That future likely won’t look at all like RapidShare’s past: The company used to run the world’s most popular one-click file hoster, and was frequented by millions of file sharers looking for safer alternatives when music labels and others started to go after P2P users. However, Rapidshare quickly found itself in court, and fought long legal battles with rights holders in Germany and elsewhere.

The company tried to appease rights holders by putting restrictions on some aspects of its service; RapidShare was one of the first companies to get rid of its rewards program, which would compensate uploaders with especially popular files. It also pressured users to get registered accounts, and finally introduced bandwidth limits in late 2012, restricting users to 30 GB of bandwidth per day – not enough for people who were using the service to offer movies and other copyrighted files for download.

Rapidshare had hoped that all of these measures would get the company some love from rights holders, as it was looking to offer video games and eventually also movies through a paid download store. The idea was to redirect downloaders looking for free, unlicensed copies, and serve up legitimate content instead. However, Holllywood apparently didn’t play ball, and RapidShare nixed its plan for paid downloads at the end of 2011.

The company is now looking to get a stronger foothold in the B2B cloud storage market, and sell personal file storage and backup solutions to consumers. However, the mass layoffs weren’t the first sign that these plans may not be going as expected: Sidler, who joined the company just two weeks ago, is RapidShare’s fourth CEO since 2010.

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Standards-essential patents (SEPs) cover, as the name suggests, technology that is essential to certain standards. SEPs are supposed to be licensed by the patent-holder on so-called fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms — essentially, because this technology is so important, the patent holder is not supposed to try blocking rivals from using it as long as they are willing to pay a FRAND rate.

In the case of Motorola, the SEPs in question cover part of the GPRS standard, which is in turn part of the rather important GSM cellular standard. Motorola and Google tried to get Apple to pay a rate of 2.25 percent of the entire device’s sale price in order to use the technology. Apple said this wasn’t a reasonable rate and Motorola sued in Germany, eventually winning its case and threatening the sales of iOS devices in that country. The Commission opened an investigation into this in April 2012.

Crucial to the Commission’s “statement of objections” today, Apple had agreed to let the German court set a reasonable licensing rate, but Motorola had pushed on with enforcing the injunction anyway. This showed Apple had been willing to pay something to Motorola – without that willingness, the Commission suggested, it might not have stepped in.

As the Commission summarized its preliminary conclusion:

“The seeking and enforcing of an injunction for SEPs can constitute an abuse of a dominant position in the exceptional circumstances of this case – where the holder of a SEP has given a commitment to license these patents on FRAND terms and where the company against which an injunction is sought has shown to be willing to enter into a FRAND licence.”

That said, Motorola maintained in its own statement today that “Apple had to make six offers before the court recognized them as a willing licensee.”

A statement of objections is effectively a warning and an invitation to the target to defend itself – after that defence has been heard, the Commission will come up with a final judgement.

In a statement on Monday, EU Competition Commissioner Joaquín Almunia said SEPs should not act as blockers to competition:

“The protection of intellectual property is a cornerstone of innovation and growth. But so is competition. I think that companies should spend their time innovating and competing on the merits of the products they offer — not misusing their intellectual property rights to hold up competitors to the detriment of innovation and consumer choice.”

In its statement, the Commission highlighted the difference between its preliminary ruling and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) proposed Consent Order that would force Motorola to play by the FRAND rules — that order would only apply to Motorola’s future dealings, while the European Commission is preparing to rule on what Motorola has already done.

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The company has come under criticism for not having a European data center in the past, largely due to compliance issues – Salesforce is part of the EU-U.S. Safe Harbor framework, which means it’s allowed to handle European citizens’ personal data, but many customers would prefer the certainty that a locally sited data center allows. (We will be discussing such issues at our Structure:Europe conference in London on 18-19 September, by the way.)

Salesforce said last year that it hoped to open a data center in the UK in 2013, but this appears to have been pushed back a little now. According to a statement today, the new data center – the firm’s sixth — will be completed in 2014 in partnership with NTT Communications’ local arm, NTT Europe.

In a statement, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said Europe had provided the greatest revenue growth – 38 percent — for the company in the 2013 fiscal year:

“We are doubling down on Europe with the announcement of our new data centre in the UK, which will support continued customer success in EMEA.”

Robin Balen, NTT Europe’s wholesale data center business chief, added that the new facility would be “powered 100 percent by renewable energy sources.”

