French President (Again) Calls For An End To Online Anonymity

Free Speech

from the macron-would-prefer-a-more-totalitarian-democracy-apparently dept

A world leader not known for shying away from truly terrible ideas about speech and the internet is back at it again. A few years ago, French President Emmanuel Macron delivered, as Cathy Gellis put it, “a speech only an autocrat would love,” decrying pretty much everything that’s good and open about the internet while trying to portray his ideas as necessary to societal development.

To summarize his general view on the subject: sure, we don’t want certain ideas to be marginalized. We should defend people’s access to the Internet, he said, but not always. He interprets the term “neutrality” to mean that all ideas have to be treated equally, but, in his view, some ideas are more equal than others. And this is what so offends him: net neutrality allows those who do not share “our values” to spread their ideas too.

The bad ideas have flowed nonstop from Macron and the French government. Everyone seems to think the internet must be more regulated. Any additional regulation should align with their views, rather than the views of the people they serve. And, while Macron is the nominal king, online anonymity should be the first against the wall.

Macron still believes online anonymity is a direct threat to society. And he has chosen to defend this view with one of the worst analogies ever deployed by a politician.

French President Emmanuel Macron has reiterated his opposition to online anonymity, and stated that he will not close the door on the idea of dismantling platforms. EURACTIV France reports.

“In a democratic society, there should be no anonymity. You can’t walk around in the street wearing a hood. On the Internet, people allow themselves, because they are hooded behind a pseudonym, to say the worst abjections,” the outgoing president told Le Point on Tuesday (12 April), two weeks before the second round of the presidential elections.

As Euractiv points out, this would be the third time in four years Macron has stated online anonymity is a luxury his country can do without.

But his analogy makes no sense.

First, there’s a very good chance someone can walk down the street wearing a hood, no matter what aggressive (and potentially unlawful) anti-mask laws the government might have in place. A hood doesn’t cover a face and a person can still be identified (especially by government employees) by demanding they lower their hoods.

But underneath this rhetorical hood is a straw man. People are still anonymous when out in public. Even if they interact poorly with others while in public, they remain anonymous. Maybe those they’ve insulted will be able to identify them at a later date, but lowering a hood does not immediately provide others (much less the government) with a wealth of identifiable information about that person.

If this is the analogy Macron wants to use, it suggests he’d prefer people out on public streets were immediately identifiable, at least to the government. This would mean a vast network of cameras tied to multiple databases, facial recognition software, and other tech goodies that would subject all French residents to continuous, pervasive surveillance should they decide to leave their houses.

Is that what Macron really wants? Because that’s what ending online anonymity does. And it is something a government can carry out without signalling its intent by erecting a network of visible cameras in any place accessible by the public.

Then there are the side effects, some of which may be intentional. Just as surely as a massive physical surveillance network would result in fewer displays of civil disobedience and encourage people to censor their outside conversations, the stripping anonymity online would curtail criticism of the government and opinions on heated topics of public interest. While it may force some people to be a little more courteous in their online interactions, it will do more to prevent the government from being the subject of internet invective.

Also ignored by this clumsy attack on anonymous speech is the fact that stripping anonymity doesn’t automatically result in more online civility. This assumption has been proven false again and again by websites who’ve allowed Facebook (and its “real name” program) to handle online comments. This hasn’t made comment sections any more tolerant or hate-free than more anonymous options.

Finally, there’s the undeniable fact that stripping online anonymity will result in more harm to marginalized groups, rather than less. Without even digging into the collateral damage to speech in general (which includes reporting using anonymous sources and anonymous reporters), the removal on anonymity will make it more difficult for those who fear reprisal for their very existence (much less their online posts) to engage in online discourse, knowing that their names or skin color will be all that’s needed to draw the unwanted attention of people who don’t care who knows how bigoted they are.

Macron’s an addict that just can’t seem to stop going back for one more “no anonymity” hit. He needs an intervention. Unfortunately, years of being wrong haven’t brought him any closer to being right.

