publishers' libraries, often giving up control of their copyright for an extended period of time.

Sooner or later, the system will collapse under its own weight. Slashing funding to universities negatively affects the creation of the very documents Elsevier needs to sustain its position in the marketplace. You can't continue to rob one to pay for the other, at least not forever. Publisher reaction to declining participation has generally been to increase rates -- another unsustainable pattern. But until it all falls apart, publishers will continue to do all they can to separate the public from research it already paid for once… and erect a paywall to ensure they still can't access it even after paying for it again.

Filed Under: france, open access, priorities, research

Why A 'Declaration of Digital Human Rights' Gets It Wrong

from the nobody-said-it-would-be-easy dept

Back in November 2013, the French think-tank Forum d’Avignon published a manifesto entitled, "Principles of a universal declaration for Internet users' and creators' rights in a digital era," which tried to define the concept of an individual's "digital cultural data." The same group has now put together what it rather grandly calls a "Preliminary Declaration of the Digital Human Rights". That might sound like a good idea, but as Techdirt has discussed before, thinking in terms of "rights" and "laws" isn't always the best way to proceed in these sort of areas.

That's certainly the view of a heavyweight collection of French civil society organizations, which have issued a statement about what they see as key problems with the declaration (via @maliciarogue.). First of all, they point out that the group behind the declaration is not entirely disinterested here:

It is worth noting that the Forum d’Avignon is a French think tank whose main goal is to deepen the links between culture and economy. We hereby denounce the Forum's use of digital privacy's debate to its own profit, that is in order to reinforce copyright.

One big problem is the absence of any appreciation of the importance of the public domain:

Article 5 of the Declaration poses that « any use of the data as a creative work » is subject to prior consent of the individual. Such a formulation completely ignores the fundamental role of the public domain as well as the exceptions and limitations to copyright, which are all essential in balancing and preserving the system.

The statement also points out that trying to apply copyright law to personal data is unsatisfactory, because it puts the onus on individuals to defend their privacy:

Similarly, the application of copyright law to personal data is a dangerous solution for it is based on the sole individual responsibility and control of the use of data which identify oneself. The French State Council and the National Digital Council rightly warned against such a conceptual framework as it could lead to greater discrimination and therefore inequalities in the protection of privacy. We are not all equal with the exploitation and protection of our data and it is essential that common rules exist.

The statement concludes:

We therefore emphasise that personal data is not a form of creative work and must not be considered as such. Equally, a form of creative work is not personal data and must not be considered as such.

The protection of personal data is a fundamental stake in the digital age. It needs to be balanced with freedom of expression and the right to information.

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Filed Under: copyright, culture, declaration of human rights, france, human rights, public domain
Companies: forum d'avignon

Hadopi Strikes Again: Net User Fined For Not Understanding How A Program Installed By Someone Else Works

from the ignorance-of-the-technology dept

As we've reported, France's "three strikes and you're out" law, known officially as Hadopi, has been a joke from start to finish. For example, the law's first victim was convicted because his wife had downloaded some songs, while the law's first suspension was cancelled for technical reasons. Despite these setbacks, and a change of government, France is persisting with this benighted scheme, and Numerama brings us the latest installment of this uniquely French farce (original in French.)

It concerns an Internet user whose husband used the P2P file-sharing program eMule to download several films. He was spotted doing so, his wife received the first warning under Hadopi, and he stopped downloading forthwith. Unfortunately, he left the eMule program on his wife's computer, and every time she started it up, it continued to share the films already downloaded. That fact was spotted again, and the owner of the PC in question was eventually taken to court. Despite her protestations that she was unaware of eMule continuing its filesharing activity, the court was unimpressed, she was found guilty and fined 800 euros (although the fine was suspended.)

Leaving aside the rights and wrongs of this particular case, it does raise an interesting issue. It is generally accepted that ignorance of the law is no defense, but what about ignorance of the technology? If you don't understand what your computer is doing, are you really to blame when it does something illegal without any involvement from you? And if you are, does that mean that all the people whose computers get taken over as part of a botnet are responsible for the damage it causes?

