It seems that the Government of the Caribbean island of Antigua decided to open a web portal to sell movies, music and software illegally downloaded.

The institutions of what was the “pirate’s land” want now to make a virtual pirate island.

According to many journalists this project is a sort of revenge against the US Authorities. Indeed in Us there’s a strict legislation against act of gambling so they blocked the access for the Us citizens to many specialistic websites of the Island. This meant the loss of million dollars for the caribbean Island. Althought the Us Authorities  tried to contrast the project with the explanation of “fight to piracy”, the project obtained the feu vert by the World Trade Organization.

The portal would like to propose a subscription for 5$US  a month  to access – without limits – to any kind of content. That would be the worst nightmare for the entire creative sector, audiovisual industry as well as phonografic industry.

A warning came even from the White House, obviously: let’s consider the key role of the major for the electoral campains “made in US”.

There are, in any case, many people who hope in the illusion of the “all for free”.

But, above all, such a news deserves a deep reflection. If the portal will be active, the loss for the creative sector can be apocalyptic and difficult to be quantified. We would like to remind that pay for original contents does not mean enrich those who had created that contents but, first of all, insert new resources for the re production of the system. Without new funds to be reinvested the productive eco-system would fail, as well as contents would disappear. And then, there will be nothing to joy for, not considering the dramatic loss for the cultural system at all.

- The Un approved an agreement with 77 votes in favour and 33 against;

- 89 Countries – among them China, Russia, Brazil and Saudi Arabia – signed the new treaty;

- 55 Countries didn’t sign the treaty. Among them Usa, Canada, United Kingdom. They accused the treaty to be against the Internet freedom and decided to abandon the meeting.

- Other Countries, including Italy, remained in stand-by, waiting to make a choice.

In the end, the Conference has been a substantial “flop”.

First of all the new treaty has been judged damaging to the internet freedom, despite Hamadoun Touré (Itu  Secretary General) reassurances. Moreover the treaty can have different interpretations, possibly leading to Countries ratifying the treaty through different applications.

According to many analists the “Internet war” has become a geopolitical affaire within a new “cold war”. Countries will be divided in two blocks depending on whether they
did or did not sign the treaty, which basically gives Governments more power in dealing with matters concerning the Internet.

And this worries Countries like US that strongly aim to maintain the multistakeholders approach. Likewise, obviously, Google that declared  to be “on the side of those who reject the Treaty, in favour of a free and open Internet.” Same position also for Robert Mc Dowell, Commissioner at the FCC – Federal Communications Commission “only an Internet isolated from governative’s regulamentations don’t undermine the success of the Internet governance based on the multistakeholder’s model”.

Even if it’s clear, on the one hand, that US tries to protect their own interests, it’s even more clear, on the other hand, that there will not be a shared treaty for tlc and the Internet.

The treaty will become law by 2015 so, in the next 2 years many thing could change. The next Itu meeting will be held in South Corea in 2014.

The ITU’s 193 member States have offered their proposals for how to revise the ITR, which form the basis for the negotiations at the WCIT.

The out come of the Dubai Summit could change how the Internet works.

The WCIT is a two-week conference that started last Monday, 3rd December and will go on until next Friday, 14th December.

We’ve just passed the halfway point of the conference. The first week had a few surprises but little indication what the outcome on Dec. 14th will actually look like. And the situation seems to be a “stand-by point”.

We have two blocs. On the one hand, The United States and a number of Countries in Europe, Latin America, and Asia-Pacific want to keep Internet governance out of international treaties, a sort of  “no man’s land” (with all the consequences in terms of  privacy and protection), while others — namely, Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia — are pushing to extend governmental control over the Internet.

We look forward to the end of the Summit and the decisions taken and we’ll certainly write about in this column.

The so-called “DNS poisoning” and the blocking of data exchanges with the IP address of a certain web site are confirmed to be the favoured methods adopted by Italian
judges against digital piracy; for the first time, however, the operators of a piracy-dedicated website are not only charged with violation of copyright, but also with the crime of receiving stolen goods, as per article 648 of the Italian Criminal Code. This allegation allowed the Public Prosecutor to issue the pre-emptive seizure of the pirate portal, while waiting for the designated court to rule on the proposed case.

