Today, the USTR released its 2013 Special 301 Report (pdf and embedded below), the notorious "watchlist" of foreign countries where intellectual property is supposedly in danger (which is in fact just a self-serving diplomatic pressure tool). Ukraine has been dubbed enemy number one, with Algeria, Argentina, Chile, China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Russia, Thailand and Venezuela on the priority watchlist, so expect the diplomatic push for American-style IP laws to intensify in those countries.

One thing to note is the fact that Spain succeeded in staying off the list. As we recently noted, the Spanish government has essentially admitted that its recent copyright reform efforts were designed entirely to keep the country out of the 301 Report. Well, it looks like they got their wish, and all they had to do was sell out their country to US interests. Nobody will be able to say that they sit on a list of dirty thieves alongside backwards pirate nations like Canada and Finland, which brazenly ignore the kind US diplomats who surely have our best interests at heart. Congratulations, Spain!

We've covered the ridiculous situation in Spain, where the government, which has much more reasonable copyright laws (for example, they didn't blame service providers for actions of their users), was put under tremendous pressure from US officials to "fix" copyright law in the way that Hollywood wanted. There were widespread public protests, and even the head of the Spanish Film Academy protested what appeared to be an attack on the internet. This delayed the bill for a year or so, but last year, a new Spanish government rushed through the approval of the bill with almost no debate. That led the USTR to remove Spain from the silly and meaningless Special 301 list of "naughty" countries (as defined by Hollywood and laundered through the USTR).

Then, even though Spain bent over and basically gave the US everything it wanted, Hollywood bitched and complained again... and said that Spain needed to be put back on the list. Yes, because the very law that Hollywood wanted didn't actually do what they'd hoped (shocker, there). So now they want an even more draconian law, and the Spanish government appears to have rolled right over and said "sure." The new law will include many of the provisions that the US itself rejected when SOPA was dumped. It'll put tremendous burdens on intermediaries and service providers, which will inevitably mean fewer of those providers, which is exactly the opposite of what the entertainment industry needs right now.

And now, in a move that will surprise almost no one, the country's Education and Culture Minister Jose Ignacio Wert has more or less admitted that they're trying to stay off the Special 301 list with this new law. This is a mistake. A big mistake. Canada has taken the official position that it does not recognize the Special 301 list as being legitimate, because it comes from a corrupt process. Spain should stand up for itself and take a similar position, rather than be bullied and pushed around like this. Just the fact that they already passed the law that the US wanted a year ago and the US is already back for more should set off alarm bells: Hollywood is never going to be satisfied. Spain should stop trying to please Hollywood and the USTR and focus on doing what's actually for the best.

I'll actually be in Spain in a few weeks talking about some of this stuff, which should be interesting. Just as some other countries appear to be moving in the right direction with copyright law, it would be a shame if Spain continued to move in the opposite direction, harming its own internet economy.

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

The final agreement introduced a complex arrangement for the oversight of patent matters by the Court of Justice of the European Union. Instead of being enshrined in the main patent regulation, the court's role will be mentioned indirectly in the Unified Patent Court agreement. Axel Horns, a patent attorney at the KSNH law firm in Munich, says the solution is "awkward." But it satisfies both defenders of the Court of Justice's supreme authority, such as the European Parliament, and those who want to limit its role, including some businesses and the United Kingdom's conservative government.

A key bone of contention is therefore what exactly the role of Europe's highest court, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) will have here, with different EU countries wanting very different things. But it's even worse than that, because two nations, Spain and Italy, refused to sign up to the Unitary Patent at all, after their respective languages were not included alongside the other official ones -- English, French and German. This has led to a Unitary Patent that doesn't actually unify Europe, but instead introduces yet another complicated layer on top of existing structures. Spain is now taking advantage of that fact to challenge the whole structure at the ECJ, as this story on The IPKat blog explains:

By hiding the actual substance of the patent, its scope and its limitations, behind an -- admittedly clever -- system of legal referrals, the [Unitary Patent] regime has become even more complex. As a result, the ECJ is confronted with a patent which is in fact just an empty shell. This makes the Regulation [governing the Unitary Patent] either invalid for a lack of legal determination or it will force the Court to define the substance of the unitary patent out of the blue. It will however not prevent the Court from exercising its judicial review over the European patent system. The idea of keeping the ECJ out of the game by stripping down the Regulation was doomed to fail from the very beginning.