Filed Under: anonymity, france, free speech, surveillance

Auguste Rodin's Sculptures Are In The Public Domain; 3D Scans Of Them Should Be, Too

Culture

from the free-the-scans dept

Auguste Rodin is without doubt one of the greatest sculptors in history. Equally without doubt, his works are now in the public domain, since he died in 1917. Unfortunately, the situation in France is a little more complicated, for reasons the artist and public domain campaigner Cosmo Wenman explains:

Shortly before his death, Rodin willed his estate to the French government, which created the Musée Rodin and assigned to it droit moral (“moral rights”) in Rodin’s oeuvre. By these rights the museum is permitted under French law to manufacture and sell a limited quantity of modern, posthumous bronze casts and represent them as “original” Rodin works. Musée Rodin earns considerable income from sales of such posthumous casts, as well as unlimited, simple reproductions.

Musée Rodin’s moral rights apply only within French jurisdictions, and only in very limited circumstances. They do not impinge on the public domain status of Rodin’s works, nor on the public’s right to freely copy them, even within France.

Wenman believes that museums, art galleries and private collectors around the world should make 3D scans of important public domain works and release them freely, thereby becoming “engines of new cultural creation”. The Musée Rodin disagrees, presumably because it is concerned that its monopoly on “original” posthumous casts might be devalued. As a result, it has been fighting for some years Wenman’s efforts to obtain the museum’s 3D scans of Rodin’s works through the courts.

Wenman has tweeted an update on his lawsuit. One piece of good news is that thanks to his legal campaign, the scans carried out for the Musée Rodin’s of two famous works – “The Kiss” and “Sleep” – are now freely available. Even better news is that Wenman has discovered the Musée Rodin has scanned its entire collection at high resolution. As he says: “These documents are of world wide interest and immeasurable artistic, academic, cultural, and commercial value. I am going after all of them, for everyone.”

It’s regrettable that some museums and galleries are still resisting these attempts to liberate public domain works. When those who are supposedly the guardians of society’s cultural patrimony are fighting to stop people from having full and free access to it, it’s clear that copyright’s poison, based on ownership and exclusion, has entered deep into their souls.

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

Originally published to the Walled Culture site.

Filed Under: 3d scans, auguste rodin, copyright, france, public domain

US Court To Gruyere Cheese People: No, You Can't Ban People From Calling Their Cheese Gruyere If They Aren't Your Neighbors

Trademark

from the too-late dept

One of the more annoying trends in intellectual property is when regional consortiums try to lock up terms or language around a specific style of product with arguments that only that region can produce a certain thing. If you’re familiar with this concept, the first thing to leap to your mind will likely be one French wine group’s control over the term “champagne” in certain regions. Another example would be a consortium of Belgian chocolate makers trying to assert that nobody can advertise “Belgian-style chocolate” unless it comes from one of them. It’s all very silly, as it attempts to take a term that everyone recognizes as describing the style of a product and transform it into locked up language to be controlled by some specific originators. Like I said, silly, though, far too often, these consortiums get their way.

Not the case in the United States for a group of French and Swiss cheese-makers in the area surrounding Gruyeres, who attempted to get the term “gruyere” trademarked. After the the U.S. Dairy Export Council opposed the mark, and the USPTO somehow got this right for once and rejected the application over the term being generic, the Interprofession Du Gruyere and Syndicat Interprofessionel du Gruyere took the matter to the Eastern District of Virginia courts only to find the judge there has ruled against it too.

After a lengthy legal fight, a U.S. District Court judge has ruled that Gruyere cheese does not have to come from the area in or around Gruyeres, Switzerland in order to be labeled Gruyere, writing in his decision that Americans don’t associate that cheese with that town. The Interprofession du Gruyère and Syndicat Interprofessionel du Gruyère — the associations that represent Swiss and French Gruyere, respectively — filed the lawsuit after they were denied trademark protection for the word “Gruyere” last year.