We will wait with interest, to see the findings of the court on such pre-emptive seizure, as well as the decision on the case.

The editors of the 5 Countries are coordinating themselves at the International level and are vehemently asking their governments adequate forms of protection for their content into this new “digital age” in order to get adequate remuneration for the exploitation of their works.

Meanwhile in Germany today began the exam of the Parliament of the so called “Lex Google” which is aimed at protecting intellectual property rights online. Meanwhile, “Big G” a few days ago, has launched a signature campaign against the law that would limit (Google said), the freedom of the internet.

Even within the German Parliament are, however, emerging splits on the question whether Google should or should not pay the so-called “ancillary copyright”, a sort of “auxiliary copyright” for few lines of
news available on the web on search engines or news aggregators.

All the publishers involved, including the Italian Fieg, agree that “Big G” has to redistribute to the printed publishers part of its huge advertising revenues. We would like to remind that data released by the World Association of Newspaper showed that, between 2005 and 2011, advertising revenues of newspapers, globally, have fallen from 195 billion to 76 billion US dollars but, at the same time, revenues of newspapers deriving from on online advertising grew just from 2 up to 3.2 billion dollars.

Meanwhile in France has been appointed a moderator in the controversy between publishers and “Big G” to find a solution by the end of the year. Otherwise the French Parliament will intervene with a specific law.

But the European battle against Google is not only focused on copyright. New controversies are attacking “Big G” on central issues: fiscal evasion as well as dominant position in the web search…

The main case involved a legal action filed by a collecting society (Bonnier Audio), which requested its national court to disclose the identity of the person who spread illegal copies of copyrighted audiobooks via FTP through a certain IP address, against the internet service provider (Perfect Communication Sweden) which provided connectivity to the alleged pirate.

Perfect Communication Sweden, which in fact had assigned the challenged IP address to the pirate, opposed the confidentiality of it’s
client’s communications, and strongly questioned the legality of the sweden law allowing judicial disclosure of personal data related to an IP address.

The injunction, granted by the court of first instance, was contested towards the Svea Court of Appeal, which finally raised the question to the European Court of Justice.

In the judgment under review, the Court of Justice makes a thorough survey of the rules contained into the EU Directives on copyright,
privacy and telecommunications, highlighting the many purposes addressed and the protections tools provided, and finally stating that, at the present date, nothing seems to preclude the recognition of such a power to national courts, and that indeed the Directives have so far taken care to leave room for Member States’ action on the matter, so to offer a correct balance of interests while enforcing copyright protection.

We shall follow the developments and the effects of this judgment on European law; at a first glance, however, we note that this ruling modifies the previous orientation of the ECJ, expressed in the
“Promusicae” case, where privacy protection was reputed as prevailing
against the judicial protection of copyright, and basically allows for the
first time the allocation of strong disclosing powers to national judges.”

“Lex Google” means a regulatory framework that introduces forms of remuneration for newspaper’s publishers whose news are enjoyed through indexing by the most popular search engine in the world, Google.

The issue is related, without doubt, to the editors of newspapers and magazines, but it is symptomatic of the need, now an urgent need, of a comprehensive regulation system of what happens in the “wonderful world” of the Internet.

On October 24^Th, the Italian publishers gathered in Fieg (Italian Federation of Newspaper Publishers), the French publishers of Ipg (Association de la Presse), those of the Germans Bdzv (Bundesverband Deutcher Zeitungsverleger) and the VDZ (Verband Deutcher Zeitschriftenverleger) have decided to come together to make a “common front” to defend the copyright of their editorial content online.

The editors of three of the major EU Countries require the inclusion in the regulatory framework of their Countries (but the phenomena seems to be “universal”) of a discipline that defines a system of intellectual property rights which can give rise to forms of virtuous cooperation between rights holders and content publishing giant network.

