Google News Returning To Spain, As Awful 'Inalienable' Snippets Tax Is Replaced With Marginally Less Awful EU Copyright Directive

from the what's-the-point? dept

Back in 2014, Spain brought in a Google tax. It was even worse than Germany's, which was so unworkable that it was never applied fully. Spain's law was worse because it created a right for publishers to be paid by "news aggregators" that was "inalienable". That is, publishers could not waive that right -- they had to charge. That negated the point of Creative Commons licenses, which are designed to allow people to use material without paying. Subsequent research showed that Spain's snippet tax was a disaster for publishers, especially the smaller ones.

Unsurprisingly, in response Google went for the nuclear option, and shut down Google News in Spain at the end of 2014. Seven years later -- a lifetime on the Internet -- Google News is returning to Spain:

In 2014, we closed Google News in Spain due to local legislation. Today, we're announcing that Google News will soon be available once again in Spain. We made this decision as a result of a new Royal Decree implementing the European Copyright Directive, introduced today by the Spanish government.

Google News is coming back because the EU's Copyright Directive has now been implemented by national legislation in Spain, superseding the older snippet tax. Crucially, the inalienable right to charge for snippets has gone:

the new copyright law allows Spanish media outlets -- big and small -- to make their own decisions about how their content can be discovered and how they want to make money with that content. Over the coming months, we will be working with publishers to reach agreements which cover their rights under the new law.

As Techdirt has emphasized for years, the relevant section of the EU Copyright Directive, originally called Article 11, but now renumbered as Article 15, is dreadful, because it gives publishers the ability to demand payment from Google and others for sending them traffic. But at least under the EU law that is optional, not compulsory. Google says it has no problem with paying money to publishers in a variety of ways:

we will work towards bringing Google News Showcase to Spain, a licensing program and new product experience which pays publishers to curate content for story panels across Google News and Discover.

That's a reminder that whatever form the ridiculous snippet tax takes, for Google it's just a tiny bump in the road. At most, it requires the company to spend a little small change it found down the back of the sofa.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

Filed Under: copyright, copyright directive, eu, google news, snippet tax, spain
Companies: google

Permission Culture Gone Mad: Worries About Proper License For 'Balcony Singing' Lead Collection Society To Say It's Okay, You Can Sing

from the copyright-is-broken dept

Yet another reminder that copyright is really, really broken. As you may have seen, there have been a few viral videos making the rounds of people locked down in apartment buildings deciding to hold impromptu music performances from balconies. When the first of these came out, I had joked that it would only be a matter of time until some music collection society called these an unlicensed public performance and demanded royalty payments. Thankfully, that has not happened, though in Spain, a copyright professor did tell a journalist that those singing from the balconies should first get a license (relying on Google translate here...):

Singing songs from the window or the balconies on the terraces, as seen in Spanish houses these days during the confinement due to the coronavirus pandemic, could violate the intellectual property rights of their authors. This is collected by information from Europa Press. In it, Pablo Velasco Quintana, an expert in intellectual property at the CEU San Pablo University, it is necessary to "request authorization" for a "communication to the public", whether or not it is "profitable" , since, according to the law, the author is the only one that it can "authorize or prohibit" "reproduction", "transformation" and "communication".

Thankfully, the Spanish collection society SGAE (which has a bit of a history of corruption) felt the need to come out and clarify that no license was necessary and that it was actually encouraging people to sing in these trying times:

The General Society of Authors and Editors (SGAE) encourages in a statement to the entire population to continue singing from the balconies, from the windows, or from any place where confinement allows it during the state of Alarm to stop the spread of the coronavirus.

"Because singing has no cost, but it is invaluable, especially for those who directly suffer from the virus or for those who fight on the front line against its consequences," he says.

According to the SGAE, the songs that, every night, unite millions of citizens are part of the collective memory of the Spanish and function as a link that reinforces the state of mind.

I'm glad that SGAE seems to recognize that now is not the time to nickel and dime people on lockdown in their homes for entertaining their neighbors with songs -- but just the fact that some experts in the field worried about this possibility, likely means that there were chilling effects from copyright, and some chose to avoid this form of social distance bonding among their neighbors.