And if this lack of legal clarity is not enough to scupper the whole plan, Spain has two more lines of attack. Since it is not part of the Unitary Patent zone, Spain's companies are obviously at a disadvantage:

Article 7 of the Regulation entails an indirect discrimination on grounds of nationality which results from the fact that unitary patents applied for by Spanish enterprises will always be governed by a foreign law.

It is also not unlikely that Spain will put its finger on the Court's greatest treasure, the Internal Market. There will almost necessarily be a distortion of competition between the Member States where the unitary patent is available and those where it is not.

In other words, the awkward compromise agreed to finalize the Unitary Patent last year actually contradicts the fundamental impetus behind the European Union: to create a uniform set of laws that apply equally across the whole continent. Probably for this reason the IP Kat blog suggests:

the chances of success [for Spain before the ECJ] do look promising. The mutation from an autonomous patent for the European market to the hitherto unknown schizophrenic creature of a "European patent with unitary effect" has left deep scars, and every one of them could be taken up before the Court.

One thing is for sure: if the brakes have indeed been slammed on for the Unitary Patent project, they are unlikely to come off for a good while unless something dramatic happens. The IPKat blog reminds us that proceedings at the ECJ take about 22 months on average, so it may well be several years before we have the court's judgment, and things can move forward.

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While Spain actually has a fairly vibrant culture and entertainment industry, Hollywood has really had it in for the country for some time, in part because Spanish courts had a more evolved recognition of secondary liability protections, such that they ruled that linking is not infringement, and that neither was basic file sharing. Hollywood flipped out, said all sorts of nasty things about Spain, and US diplomats basically handed the Spanish government a new copyright law. The first few attempts to pass the bill failed, after the public spoke out, economists explained how it would hurt the economy rather than help and even the head of the Spanish Film Academy noted that the American movie industry seemed to be fighting the internet and the public.

But... despite all of that, after over a year in delays, a new Spanish government approved the bill with little debate or discussion. After that the USTR actually removed Spain from its "naughty" list in 2012.

That didn't last long. As we noted last month, Spain was put back on the naughty list after just one year off of it. A few weeks ago we noted there were rumors that the government was planning to ratchet up copyright law yet again.

It appears they're doing exactly that. On Friday, the Spanish government announced that it was ratcheting up its copyright laws just about a year after it had already done exactly that. This time, it appears to basically be taking SOPA and implementing it in Spain:

Spain is strengthening its intellectual property law by introducing sanctions for advertisers on websites that violate copyright protection and increasing fines for websites that do not remove pirated material, the government said on Friday.

The bill will put massive liability on any company seen to "work with websites that carry pirated material." No, I'm sure there won't be any unintended consequences with a far reaching bill like that... And, of course, once Spain gets the basics of SOPA in place, how long will it be until the same copyright lobbyists who wrote that law for Spain to start arguing that other countries "need" to "harmonize" their laws to match what Spain is doing?

This is the game that the copyright lobbyists play. They have strategies in countries all around the globe, pushing local laws, as well as various trade agreements, all with a single goal: constantly ratcheting copyright law and copyright enforcement upwards, with no care in the world for unintended consequences (or even if these policies do anything for their bottom line).

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

The new proposals have a clear intention: to amend the Criminal Code to allow criminal prosecutions of Websites that provide links. According to the leaked document it will be an offense to provide ordered listings and categorized links to protected content, developed for this purpose and involving an active and non-neutral maintenance and updating of those lists.

Interestingly, Google wouldn't be affected by the new law according to ADSL Zone, nor would "occasional links" be prosecuted. Of course, everything would then hinge on what "occasional" meant in this context.

There's also the following proposal:

Second, the paper seeks to limit the concept of private copying. This will require us to be in possession of the "original media". This is really incompatible with the current reality, since there are legal platforms like Spotify or iTunes where you do not have that "native support".