“It is clear from the record that the term GRUYERE may have in the past referred exclusively to cheese from Switzerland and France,” the judge wrote, according to the AP. “However, decades of importation, production, and sale of cheese labeled GRUYERE produced outside the Gruyère region of Switzerland and France have eroded the meaning of that term and rendered it generic.”

All of this legal actions follows months of the two foreign groups sending all kinds of threat letters to a variety of American dairy companies that produce gruyere cheese. Non-helpfully, those threat letters also often came with suggestions about what these companies should call their cheeses instead: alpine cheese and mountain cheese are both among the dumbest of the suggestions.

Now, while both parties have said they plan to appeal this ruling, it would be quite nice if that only resulted in a continued litigation smackdown. There is no un-ringing this bell; Americans have been consuming gruyere cheeses forever at this point and I’d wager the vast majority of them, like me until writing this post, weren’t even aware that a city called Gruyeres in Switzerland existed.

What’s next? Belgium style ales can’t be called that unless they come from that country? IPAs that can only originate in, ironically, England? Or maybe we can just stop being so absurd about all of this instead.

Filed Under: cheese, france, geographic indicators, gruyere, trademark, us

France Says Clearview Broke Privacy Laws, Orders It To Delete Residents' Data

Privacy

from the suprisingly-not-terrible-use-of-the-GDPR dept

Clearview is again on the receiving end of an order demanding it delete all the local data it scraped from thousands of websites and social media platforms.

Canada led the way in booting the facial recognition company, ordering its exit in February. A government investigation concluded Clearview had broken the country’s privacy laws with its web scraping and ordered it to delete all Canadian data.

Australia was next, kicking Clearview out in November. It too concluded (after an investigation) that laws were broken by the country. The United Kingdom followed suit, more or less. It didn’t kick Clearview out but threatened it with a $23 million fine and forbade it from processing any more data collected in the UK.

Now, it’s France’s turn. The GDPR is in play this time, which means this announcement is likely to be followed by similar orders from other members of the European Union. Richard Nieva reports on the latest for BuzzFeed.

Facial recognition company Clearview AI has been hit with another order by a country’s watchdog agency to delete the personal data of its citizens, the latest in a global rebuke by privacy regulators around the world.

On Thursday, France’s Commission Nationale Informatique et Libertés (CNIL) said Clearview had breached Europe’s overarching data protection law, known as GDPR. It gave the company two months to delete the personal information it had collected and stop “unlawful processing” of the data.

Clearview hasn’t been actually asked to leave, but considering its business model relies on it breaking local laws, there’s little reason for it to stick around. Its CEO has responded with some overdone shrugging, claiming it doesn’t matter what France says because it doesn’t maintain a local office.

In response to the claims, Clearview AI CEO Hoan Ton-That argued that his company isn’t bound by Europe’s data regulation law. “Clearview AI does not have a place of business in France or the EU, it does not have any customers in France or the EU, and does not undertake any activities that would otherwise mean it is subject to the GDPR,” he said in an emailed statement.

While some of that may be true, it’s pretty clear a lot of it isn’t. I don’t believe Clearview geofences its data-scraping, which means it’s certainly still collecting info on European residents. And claiming it has no customers in France or the EU is demonstrably false.

This is from earlier reporting on Clearview by BuzzFeed:

Data reviewed by BuzzFeed News shows that by early 2020, Clearview had made its way across Europe. Italy’s state police, Polizia di Stato, ran more than 130 searches, according to data, though the agency did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for France’s Ministry of the Interior told BuzzFeed News that they had no information on Clearview, despite internal data listing employees associated with the office as having run more than 400 searches.

While it may be technically true it has no customers in the European Union, entities in the union were at least given trial access to Clearview’s AI and utilized it. Those are the kind of “activities” that would be “subject to the GDPR.” The locals weren’t running searches on American citizens. They were running them on residents of their respective countries, meaning there was searchable data collected by Clearview in violation of the GDPR.