If on the one hand, in fact, the decrease in sales of paper copies of newspapers is partially “compensated” by the use of online news (grown strongly in the last two years), they complains, in all the three Countries, an overall situation of difficulty for the publishing industry newspaper. Publishing companies accuse, in addition to the general economic crisis (leading to a widespread reduction in consumption), an unfair use of their content by search engines (Google in particular), which continue to increase
their revenue through advertising.

It is interesting to quote some data related to Italy, France, Germany, supplied during a meeting held in Rome on October 24^th, 2012:

- In Italy, every day more than 24 million people read a newspaper. Between 2009 and 2011, the number of users of newspapers’ websites, on an average day, rose from 4 million to 6 million users, with an increase of 50 %. Compared with the overall internet users, readers of online newspapers represent the 47 % of the whole market;

- In France, 97 % of French people read every day, at least, one paper (newspaper or magazine), 25 million of French people, every month, consult, at least, an information website. 8 million mobile users per month and 1.4 million people each quarter access to editorial content through their tablets. Even young people are attracted to it: 70 % of those who are between 25 and 35 years of age read newspapers on the internet.

- In Germany, 47 million people over 14 years of age read a daily newspaper every day (67 % of the total population) and the websites of German newspapers are visited every month by 27.7 million of unique users (40 % of the population). 92 % of the German population over 14 years of age – that is more than 65 million readers – read magazines. Internet sites and other applications of the German publishers count 13.8 million users, representing 72 % of the total traffic of the Internet. Finally, 66 % of those
who use an iPad has a newspaper’s subscription. The digital market now accounts 10 % of the German publishers’ turnover.

We would like to remind that for a similar problem of indexation of news by search engines the Associação Nacional De Jornais (Anj) of Brazil decided to come out of Google News.

Carlos Fernando Lindenberg Neto, President of Anj said that being on Google news is not a benefit for them. Google News has commercial benefits from their content but refuses any kind of remuneration. In Brazil Google News was abandoned by 154 newpapers’ publishers, representing the 90 % of the total newspaper market.

Google denies all accusations, with the usual thesis that the presence on the search engine increases the dissemination of news in the network, and then stimulates potential readers in buying the newspapers in the print edition or in the digital one.

The phenomena – in its opposing interpretations – has planetary features.

As it happened in the music industry, even the newpaper publishing sector is undergoing the same decrease of total revenues, year after year: a growing portion of revenues comes now from the Internet, but this increase does not compensate the decrease in revenues of the “phisycal” business.

We are assisting to a sort of “transfer of wealth” from publishers to aggregators. With
a small detail: publishers invest in quality content while aggregators don’t.

In economy, this phenomena is called “parasitic income”.

In other words, the Internet is leading to a continuous process of impoverishment of these cultural industries, reducing the chance of producing quality content.

If it’s true that the Internet multiplies the chances of universal access to content (with great benefits for democracy), it’s also true that it impoverishes content producers: this happens for newspaper publishers, as well as for television broadcasters.

We can summarize that people likes the news (on the internet), but this way doesn’t pay news’ producers. And that’s true for all the quality content, from music to audiovisual media.

According to some, the publishers of France, Germany and Italy aim to emulate what
happens in the United Kingdom, where the Newspaper Licensing Agency began to ask for money to news aggregators. The difference is that, in Germany and France, publishers are thinking of asking a commission not only for subscriptions services, but even for the free ones detected by Google.

The initiative of the French and German publishers is supported by their respective
Governments: Merkel has taken up the battle of the publishers because she considers it proper, to preserve employment and a material and immaterial wealth of the Country. The French Minister for Innovation and Digital Economy, Fleur Pellerin, stated that the “war against aggregators” must be fought together at a European level.

As far as Italy is concerned, there has been no position taken by Monti.

We would remind that in January 2011, the Italian Antitrust Authority concluded an investigation launched in 2009 against Google for abusing its dominant position. Google
took a series of commitments that were supposed to avoid the risk of distortion of competition.