While it's good that it's been made clear no license is needed, the fact that people even thought about it is a real condemnation of just how terrible copyright maximalism is. It has infected peoples' brains to the point that they were uncomfortable with the idea of singing in even these conditions, and that's truly messed up.

Filed Under: balcony singing, copyright, italy, licenses, music, public performances, royalties, spain
Companies: sgae

Do Citizens Have A Right To See The Algorithms Used By Publicly-Funded Software?

from the public-money-means-public-code dept

In 2009, the Spanish government brought in a law requiring electricity bill subsidies for some five million poor households in the country. The so-called Bono Social de Electricidad, or BOSCO, was not popular with energy companies, which fought against it in the courts. Following a 2016 ruling, the Spanish authorities introduced new, more restrictive regulations for BOSCO, and potential beneficiaries had to re-register by 31 December 2018. In the end, around 1.5 million households were approved, almost a million fewer than the 2.4 million who had benefited from the previous scheme, and a long way from the estimated 4.5 million who fulfilled the criteria to receive the bonus.

The process of applying for the subsidy was complicated, so a non-profit organization monitoring public authorities, Civio, worked with the National Commission on Markets and Competition to produce an easy-to-use Web page that allowed people to check their eligibility for BOSCO. Because of discrepancies between what the Civio service predicted, and what the Spanish government actually decided, Civio asked to see the source code for the algorithm that was being used to determine eligibility. The idea was to find out how the official algorithm worked so that the Web site could be tweaked to give the same results. As Civio wrote in a blog post, that didn't go so well:

Unfortunately both the government and the Council of Transparency and Good Governance denied Civio access to the code by arguing that sharing it would incur in a copyright violation. However, according to the Spanish Transparency Law and the regulation of intellectual property, work carried out in public administrations is not subjected to copyright.

Civio was not the only one to have problems finding out why details of the algorithm could not be released. The non-profit research and advocacy organization AlgorithmWatch also asked several times exactly whose copyright would be violated if the source code of the governmental BOSCO software were shared, but without success. The fact that code, apparently public-funded and thus not subject to copyright, is nonetheless being withheld for reasons of copyright, is one unsatisfactory feature of the BOSCO saga. Another is that secret government algorithms are being used to make important decisions about citizens. As Civio says:

"Being ruled through secret source code or algorithms should never be allowed in a democratic country under the rule of law," highlights Javier de la Cueva, Civio's lawyer and trustee, in the lawsuit. "The current interpretation of the law by the [Council of Transparency and Good Governance] will allow public administration to develop algorithms hidden from public scrutiny," he warns. For this reason, we appealed the refusal of the Transparency Council before court.

There is another issue beyond the lack of transparency of governmental algorithms that impact people's lives. Supporters of open access rightly point out that it is only fair for the public to have free access to academic research they have paid for. Similarly, it seems only fair for the public to have free access to the source code of software written and used by the government, since they have paid for that too. Or as a site created by the Free Software Foundation Europe on precisely this issue puts it: "If it is public money, it should be public code as well".

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

Filed Under: bosco, open source, publicly funded software, source code, spain

Popular Spanish Soccer Mobile App Has Been Turning Users Into Piracy-Spotters Via Mobile Devices

from the unwitting-spy-network dept

As readers here will already know, the GDPR is now in full swing in Europe, with all of its crippling and stupid regulation in the name of personal privacy. It's a hilariously overly broad law that has had the happy coincidental effect of forcing companies that store personal data to at least be more upfront about how they are using that data. This effect has caused some to embrace the GDPR as wholly good, which is exactly the wrong conclusion to draw. Instead, the GDPR swings way too far in the direction of users controlling their personal data mostly by reaching way too far and keeping its language as vague and broad as possible, something that is already causing chaos in the digital marketplace.