At this point, Clearview may no longer be collecting data on Europeans and other countries that have demanded it delete data. But that doesn’t mean it’s legally in the clear. A belated exit is better than nothing, but no documents have surfaced that show Clearview isn’t still gathering data from areas where it’s been told to cease operations. All we have are Clearview’s assurances, which aren’t all that reassuring, considering they’re half-truths at best. It still has yet to show it has learned anything from the past 18 months of negative coverage and has never offered anything approaching contrition for its horrific actions and incredibly irresponsible business model.

Filed Under: facial recognition, france, privacy
Companies: clearview

Yet Another Move To Funnel Money To Big Copyright Companies, Not Struggling Creators

Copyright

from the who-is-copyright-for dept

When modern copyright came into existence in 1710, it gave a monopoly to authors for just 14 years, with the option to extend it for another 14. Today, in most parts of the world, copyright term is the life of the creator, plus 70 years. That’s typically over a hundred years. The main rationale for this copyright ratchet – always increasing the duration of the monopoly, never reducing it – is that creators deserve to receive more benefit from their work. Of course, when copyright extends beyond their death, that argument is pretty ridiculous, since they don’t receive any benefit personally.

But the real scandal is not so much that creators’ grandchildren gain these windfalls – arguably something that grandpa and grandma might approve of. It’s that most of the benefit of copyright goes to the companies that creative people need to work with – the publishers, recording companies, film studios, etc.

One of the cleverest moves by the copyright industry was to claim to speak for the very people it exploits must brutally. This allows its lobbyists to paint a refusal to extend copyright, or to make its enforcement harsher, as spitting in the face of struggling artists. It’s a hard argument to counter, unless you know the facts: that few creators can make a living from copyright income alone. Meanwhile, copyright companies prosper mightily: some publishers enjoy 40% profit margins thanks to the creativity of others.

By claiming to represent artists, copyright companies can also justify setting up costly new organisations that will supposedly channel more money to creators. In fact, as later blog posts will reveal, collecting societies have a record of spending the money they receive on fat salaries and outrageous perks for the people who run them. In the end, very little goes to the artists they are supposed to serve.

EurActiv has a report about an interesting new copyright organization:

French publishers are close to launching a new body to collectively negotiate with online platforms, while the dispute with Google raises fundamental questions on how to monetise online content.

The president of the Institute for Digital Fundamental Rights (IDFR), Jean-Marie Cavada, told lawmakers in the French parliament that the set up of the new collective management organisation (CMO) will be completed in the next month.

The new body, which Cavada will lead, is to be in charge of negotiating with online platforms the remuneration of press publishers under the neighbouring right.

This “neighbouring right”, yet another extension of copyright, is being brought in as part of the EU’s Copyright Directive, passed two years ago. It’s interesting to note that the new organisation will be headed up by Jean-Marie Cavada, a French politician who played a leading role in getting the EU’s Copyright Directive passed. It’s a small world.

This “right” is also known as the “snippet tax”, because it basically requires online companies like Google to pay when even tiny excerpts of press materials appear on their sites. A moment’s reflection is enough to show that this is absurd: such snippets are effectively free advertising for publications, and they drive traffic to sites for free – something confirmed by research carried out in 2017 for the European Commission. If anything, press publishers should pay online companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter for the work they do.

But a clever campaign convinced EU lawmakers that the creators – in this case journalists – ought be paid more, and that Big Tech was somehow exploiting their work by displaying short excerpts in search results etc. And so the Copyright Directive was passed requiring online platforms to negotiate payments for the use of snippets, even though this has been a disaster in the two markets – Germany and Spain – where the approach has already been tried. As that 2017 European Commission report found:

After an initial rejection and chilling effect on traffic to their websites, German publishers agreed that news aggregators could take their content without remuneration. Spanish publishers did not have that option and suffered a decline in traffic.

What’s interesting about the French announcement is that its aim is “the remuneration of press publishers”. If you think that journalists working for those publishers will be seeing much or any of that remuneration in the form of extra wages, then I have a bridge you might like to acquire.