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Filed Under: copyright, france, hadopi, software

Court Fines French Blogger $3,400 For Her Negative Review Of Local Italian Restaurant, Il Giardino

from the enjoy-your-cash,-idiots...-and-your-demolished-reputation dept

Here's yet another business that, when confronted with a negative review, thought to itself, "Why not deter EVEN MORE potential patrons from ever considering setting foot in our establishment?" There are many ways to react to criticism, and Il Giardino, an Italian restaurant located in France, opted for "catastrophic."

A food blogger in France has been fined 1500 euros ($2,040 USD) for writing a negative review of a restaurant. According to Arret Sur Images (translated), Caroline Doudet wrote an unflattering review of Il Giardino, an Italian restaurant in Cap-Ferret, France in August of 2013 on her blog Les Chroniques Culturelles. She was brought to court six months later by the restaurant.

Doudet's review is actually a blog post, one that would require readers to do a little digging to get past the normal review sites. As far as I can tell from the translation, Doudet portrayed the lousy service she encountered in a far more humorous fashion than most negative reviews, all the while clearly pointing out the deficiencies she encountered.

So, rather than address the issues, or simply disregard the single voice complaining about the three waitpersons apparently needed to acquire a single round of beverages (not to mention quality issues with the food [and service] past that point), Il Giardino decided to make its mégot mal a full-blown legal affair.

It all comes back to European supervillain The Google.

Sud Ouest reports (translated) that the lawyer for the restaurant claims that the post caused "great harm" to his client because when the restaurant was Googled, the negative review was one of the first results.

Ah, yes. SEO uber alles (he said, fearlessly mixing European dialects like a trainspotting linguist). Great harm was apparently suffered and, therefore, the person who received lousy service from the aggrieved entity must pay. The court apparently agreed with this faulty line of logic (possibly due to Google's name being raised [and presumably greeted with involuntary hisses by attending countrymen]) and slapped the blogger with a hefty fine and a request that she "change the title" of the offending post.

Doudet did them all one better. She deleted it. It lives on at the Internet Archive, but won't be troubling search engine results to the extent it once did. Not that it matters. Il Giardino's decision to sue is hurting it far more than Doudet's post did.




Doudet was also charged $1,360 in court costs, bringing her total fines to a positively KlearGearian level of vindictive ridiculousness ($3,400).

There are too many things wrong with this court decision to enumerate, but Doudet's take on the fiasco sums it up beautifully.

"If bloggers do not have the freedom to write negative reviews, positive reviews make no sense either."

If businesses like Il Giardino want to continue living a "hear no evil" existence, that's fine. But no one should believe anything positive posted about the restaurant anywhere -- not if this is how the business reacts when it's criticized. Every so often, something truly defamatory should be addressed in this fashion, but just being criticized shouldn't trigger this sort of reaction. If the restaurant's Google juice is so diluted it can't outweigh a blogger, the problem lies with the restaurant, not the critic. Now that it's punished a critic, its reputation has gone completely south, something that wouldn't have happened if it had just accepted the fact that bad reviews happen and moved on.

Filed Under: blogging, caroline doudet, food blogging, france, free speech, opinion, reviews, search results, seo
Companies: il giardino

France Passes Anti-Amazon Law Eliminating Free Shipping; Amazon Responds With 0.01 Euro Shipping Fees

from the cher-dieu,-nous-avons-été-Columbia-Housed! dept

In a long-running legal battle that stretches back nearly a decade, Amazon has again emerged as the winner, despite both a court ruling and legislation against it.

In 2004, France's bookstores took the company to court over its discounts and free shipping, arguing that the online retailer was killing off local businesses. Three years later, the court emerged with a ruling that declared Amazon would have to start charging for shipping or face a 1,000 euro per day fine until it did. Amazon chose the latter option, opting to allow aggrieved merchants (and press covering the legal battle) to provide it with some very low-cost press.