In that occasion, The President of Fieg Carlo Malinconico declared: “The commitments taken by Google change, at a global level, some editorial and commercial policies related to Google News and AdSense, in a perspective of greater transparency and collaboration.”

This is a first response, which must follow, as noted by the Authority, the intervention of the legislation to regulate the remuneration of the companies that produce editorial content online, against economic exploitation of their works by others subjects.

Then Malinconico added: “At the same time, Fieg is watching with great interest what the Communications Regulatory Authority would take to protect the copyright”.

After almost two years, no sign of intervention came out by the Agcom. At the beginning of October 2012, during a conference organized by ConfindustriaCultura, the Sub- Secretary Peluffo claimed: “I renew the invitation to the “new” Agcom, which I had already turned to the previous Council, to quickly approve the Regulation against piracy.”

From the Agcom, now, all is silent. Although, few days after, the Commissioner Preto affirmed: “In this new scenario, the copyright on the internet is much more important. The protection of intellectual property on the web may not be a taboo, but it must
be a driving force for innovation, for the development of legal content and the
economy of the sector. We don’t want to gag the people on the network, but to ensure respect for the rights and rules. The network is not a no man’s land. (…)
In this direction, the Agcom enforcement must be based on the principles of
proportionality, effectiveness and promptness.”

In the following days, the French President Hollande met the Ceo of Google, Schmidt, leaving understand that, by the end of the year, a solution should have be found, and that if Google will not begin negotiations with publishers, the Government will intervene.

However there’s not a general agreement. The news websites that don’t depend on newspapers and magazines or large publishing groups have been formed in Spiil (Press Association Online), and do not share the introduction of a tax, regarded as a wrong choice and short-sighted in the long run, because will lead to the reduction of pluralism of information. The Spiil believes that Google should pay full taxes on profits, which, as many well know (and as we have reported on this blog), “Big G” avoids,
operating from Ireland.

For its part, to a threat, Google responds with another threat, that is to stop indexing the articles of the French papers (in other words: “will delete the links to the websites of newspapers”), just as recently happened in Brazil. The French Government, however, seems very fierce: especially the Minister of Culture, Aurélie Filippetti, who runs the file, does not seem willing to give. The standoff has only begun. Google says that it cannot accept such a measure, which “calls into question its existence”.

We hope that, beyond the rhetoric of the magic Internet, we’ll return to understand that the news in the papers are the result of someone’s work and, as such, something to be paid. Like a novel, a cd, a movie…

The “myth of the manna” of the free Internet should be debunked. It is urgent to develop a modern system of intellectual property rights.

There are not yet hard facts (also for the continuing lack of transparency in Google’s economy), but, according to some analysts, in 2012 Google exceeded Rai in advertising. In late September, at a conference, Antonio Pilati (Board Member Rai, former adviser Agcom and Agcm) has argued that “Google is now the second largest
advertising operator in Italy. He has exceeded Rai and is second only to Publitalia”.

We remind that last July, Fabio Vaccarono left Manzoni Advertising, advertising dealer
of L’Espresso-Repubblica, to become the Country Manager of Google Italy: a further confirmation of the vocation to growth of the giant in the business of the Italian advertising.

We will see what will be the outcome of this story, and certainly will be back soon to write on this blog.

The FTC is nearing a decision after 16 month of long investigation into Google’s search and advertising businesses, and sources say things are not looking good for the Mountain View–based company. The final decision will probably arrive next November or, at least, December.

Reuters reports that four of the five FTC commissioners are “convinced” that “Big G” abused its dominant position in the web search market to stifle its competition. Only one
commissioner remains “skeptical”.

For its part, Google, with its Chairman Eric Shmidt, has consistently denied any wrongdoing.

More specifically, The FTC is investigating on how Google act in the online travel industry, where it seems to be done that Google damaged competitors as Nextag or Yalp, positioning them in a bad quality ranking.

If the FTC will confirm that “Big G” has abused its market position, the search giant will be left with only two real choices: it can strive to reach a settlement, as it did with the European Commission, or it can prepare itself for a long and contentious legal battle.
Either option is sure to be costly.