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

Originally posted to the absolutely wonderful new Walled Culture website.

Filed Under: collection societies, collective management organization, copyright, culture, france, jean-marie cavada, neighboring rights

ProtonMail Turned Over French Activist's IP Address To Law Enforcement Following A Request From Swiss Authorities

Privacy

from the vet-your-secure-providers,-folks dept

ProtonMail has long advertised itself as a particularly privacy-conscious email service. The free end-to-end encrypted email service promises more privacy and security than many of its competitors. But there are limits. ProtonMail operates out of Switzerland, making it subject to that country’s laws (which, to be fair, are hardly draconian). It also (at least temporarily) retains a certain amount of information about users’ emails — metadata that can be used to verify accounts in the case of a lost password.

And while email between ProtonMail accounts is encrypted, the same protection isn’t applied to emails between services, like communications sent to or from ProtonMail from other email services. This is an understandable limitation, which is why many seeking secure communications have moved to encrypted messaging services, rather than email offerings that collect metadata about communications.

These inherent weaknesses have been exploited by French law enforcement to obtain information about a French activist — something it achieved with the assistance of Swiss authorities.

ProtonMail, a hosted email service with a focus on end-to-end encrypted communications, has been facing criticism after a police report showed that French authorities managed to obtain the IP address of a French activist who was using the online service. The company has communicated widely about the incident, stating that it doesn’t log IP addresses by default and it only complies with local regulation — in that case Swiss law. While ProtonMail didn’t cooperate with French authorities, French police sent a request to Swiss police via Europol to force the company to obtain the IP address of one of its users.

ProtonMail wasn’t able to hand over much information due to its refusal to gather much information about its users. But it did hand over some, which made it clear that ProtonMail not only collects some email metadata, but will actively collect more metadata if forced to do so by local law. French law may not apply to the Swiss-based email company, but Swiss law certainly does.

Proton’s founder, Andy Yen, offered up this explanation, which said local law supersedes the privacy ProtonMail claims it offers its users.

Proton must comply with Swiss law. As soon as a crime is committed, privacy protections can be suspended and we’re required by Swiss law to answer requests from Swiss authorities.

And that’s how foreign governments can extract information from an encrypted email service that gives users the impression that it’s capable of protecting even the limited information it collects from nosy officials. The message going forward, however, is that ProtonMail is subject to the laws of multiple countries in the European Union and will comply with Europol orders if issued/forwarded by Swiss authorities.

As Karl Bode (hey, I know that guy!) points out in his article for Motherboard, there are two problems here. The first is that what’s advertised appears to exceed what ProtonMail can actually guarantee its users. The other problem is the communication method itself, which generates a lot of information that other communication methods don’t, creating a metadata paper trail that can be scooped up/gathered in bulk by law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

While ProtonMail does take some steps to protect user privacy better than other email service providers, the fact remains that email is inherently a protocol that requires a lot of information to be shared between parties, and is notoriously difficult to encrypt.

[…]

Ultimately, many of the security and privacy weaknesses are not necessarily ProtonMail’s fault but are weaknesses with email itself. Security experts have pointed out that for highly sensitive communications, email is almost never the best option.

These unavoidable facts — along with its cooperation with French and Swiss authorities — have led ProtonMail to revise its claims about user data. It no longer claims it does not collect personal information to create accounts or log IP information “by default.”

It now says simply:

ProtonMail is email that respects privacy and puts people (not advertisers) first. Your data belongs to you, and our encryption ensures that.

Well, except for when your data is subject to Swiss government demands for data, either directly or by proxy. User beware is the rule going forward now that this successful metadata grab has been exposed.