The concept of "original media" is meaningless in the digital realm, where files are copied many times as they traverse the Internet, or as people move them around on their storage media. How on earth would you prove that your digital copy was "original"?

Finally, there is a suggestion for making the copyright levy system not only worse, but in conflict with current EU plans to rationalize it:

no matter whether we copy or not, whether or not we have the "original media", the fee will be charged in any case.

In an age where storage media are becoming ubiquitous -- if Samsung's refrigerator is running Android, it must have storage -- such levies are anachronistic and harm innovation, so Spain's plans to push on with them is one more indicator that it's heading in the wrong direction. The big question, of course, is why it is doing this: is it simply the usual story of lobbyists' privileged access to government ministers who aren't interested in whether the new measures are fair or even effective? Or is this once more the heavy hand of America reaching across the water to put a little pressure on its Hispanic friends...?

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

As Michael Geist points out, far from being good news, that's outrageous:

Those that thought passing Bill C-11 -- the Canadian copyright reform bill that contained some of the most restrictive digital lock rules in the world -- would satisfy U.S. groups will be disappointed. The IIPA wants Canada back on the piracy watch list, one notch below the Special Watch List (where the US placed Canada last year).

Despite the praise for Bill C-11 last year, the groups are right back in criticism mode and demanding reforms. The IIPA is now unsure if the enabler provision will help stop sites that facilitate infringement (despite the fact that its members have yet to use the provision) and concerned with the prospect of new exceptions to the digital lock rules. In fact, its criticisms of the rules for Internet providers (it wants a notice-and-takedown system, tougher rules on search engines that link to infringing content, and new rules to target repeat infringers) are so strong that the organization implausibly claims possible non-compliance with the WIPO Internet treaties.

Nor is Canada the only country that might be surprised to find itself on the naughty step again. As Mike explained last year, Spain was removed from the official Special 301 list for being an obedient little vassal state and bringing in the punitive Ley Sinde, as instructed, despite huge public and business opposition. And now, guess what? The IIPA already wants Spain back on the list for not doing enough in this area (pdf):

Contrary to the expectations surrounding the implementation of ley Sinde that led to Spain's removal from the Special 301 Watch List last year, Spain saw no positive developments in 2012.

Let's hope Canada and Spain -- and everyone else -- draw the obvious conclusion from the IIPA's latest calls: that no matter what countries do, no matter what legislation they bring in, and no matter what disproportionately harsh punishments they inflict on their own people, it will never, ever be enough, and there will always be further demands, and further threats to put them back on the naughty lists. The only solution is to stand up to this blackmail once and for all, and to treat the Special 301 list with the contempt it deserves.

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We've had plenty of stories (mainly in the US) of police overreacting to the public photographing or videotaping them. Thankfully, US courts have been recognizing that recording police on duty is not a crime (and can actually be beneficial in preventing abuse). While we still see frequent reports of police harassing photographers, it does appear that US officials and judges widely support allowing the photography of police, except in extreme circumstances. However, Spain may be going in a different direction. Francisco George points us to the news that the Department of the Interior is proposing a regulation that would make the dissemination of photographs of law enforcement a possible crime. The new rules would prohibit

"the recruitment, reproduction or processing of images, sounds or information of members of the security forces in the exercise of its functions as may endanger life or risk the operation they are developing."

In other words, they don't want you to notice them, even if you notice them. This seems ridiculous and clearly goes way too far. If police are out in public, it should be fair game to photograph or videotape them. It may not be smart or particularly helpful in solving crimes, but to claim that such photographs could be illegal seems like a clear attack on free speech.

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

According to a story pointed out to us by @sinkdeep, that sweet octogenarian lady is back, accompanied now by her lawyers, claiming copyright on her work and demanding a cut of the takings from the collection box that the church authorities have placed near the fresco (original in Spanish.)

It would be fascinating to know where the idea came from: whether somebody suggested to her that she had a "right" to some of the church's money, or whether the sense of entitlement -- in this case for more or less ruining an admittedly minor work of art -- is now so widespread that everyone, everywhere, naturally assumes they ought to get their cut as soon as money is involved. Either way, it's a sad commentary on our times -- and on what a belief in copyright can do to otherwise generous people.