We remind that a similar investigation was launched by the European Commission in 2010.

back to Europe, the attention seems to be focused on privacy.

European privacy regulators have found flaws in Google’s revised privacy policy, which may breach EU data protection laws.

A majority of the European data and privacy regulators have signed and sent a joint letter to the California-based search giant asking the firm to make changes to its revised policy. 24 of the 27 member states’ data protection regulators signed the letter, with the exception of Greece, Romania and Lithuania.

The regulators have asked Google to explain the firm’s intentions and detail methods for sharing user data across its services. The letter also said that Google must seek “explicit consent” when combining users’ data together.

We will back soon on this “delicate” issue.

The questionnaire was posted both in Italian and English version on the open source platform Limesurvey and remained available online for 4 months without any filter or limitations (from February 1 to June 1, 2011).

The survey is divided in two section: the first one is dedicated to Italy, and the second one to the rest of the world. Aliprandi interviewed about 1,800 people (1,300 for Italy and 500 for the rest of the world). More than anything else, the main pourpose of Aliprandi was to explore how copyright can be analyzed from a sociological point of view. This, as Aliprandi said, can be considered a sort of a “pilot research”.

Therefore, this study address three broader research fields:

• most common behaviors of Internet users when they get, distribute, or otherwise deal with online content under copyright;
• the average perception of Internet users about copyright itself, that is, whether they see it as a primary or minor problem, a useful tool or a useless burden, etc.;
• the level of awareness of Internet users about mechanisms and principles currently governing copyright law, in order to expose their actual level of knowledge on related issues.

We would like to remind that Aliprandi chose to use open content licenses, both on the web and in open access journals.

Today we decided to analize the Italian part of the study, whose results gives interesting “food for thought”.

We would like to underline that the main part of the “respondents” are in the target 18-44 with a medium-high level of education (80%).

First of all we can say that emerges clearly the perception’s deficit still present in our Country about the copyright’s protection. Those who illegally download didn’t perceive
a sense of guilty for that action. The illegal downloading of programs, creative contents, music files is not perceived like stealing a cd, dvd or even a book from a store. Even if many of them knows that downloading file in that way is illegal, they already know that is generally accepted / acceptable. We can conclude that the main problem is the “social perception”, even because the great part of the repondents believe that the illegal download damages the companies that produce and sell the work, and not the entire creative and social-economic system.

For more information http://copyrightsurvey.blogspot.it/

These judgments involved two separate aspects of the ongoing fight against
illegal publication of intellectual property online.

- In the first case, the Supreme French Court ruled that, when a report has already been made against an illegal content uploaded online (and the consequent removal procedure has been throughly carried out), the host provider (in this case Google / Youtube) can not be held responsible if the content in question is again uploaded on its servers, but it is up to the copyright owner to report the presence of such content and ask again for its removal; in this case, the Court overturruled what had been held by the Court of Appeal, which had held that a single notice was sufficient against a specific content, but doing so indirectly called into question a surveillance obligation, seemingly
imposing Google to prevent a specific video (which had been already removed) from being uploaded again on Youtube.

- In the second case, Google was considered responsible for not having removed from its keyword list (meaning the words which are automatically “suggested” while typing a websearch), some terms that would facilitate the users in finding pirated material online (eg.: torrent, megaupload, rapidshare, and similar); in this case, the Court, reversing
the conclusions issued by previous judges, ruled that “the electronic communications service offered to the public by Google systematically guides internet users, by means of specific keyword suggestions, towards websites that contain recordings made available to the public without the permission of the respective artists / authors / performers or record labels, thus facilitating the infringement of copyright”.

The first of the judgments above seems in line with the most recent ones observed at European level, confirming that, even for French Courts, the host provider acts as mere conduit, and does not seem to have any obligation to oversee what its users post online, as long as it promptly acts for speedy removal, once asked to do so by the rightholders.

As for the second ruling, the most obvious point is that, in spite of the declarations made a few months ago, Google still does not seem to have cleaned up its autocomplete function from words which encourage and/or facilitate searching for pirated material online.