Filed Under: email, encryption, france, ip address, metadata, privacy, switzerland
Companies: protonmail

Governments Accused Of Spying On Journalists And Activists With NSO Group Malware Are Now Suing Journalists And Activists

News

from the all-hosted-by-a-country-that-really-knows-how-to-host-a-war-or-two dept

I don’t think anyone foresaw the immense amount of fallout that would result from the revelation that Israeli malware purveyor NSO Group’s Pegasus software is being used to target phones belonging to journalists, activists, religious leaders, and high-ranking government officials. After all, some of this was already common knowledge, thanks to investigations by Citizen Lab and others delving into the inner workings of this powerful spyware.

The malware maker had already weathered plenty of negative press, thanks to its customers’ questionable use of its products, as well as NSO Group’s willingness to sell powerful exploits to enemies of Israel with long human rights abuse rap sheets.

The company is now trying to regain control of the narrative, but its statements and responses have raised more questions than they’ve answered. NSO claims it has nothing to do with the list of 50,000 potential target phone numbers seen by journalists (a list that contains nearly 200 journalists’ phone numbers). It also says it has “no visibility” on customers’ use of its malware, which undermines the strength of this denial. NSO also claims it cuts off governments who abuse the product to target journalists, religious leaders, and government officials, but [taps statement above] if NSO doesn’t know what customers are doing with the malware, it seems highly unlikely the company is in any position to start cutting customers off.

It’s not just NSO Group that’s angry. Entire governments are now pissed off by these revelations. Not everyone is angry for the same reason, though.

In France, the revelation that President Emmanuel Macron’s phone was on the list of NSO-linked numbers has resulted in Macron and 14 other French ministers acquiring new phones and numbers. The French government has also opened an investigation into the Moroccan government’s use of NSO’s Pegasus software, which is seemingly where the targeting of French officials originated.

Over in Morocco, the government is angry that it’s been named as one of the main perpetrators of questionable targeting.

Morocco has filed defamation claims against Amnesty International and a French NGO who claim its intelligence services used the Pegasus mobile phone spyware against dozens of French journalists, lawyers for the government said Thursday.

“The Moroccan state … wants all possible light cast on these false allegations from these two organisations, who make claims without any concrete or demonstrative evidence whatsoever,” the lawyer, Olivier Baratelli, said in a statement.

Somewhat awkwardly, this defamation action is being pursued in France, where Moroccan government activities are now facing scrutiny from French investigators.

But even Moroccan government officials weren’t exempt from the government’s alleged spying efforts.

On Tuesday, Radio France claims the country’s monarch was on the list, as well as “a large number” of Moroccan royals.

The list is said to include the king’s wife Lalla Salma Bennani; his cousin Prince Moulay Hicham Alaoui, nicknamed the “red prince” for his progressive views; a former son-in-law of the late King Hassan II; entrepreneur Fouad Filali; and Hassan II’s former bodyguard, Mohamed Mediouri, who is the current king’s stepfather.

“But what is most surprising, when you look closely at this list, is that the sovereign himself is among those whose numbers were selected as potential Pegasus targets,” the report says.

And the government has placed journalists under surveillance in the past, undermining its new claims that it has never used the software nor purchased exploits from NSO Group.

[Amnesty International] found that [Moroccan journalist] Omar Radi’s phone was subjected to multiple attacks using a sophisticated new technique that silently installed NSO Group’s notorious Pegasus spyware. The attacks occurred over a period when Radi was being repeatedly harassed by the Moroccan authorities, with one attack taking place just days after NSO pledged to stop its products being used in human rights abuses and continued until at least January 2020.

So, there’s a lot to unpack and hopefully the court will start doing that when it begins handling the Moroccan government’s defamation claim. If there’s any truth to the allegations, one would expect the lawsuit to be dropped if the Moroccan government is ordered to turn over information on its surveillance tech and spying activities.

Morocco isn’t the only aggrieved national government, though. More litigation is in the works, courtesy of the Algerian government, which says it was falsely accused of utilizing the spyware to snoop on targets. This legal action will also be taking place in France.

Algeria said on Friday that it had filed a defamation claim against media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) after it back-pedalled accusations that the North African country had possessed Israeli-made Pegasus spyware.