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Google has continued to update its big "Transparency Report" with new data on specific content takedown requests from government agencies. With this latest update, Google has put out a blog post warning people that governments -- including those not normally associated with censorship -- are increasingly seeking to shut down speech for what appear to be politically motivated reasons:

We noticed that government agencies from different countries would sometimes ask us to remove political content that our users had posted on our services. We hoped this was an aberration. But now we know it’s not.

This is the fifth data set that we’ve released. And just like every other time before, we’ve been asked to take down political speech. It’s alarming not only because free expression is at risk, but because some of these requests come from countries you might not suspect—Western democracies not typically associated with censorship.

For example, in the second half of last year, Spanish regulators asked us to remove 270 search results that linked to blogs and articles in newspapers referencing individuals and public figures, including mayors and public prosecutors. In Poland, we received a request from a public institution to remove links to a site that criticized it. We didn’t comply with either of these requests.

There are some interesting, if odd, specific examples, like the following:

Brazil: In December, we received an electoral court order that resulted in the removal of four orkut profiles for content related to political campaigns.

Canada: We received a request from the Passport Canada office to remove a YouTube video of a Canadian citizen urinating on his passport and flushing it down the toilet. We did not comply with this request.

Pakistan: We received a request from the Government of Pakistan's Ministry of Information Technology to remove six YouTube videos that satirized the Pakistan Army and senior politicians. We did not comply with this request.

Poland: We received a request from the Polish Agency for Enterprise Development to remove a search result that criticized the agency as well as eight more that linked to it. We did not comply with this request.

Spain: We received 14 requests from the Spanish Data Protection Authority to remove 270 search results that linked to blogs and sites referencing individuals and public figures. The Spanish Data Protection Authority also ordered the removal of three blogs published on Blogger and three videos hosted on YouTube. We did not comply with these requests.

United States: We received a request from a local law enforcement agency to remove a blog because of a post that allegedly defamed a law enforcement official in a personal capacity. We did not comply with this request, which we have categorized in this Report as a defamation request.

We received a request from a local law enforcement agency to remove 1,400 YouTube videos for alleged harassment. We did not comply with this request. Separately, we received a request from a different local law enforcement agency to remove five user accounts that allegedly contained threatening and/or harassing content. We terminated four of the accounts, which resulted in the removal of approximately 300 videos, but did not remove the remaining account with 54 videos.

We received a court order to remove 218 search results that linked to allegedly defamatory websites. We removed 25% of the results cited in the request.

This expansion of governments seeking to censor speech via Google takedowns is clearly worrisome, though it's good to see that Google at least investigates the details before taking down the content.

Francisco sent over an interesting story of how a bunch of people in Spain were able to crowdfund a bunch of money in an attempt to bring Rodrigo Rato, the former chair of one of Spain's largest banks, Bankia, to justice for driving the bank into the ground until it had to be bailed out. In just one day, they were able to blast past the €15,000 they were seeking.

I have to admit that I'm interested in this as an outlet for populist outrage, but I do wonder how effective it really is. An English version of the site claims they plan "criminal and civil actions against members of Bankia's Board of Directors," and they "demand prison and seizure of assets." While they can file civil claims, criminal charges have to come from the government. So the goal is to use the money not just for filing a civil suit, but also to hire independent investigators and auditors to work towards building enough details and evidence that it forces the government to file criminal charges as well. This seems like a project that has a ridiculously high likelihood of failure.

Separately, while I tend to agree that the banks were run by some insanely greedy people who did many questionable things, I think it's going a little mob-like "burn him!" crazy to try to pin the problems on a single person. The global economy is still a mess, and the European economy is in turmoil, with Spain being a big part of that. In other words, there are larger economic issues at play here that go beyond just one banker, even if it turns out that he was a really bad banker.

Either way, though, I am fascinated to see how crowdfunding evolves over time, and the unique ways people use it -- and this is certainly a unique plan.