And, yet, it cannot be ignored that the revelations of just how users' data are being abused by some bad actors keep coming. The latest of these concerns the mobile app for La Liga, Spain's most popular soccer league. La Liga recently revealed, having its hand forced by the GDPR, that users of its mobile app were unwittingly part of La Liga's spy network for uncovering unauthorized broadcasts of soccer matches at public venues.

The La Liga app, which is the official streaming app for Spain’s most popular football league, has reportedly been using the microphones on fans’ phones to root out unauthorized broadcasts of matches in public venues like bars and restaurants.

It sounds exactly like the kind of surveillance people are afraid of when it comes to modern technology, but as is often the case, the La Liga app technically asks users in Spain for permission to access their mics, according to Spanish Website El Diario.

Technically, yes, except that this request is buried in the fine print of an opt-in request the app makes for user permissions that nobody ever reads. One need only review the horror of many users of the app at this news to understand that many (most? all?) of the app's users had absolutely no idea that they were serving a soccer league's attempt at ratting out their favorite watering holes and restaurants. It also appears that this technique has been in place for years, and La Liga only drew recent attention to it due to the GDPR being enacted.

La Liga has pushed back on the concerns of its users and the press coverage, stating that it doesn't retain any of this data locally and that it converts the recordings into pure code, which is something of a non-sequitor. Either the data gathered is useful because it combines GPS data and audio recordings in a way that can pinpoint where a user is and what is on the television screens there... or it isn't. Whatever the technical specifics, the end result is a soccer league peeking in on soccer fans as they watch matches, with most of those fans having no idea that this was occurring at all.

Again, the GDPR is not a solution to this problem. For proof of that, you can note that La Liga says in its statements that everything here is above board. This has far more to do with just how much important privacy-implicating notifications are buried in fine print that goes unread by the masses.

Why anyone would download the La Liga app in the future would be a mystery to me.

Filed Under: copyright, fotball, gdpr, la liga, privacy, spain, spying
Companies: la liga

Spanish Government Uses Hate Speech Law To Arrest Critic Of The Spanish Government

from the shocked-SHOCKED-to-find-such-a-predictable-use-of-a-bad-law dept

Spain's government has gotten into the business of regulating speech with predictably awful results. An early adopter of Blues Lives Matter-esque policies, Spain went full police state, passing a law making it a crime to show "disrespect" to law enforcement officers. The predictable result? The arrest of someone for calling cops "slackers" in a Facebook post.

Spain's government is either woefully unaware of the negative consequences of laws like this or, worse, likes the negative consequences. After all, it doesn't hurt Spain's government beyond a little reputational damage. It only hurts residents of Spain. When you're already unpopular, thanks to laws like these and suppression of a Catalan independence vote, what difference does it make if you're known better for shutting down dissent than actually protecting citizens from hateful speech?

One Catalan resident is getting the full "hate speech" rap-and-ride.

A Catalan high school teacher, Manel Riu, appeared in court on Thursday accused of hate speech for his tweets and Facebook posts criticizing Spain, government members and the Guardia Civil police. Over a hundred people escorted him to court in Tremp, west of Catalonia, where he denied any wrongdoing and asked for the case’s dismissal.

As a Catalan, Riu certainly has reason to criticize the Spanish government. During the last attempted referendum, the Spanish government sent police to seize ballots, voters' cellphones, and ordered Google to remove a voting location app from the Play store. The evidence against Riu is composed of 119 tweets gathered by the Guardia Civil, Spain's oldest law enforcement agency -- one that blurs the line between playing soldier and playing cop far more often than its US counterparts.

One tweet apparently compared Spain to hell. The rest are presumably similarly unflattering. Hyperbolic venting by unhappy citizens is to be expected. It also should be protected. Insulating the government from unhappy citizens never works out well. But that's how Spain is handling dissent: by sending out the most "police state" wing of its police forces to arrest people for calling Spain figuratively hell.

The crime cited here is a violation of Spain's hate speech law. But that makes no sense. Hate speech laws are supposed to protect underprivileged groups who are often targets of derogatory comments. They're not supposed to protect the powerful from the underprivileged. The anomalies of hate speech law enforcement are the times they're actually used the way they should be. (Not that they're good ideas in the first place, but for the sake of argument…) Shutting down dissenters and critics of the government is the status quo.