Since that strategy didn't pay off, French retailers began pushing for a law aimed at all online retailers -- but most specifically Amazon -- that would make it illegal to offer free shipping to French book purchasers. This was on top of an existing law (put into force in 1981) that forbade anything more than a 5% discount on new titles. This new law forces Amazon to charge for shipping or face being banned from selling in France completely, along with stripping away the 5% discount.

No doubt this was seen as a huge victory for all the local stores that managed to weather the last 10 years of low-level, government-aided price fixing. It probably felt like one, too, right up until Amazon announced its new shipping rate.

France's "anti-Amazon" law prohibiting free shipping and discounts has now gone into effect, and Amazon quickly announced that it had conformed -- technically. Though it no longer ships books for free, it only charges 0.01 euro, conforming to the letter if not the spirit of the law (French Prime members still receive free book shipping).

Enjoy your symbolic victory, French legislators. A whopping centime per shipment "containing books" (no matter how many items are in the cart) will no doubt restore the financial glory of local retailers, especially when unaffected items start flowing into France with both discounts and cheaper shipping.

That's the sort of "victory" that's often achieved by legislating "fairness." There are others ways local retailers could have handled this problem, but they chose the long, expensive and ultimately fruitless courtroom/legislation route and the end result is 1/100th of a Euro per shipment. And this won't be the end of it. Amazon is apparently eyeing an appeal with the EU Commission, which views the new law as anti-competitive.

Filed Under: books, france, free shipping, regulations, shipping
Companies: amazon

Germany Expels Top US Intelligence Official, Says It Will (Officially) Spy Back On US And UK

from the no-more-no-spy dept

Techdirt has been following the complicated German reaction to Edward Snowden's revelations about US and UK surveillance of people in that country, whether or not in high places, for some while now. Although the German public has been deeply shocked by the leaks, the German government has been keen to preserve good relations with the US. But the revelation that there was not just one but probably two double agents working for the US within the German secret services has taken the country's unhappiness with its ally up a notch, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel has finally reacted with a classic diplomatic punishment, reported here by the Guardian:

The German government has asked the top representative of America's secret services in Germany to leave the country. Members of the government's supervisory panel announced the measure at a press conference in Berlin this afternoon.

Clemens Binninger, a member of Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats, who chairs the committee that oversees the intelligence services, explained that the move came in response to America's "failure to cooperate on resolving various allegations, starting with the NSA and up to the latest incidents".

This comes just after the Independent newspaper carried the following story about another significant German response to US (and UK) spying:

Chancellor Angela Merkel's government is planning to scrap a no-spy agreement Germany has held with Britain and the United States since 1945 in response to an embarrassing US-German intelligence service scandal which has deeply soured relations between Berlin and Washington.

The unprecedented change to Berlin's counter-espionage policy was announced by Ms Merkel’s Interior Minister, Thomas de Maizière. He said that Berlin wanted "360-degree surveillance" of all intelligence-gathering operations in Germany.

...

Mr de Maizière told Bild that he was now not ruling out permanent German counter-espionage surveillance of US, British and French intelligence operations. His remarks were echoed by Stephan Mayer, a domestic security spokesman for Ms Merkel’s ruling Christian Democrats. “We must focus more strongly on our so-called allies,” he said.

It may well be that some "unofficial" German spying on the US had been going on until now, but the fact that Angela Merkel's interior minister has made an official statement of his country's intent to spy on the US, UK and France is a clear signal of her displeasure with the surveillance activities of those "so-called" allies. Given Germany's rapidly-escalating response here, an interesting question is: What will it do if/when the next big spying scandal breaks?

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Filed Under: cia, france, germany, no spy agreement, spying, surveillance, uk, us

Former CIA Director And Defense Secretary Says CIA Tried, But Failed, To Do Economic Espionage

from the this-doesn't-make-the-us-look-any-better dept

US intelligence officials still seem to think that there's some big distinction between the kind of intelligence work the US does versus the kind that other countries do. US officials time and time again claim that they don't do "economic espionage" -- even though it's pretty clear that they do it, just through indirect means (i.e., while they don't hand trade secrets over to companies, they're certainly using economic information to impact policy and trade discussions).