Algeria’s embassy in France said the complaint related to declarations the France-based organisation published on its website on July 19.

RSF had initially identified Algeria as among the countries possessing the spyware, developed by Israeli firm NSO Group, but on Friday it issued a correction.

RSF has since apologized for the error, but that isn’t stopping the Algerian government from making a whole bunch of noise about the mistake.

“As well as their defamatory and false nature, these unacceptable allegations pertain to the manipulation of RSF, which is known for its relentlessness towards Algeria,” the embassy said.

That’s pretty mild compared to the doth-protest-too-much blustering of Morocco’s Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita, who must be getting paid by the word to issue responses.

Morocco has also chosen to trust justice, at home and internationally, added Bourita, who denounced a “smokescreen”, and a “fabricated bluff (…) without any proof”, calling for “shedding light on the facts, far from controversy and slander.”

However, “this is what neither Forbidden Stories nor Amnesty International do. They base their stories solely on pure speculation”, Bourita said, noting that certain papers that are under the banner of Forbidden Stories “serve agendas that are well known for their primary hostility towards Morocco” and are ulcerated by the Kingdom’s successes under the leadership of King Mohammed VI.

This is mere hostility. This is not journalism. It is large-scale sabotage, he said.

And so it goes for several paragraphs, punctuated by the occasional even-hotter take.

“Is this a campaign? Yes! Is it denigration? Certainly! Is it orchestrated? It could not be otherwise! By whom? Time will tell,” he said.

Ah, “time will tell.” Or will it? Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes no one learns anything because the secrecy surrounding national security efforts meshes with NDAs signed by surveillance tech customers and, before anything gets really interesting, lawsuits get dropped and verbose rants are replaced with “requests for comment were not returned.”

Whatever the provenance of The List, it has become a Pandora’s Box for NSO Group. Never mind the fact NSO didn’t actually open the box itself. It’s open and NSO will have to start dealing with the mess it’s created.

Filed Under: defamation, france, malware, morocco, surveillance
Companies: nso group

French Competition Authority Fines Google Nearly $600 Million For Failing To Negotiate A Nonsensical Deal With Publishers 'In Good Faith'

Legal Issues

from the ma-foi dept

France has long been in the vanguard of passing bad copyright laws. For example, it rushed to bring in probably the worst implementation of the EU Copyright Directive’s upload filters. It’s also keen on forcing Google to pay French press publishers for sending traffic to them when it displays clickable snippets of their news stories for free. Last year, the French Competition Authority said Google had no choice in the matter, and ordered the company to negotiate with French news organizations and come up with a deal that pays them to display even short excerpts. A year on, it seems that the French Competition Authority is not happy with the way that Google has responded:

At the end of an in-depth investigation, the Autorité found that Google had not complied with several injunctions issued in April 2020. First of all, Google’s negotiations with press publishers and agencies cannot be regarded as having been conducted in good faith, while Google imposed that the discussions necessarily take place within the framework of a new partnership, called Publisher Curated News, which included a new service called Showcase. In doing so, Google refused, as it has been asked on several occasions, to have a specific discussion on the remuneration due for current uses of content protected by related rights.

And to show how really, really cross it is, the Competition Authority has whacked Google with an immediate 500 million euro fine (nearly $600 million). Somehow the French government body believes the following about that ridiculous amount:

[It] takes into account the exceptional seriousness of the infringements observed and how Google’s behaviour has led to further delay the proper implementation of the law on related rights, which aimed to better take into account the value of content from press publishers and agencies included on the platforms. The Autorité will be extremely vigilant on the proper application of its decision, as non-execution can now lead to periodic penalty payment.

That periodic penalty is an equally salty 900,000 euros — around $1 million — per day of “delay”. These figures are truly extraordinary, not least because a rational observer can see that, if anything, it is the French press that ought to be paying Google for the massive amount of free advertising it receives, not the other way around. It’s all further proof that France has been driven mad by its hatred of big US Internet companies, and its equally weird love of maximalist copyright monopolies.