Filed Under: censorship, free speech, political oppression, spain

Google Removed Catalonian Referendum App Following Spanish Court Order

from the this-seems-problematic dept

Last month, we wrote about the crazy situation in Spain, where the government was so totally freaked out about a Catalonian referendum on independence that it shut down the operators of the .cat domain, arrested the company's head of IT for "sedition" and basically shut down a ton of websites about the referendum. The Washington Post now has an article with even more details about the digital attacks in both directions around the Catalonian independence referendum, including hack attacks and DDoS attacks. But one thing caught my eye. Apparently, the supporters of the referendum had created an app called "On Votar 1-Oct." The app had a bunch of the expected functions:

The app, available on Google Play until just before 7 p.m. on Friday, helps people to find their polling station via their address and shows the closest polling stations on Google Maps via GPS, the name of the town or keywords.

It also allows users to share links to polling station locations.

But the Spanish government was so freaked out by the referendum and anything related to it, that it ran and got a court order demanding Google take the app out of Google's app store:

The court order told Google Inc—at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View CA 94043 (USA)—to take down the app located at that URL and also to block or eliminate any future apps submitted by the user with e-mail address "onvotar1oct@gmail.com" or identifying as "Catalonia Voting Software".

The judge says in her ruling that the tweet with the app link is "only a continuation of the actions of the [Catalan government] to block" Constitutional Court and High Court orders "repeatedly".

In the Washington Post article, the CTO of the Catalonian government explains why this is so disappointing:

“I’m a tech guy,” says Jordi Puigneró, chief technology officer of the Catalonian government. “So I’ve always been a great fan of Google and its principles of respect for digital rights. But now I’m really disappointed with the company.” (Puigneró’s office was also occupied by police during the referendum, he says.)

And you can understand why he's disappointed. But, the real problem here, seems to be going back to the same problem we keep identifying over and over again: deep centralization of the digital world. Part of the very promise of Android was that it was supposed to be open, and people weren't supposed to be locked into just Google's app store. And, indeed, there are competing app stores -- but the general argument around them (with the possible exception of Amazon's competing Android app store) is that if you want to keep your device secure, you'll only download via Google's app store.

And then we're back to a problem where there's a centralized choke point for censorship -- one which the Spanish government is able to exploit to make that app much more difficult to access. Google, for its part, said it took the app down because it had received a valid court order. And, that's true, but it's also opening up yet another path to widespread censorship. Google has stood up against similar situations in the past, but the decision of whether or not a movement should be stifled should never come down to whether or not a giant company like Google decides its worth taking a moral stand against a legal court order. The problem is much more systemic, and its built into this world where we've started to build back up gatekeepers.

For nearly two decades, I've argued that the real power of the internet was not -- as many people initally argued -- that it got rid of "middlemen," but rather that the middlemen turned into enablers rather than gatekeepers. In the old world, when only some content could get released/published/sold/etc., you had to rely on gatekeepers to choose which tiny percentage would get blessed. The power of internet platforms was that they became enablers, allowing anyone to use those platforms and to publish/release/sell/distribute things themselves, often to a much wider audience. But there'a always a risk that over time, former enablers become gatekeepers. And it's a fear we should be very conscious about -- even if it's not done on purpose.

To be clear, I don't think Google wants to be a gatekeeper around things like apps. It would prefer not to be. But because the marketplace has become so important, and because Google's role is so central, it almost has no choice. And when governments start issuing court orders to take down apps, suddenly Google is left with few good options. Either it censors or it picks fights with a government. And even if many of us would probably support and cheer on the latter as a choice, we should be concerned that this is even an issue at all. The solution has to be less reliance on centralized platforms and centralized choke points. Catalonians shouldn't have to rely on Google to get a simple voting app out to the public. The next big breakthroughs need to be towards getting past such bottlenecks.

Filed Under: bottlenecks, catalonia, democracy, election, independence, play store, points of failure, referendum, spain
Companies: google