Former Defense Secretary and CIA boss Robert Gates continued this sort of tone deaf line of thinking from US intelligence defenders by claiming that French intelligence downloads the contents of laptops from businessmen visiting Paris:

"There are probably a dozen or 15 countries that steal our technology in this way,” Gates said in an interview the Council on Foreign Relations posted online Thursday. “In terms of the most capable, next to the Chinese, are the French — and they’ve been doing it a long time.”

Gates, who was also director of the Central Intelligence Agency in the first Bush administration, said that when he talks to business audiences, he asks, “How many of you go to Paris on business?’ Hands go up. ‘How many of you take your laptops?’ Hands go up. ‘How many of you take your laptops to dinner?’ Not very many hands.”

“For years,” Gates said, “French intelligence services have been breaking into the hotel rooms of American businessmen and surreptitiously downloading their laptops, if they felt those laptops had technological information or competitive information that would be useful for French companies. France has been a mercantilist country — the government and business have operated hand in hand — since the time of Louis XIV.”

Throwing everyone else under the bus does nothing to make the US and the NSA's activities any better, and it's bizarre that intelligence officials seem to think they have the moral upper hand here. Almost no one sees it that way. They just look petty.

Even more bizarre: for all of Gates' talk about how the US doesn't do economic espionage... he then basically admits that he tried to do exactly that and failed:

But despite his attempt to work with, in his words, five or six commerce secretaries, “I never could get one of them interested in being the facilitator of getting that kind of CIA information to American companies. So this is something we don’t do."

Uh... he says "this is something we don't do" while admitting that he tried to do exactly that. He was just stymied by whoever was Commerce Secretary. If a more... permissive Commerce Secretary were in the job, it would be a very different story, now wouldn't it? In fact, this is a pretty major admission. For all the talk of "we don't do that," what Gates really means is "we tried to do economic espionage, and we would do economic espionage, if we could."

Suddenly, the moral high road doesn't look so high.

Filed Under: cia, economic espionage, france, nsa, surveillance, us

'Notice And Staydown' The Latest Fad In Copyright Enforcement

from the dedicated-follower-of-fashion dept

Among governments, bad digital policy ideas have a habit of spreading. For example, after France pioneered the "three strikes" approach, it was picked up by a number of other countries, but it is now finally dying a long-overdue death -- except in Australia, which evidently missed the memo that this approach demonstrably doesn't work. Now the latest fashion seems to be "notice and staydown", which Mike wrote about a couple of months back. After largely abandoning "three strikes", France may be signing up for this latest hot trend, as TorrentFreak reports:

French anti-piracy agency HADOPI handed the government a long-awaited report on the development of "operational tools" for dealing with online piracy. Several key areas are outlined, including the creation of a new type of takedown notice designed not only to take content offline, but keep it offline for up to six months.

Here are some details:

These notices would oblige a host to "stop and prevent, for a specified period, the reappearance of content that has been identified as constituting an infringement of copyright or related rights on the site."

It's suggested that these kinds of orders could be valid for up to six months but at least initially would only be directed at sites hosting actual files, not links to files such as in the case of BitTorrent indexes.

Although the "staydown" would be for up to six months, rather than forever, as proposed in the US, it's easy to predict future demands from the copyright industry to extend that limit when it doesn't have the desired results, and to include BitTorrent indexes as well. And there's no way smaller companies and startups could cope with the huge task of monitoring uploads for things that have to "staydown". All-in-all, then, this seems destined to join "three strikes" in the digital dustbin of history, along with all the other failed enforcement approaches. The question is: what will be the next bad idea governments adopt?