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

Filed Under: competition, fines, france, google tax, journalism, link tax, news, news bargaining code, news publishers, search, sending traffic
Companies: google

Estate Of 'Tintin' Comic Creator Loses On Fair Use Grounds To Artist Putting Tintin Alongside Women

Culture

from the comic-con-job dept

By way of a throat clearing, there are a couple of things you need to know about Hergé, the nom de guerre for the artist behind the well-known Tintin comics of yore. First, Hergé’s estate has found its way onto Techdirt’s pages before and has a reputation for being wildly restrictive and litigious over any use or reference to Tintin. Alongside that, you need to know that Hergé absolutely did every last thing he could to keep women entirely out of his comic strips. His reasoning for this can be best summarized as a combination of having a too much “respect” for women to include them in his humor comic… and also that women, according to his estate, were “rarely comic elements.” Women, in other words, are bad for humor.

So it makes perfect sense that a modern artist decided to create new material featuring Tintin in romantic or risqué settings with women and both parody and commentary on the original works. And, likewise, it makes perfect sense that the Hergé estate sued over it.

In Breton artist Xavier Marabout’s Hergé-Hopper mashupsTintin is variously painted into Hopper’s Road and Houses, scratching his head as he greets a woman in a car; looking disgruntled in a version of Hopper’s Cape Cod Evening, 1939; and kissing a girl in a car, in a spin on Hopper’s Queensborough Bridge, 1913. On his website, Marabout describes his work as “strip art”, in which he “strips distant artistic universes to merge them together” in a style where “parody [is] omnipresent”.

But the Moulinsart company, which manages the Tintin business, disagrees, accusing Marabout of reproducing the world of Tintin without proper consent.

“Taking advantage of the reputation of a character to immerse him in an erotic universe has nothing to do with humour,” a lawyer for the company said in court in Rennes this week, where Moulinsart has sued for infringement, as reported by Ouest-France.

Thankfully for the entire world, lawyers are not generally considered the arbiters of humor. And there is good reason for that. Most fair use equivalents throughout the world carve out specific exemptions for parody and commentary for this very reason. New artists seeking to provide social commentary, through humor or otherwise, need the room to produce that commentary. The upturned nose of some estate lawyer somewhere is not supposed to be a barrier.

With that in mind, Marabout’s rebuttal to the suit is roughly what you would expect.

In response, Marabout’s lawyer claimed the paintings were parody, reported Ouest-France, and cited a “conflict between copyright and freedom of expression and creation”, asking: “Does an artist have the right to wonder about Tintin’s sex life?” and “what about artistic freedom?” The Rennes court will rule in May.

Marabout told the Guardian that his work echoed the historian Christian Jacob’s belief that “there is no cultural transmission without reappropriation”.

Imagine a world in which an artist couldn’t create artistic commentary on a socially important icon simply due to copyright law. More to the point, imagine one artist attempting to restrict artistic commentary from another on those same grounds. It’s absurd and negates the way that art and commentary are made, not to mention that it hand-waves the importance of that commentary to society.

Fortunately, it appears that the French courts agree.

On Monday, Moulinsart’s complaint was rejected by the court in Rennes. “The court recognised the parody exception and the humorous intention expressed by my client,” Marabout’s lawyer, Bertrand Ermeneux, said.

The Rennes court also said that Moulinsart had “denigrated” Marabout by contacting galleries showing his work to say that it was infringing, Huffington Post France reported, adding €10,000 (£8,500) in damages for Marabout and €20,000 in legal fees to its ruling.

Given how the legal system has let the Hergé estate run roughshod over others in the past, this is as good an outcome as one could hope for. To not only see the suit tossed, but to see Moulinsart punished monetarily for his bullying ways is a breath of fresh air.

Still, we’re left with the never ending question: why can’t fellow artists and content producers understand that the same protections that protect their work also apply to other artists?

Filed Under: commentary, copyright, culture, france, herge, tintin