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Filed Under: copyright, enforcement, france, hadopi, notice and staydown

Frenchman Fined For 'Theft' And 'Fraudulent Retention' For Finding Health Docs Via A Google Search

from the le-cluelessness dept

The basic downloading tool Wget is much in the news at the moment, and here's another story where it plays a central role. The French blogger and activist Olivier Laurelli, also known by his Twitter name Bluetouff, was searching on Google for something else when he spotted an interesting link that turned out to lead to several gigabytes of internal documents held on the French National Agency for Food Safety, Environment, and Labor's extranet (ANSES in French). Ars Technica explains what happened next:

Laurelli merely used the Linux Wget tool to download all of the contents of the Web directory that he found. He left the files on his drive for a few days and then transferred them to his desktop for more convenient reading (which the French government would later spin as "the accused made backup copies of the documents he had stolen"). A few days later, Laurelli searched through the documents he downloaded and sent some to a fellow … writer [on the activist news site Reflets.info], Yovan Menkevick. About two weeks later, a few interesting scientific slides pertaining to nano-substances from the cache were published on Laurelli's site.

When ANSES discovered this, it reported what it called "potential intrusion" and "data theft" to the police. Then France's Central Directorate of Interior Intelligence (DCRI in French) became involved. The lower court that heard the case decided Laurelli should not be punished for accessing data that was not secure; ANSES was happy to let it go at that, but DCRI appealed.

It was clear that things would not go well in the appeals court when the presiding judge seemed not to know even how to pronounce "Google " or "login" -- he said "Googluh" and "lojin" (original in French.) The prosecutor was just as bad: he started off his speech by admitting "I didn't even understand half the terms I heard today." Ars Technica reports the denouement of this high-tech French farce as follows:

The appeals court acquitted Laurelli of fraudulently accessing an information system but saw fit to convict Bluetouff of theft of documents and fraudulent retention of information. The court wrote: "It is well demonstrated that he was conscious of his irregular retention in automated data processing, accessed where he downloaded protected evidence; and that investigations have shown that these data had been downloaded before being... disseminated to others; that it is, in any event, established that Olivier Laurelli made copies of computer files inaccessible to the public for personal use without the knowledge and against the will of its owner"

Leaving aside the fact that the appeals court was clearly ill-equipped to understand the technical issues involved, and that the original files were completely unprotected and found by Google's crawler, not Laurelli, there is another disquieting aspect to this affair. Alongside his writing and activism, Laurelli also runs a small computer security company. One of the services it offers is a standard VPN. He was using this VPN service when he accessed the ANSES site, and the fact that his connection was routed via Panama -- the VPN's exit node -- counted heavily against him, he believes:

"This VPN (in fact above all this Panamanian IP address) is probably one of the strongest elements which had driven the prosecution to pursue a criminal case," he wrote.

VPNs represent one of the few tools available to ordinary Internet users to help them bolster their security and privacy against global surveillance. It's deeply troubling that the mere fact of using a VPN to access a Web site was apparently viewed by the court as evidence of criminal intent, rather than simply good online practice in the post-Snowden world.

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Filed Under: anses, bluetouff, documents, france, liability, olivier laurelli, retention, search, security, theft, wget

French Privacy Agency DDoS's Itself In Ordering Google To Link To It From Google France Home Page

from the what-you-get-when-you're-technologically-clueless dept

Last month, Google got hit with a €150,000 fine for its new privacy policy, which French regulators claimed violated the law. Google has been disputing this and has appealed, but as part of the ruling by the French National commission for Computing and Civil Liberties (CNIL), Google was ordered to post a statement to the home page of Google.fr about the fine, along with a link back to CNIL's website which had the full ruling. Google had asked to suspend the order to post the message until after the appeals process was complete, but that was denied. In response, Google posted the message, and promptly caused CNIL's website to go offline, as apparently the technologically clueless folks over there never realized that having a link from Google's home page in that country might lead to a bit of extra traffic.

Filed Under: cnil, ddos, france, google home page, link, privacy
Companies: google