Innovation Challenge

Meanwhile, Salesforce has also teamed up with a group of European venture capital firms – Notion capital, Octopus Investment and MMC Ventures – to launch a €5 million ($6.6 million) Innovation Challenge for startups.

Startups are invited to pitch their enterprise cloud apps that could run (surprise!) on Salesforce’s platform. There will be pitching events through Europe between September and November, and the winners will get seed funding. Apps will need to be at least in the beta stage, with demonstrable “traction, customer success and user adoption.”

“This is a unique opportunity for innovative start-ups in the enterprise app market here in Europe to receive commercial support to allow them to compete on a global stage,” Octopus principal Luke Hakes said in a statement.

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The case followed complaints by Microsoft and others over Google’s treatment of rivals’ web services in its search results. These companies argue that Google favors its own services, which are not clearly marked as such, and also that it unfairly locks advertisers onto its platform and scrapes content from third-party search and comparison sites without consent.

A recent leak outlined the terms of the proposed settlement deal, but here’s the official version:

To address these concerns, Google offers for a period of 5 years to:

(i) – label promoted links to its own specialised search services so that users can distinguish them from natural web search results,
- clearly separate these promoted links from other web search results by clear graphical features (such as a frame), and
- display links to three rival specialised search services close to its own services, in a place that is clearly visible to users,

(ii) – offer all websites the option to opt-out from the use of all their content in Google’s specialised search services, while ensuring that any opt-out does not unduly affect the ranking of those web sites in Google’s general web search results,
- offer all specialised search web sites that focus on product search or local search the option to mark certain categories of information in such a way that such information is not indexed or used by Google,
- provide newspaper publishers with a mechanism allowing them to control on a web page per web page basis the display of their content in Google News,

(iii) no longer include in its agreements with publishers any written or unwritten obligations that would require them to source online search advertisements exclusively from Google, and

(iv) no longer impose obligations that would prevent advertisers from managing search advertising campaigns across competing advertising platforms.

Authorities in the U.S. more-or-less cleared Google over similar complaints, but it’s important to note that Google’s share of the search market there is around 67 percent, whereas in the E.U, it’s around 90 percent. This gives it stronger market power in Europe, and forces the regulators’ hand somewhat (as do local laws).

A Q&A document, which outlines the Commission’s concerns in detail, points out that “it does not seem likely that another web search service will replace [Google] as European users’ web search service of choice.”

“In this context, it is important for the Commission to intervene in order to ensure that Google’s prominent market position in web search does not affect the possibility for other competitors to innovate in neighbouring markets, including in the long-term,” the document states.

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The 27 countries agreed on the rule change on Wednesday, according to the European Commission, which is behind the proposed revision of a 2003 directive on public sector information. If the European Parliament adds its stamp of approval, national governments will then transpose the changes into their laws sometime in the next 18 months or so.

According to Neelie Kroes, the digital agenda commissioner, the European Parliament will sign off on the change soon:

Breaking … #EU member states have agreed to updated #OpenData rules. Big culture change coming, #EP to sign off in coming weeks.

— Neelie Kroes (@NeelieKroesEU) April 10, 2013

The change will give developers, businesses and citizens the right to get their hands on public data at low cost or for free. They will also be able to use data from museums, libraries and archives for the first time. Public sector bodies will only be able to charge marginal costs for sharing their data, and will also have to be more transparent about their charges. They will also be encouraged to make their data available in machine-readable formats.

According to a webpage setting out the Commission’s hopes on the matter, the data in question will cover digital maps, weather data and road congestion data, as well as information on companies and court proceedings:

“Most of Public Sector Information raw data could be re-used or integrated into new products and services, which we use on a daily basis, such as car navigation systems, smartphone apps with weather forecasts, information services for companies integrating information from various sources, such as statistical data with economic forecasts, company register data and other publicly available information.”

Some European countries, such as the UK, already have established open data initiatives (and so, of course, does the U.S.).

Sources close to the negotiations tell me that agreement was reached on the basis that cultural institutions in particular could charge a bit more than originally planned for handing out their data. Some governments had apparently been hoping to be able to charge a lot more for their institutions’ data, but were convinced that they would get more money in the form of taxation from the businesses that would spring up around open data, the sources noted.

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“We are looking for highly motivated individuals with the right mix of technical, organizational and communication skills to provide localization for the Netflix experience in the following languages: Turkish, Dutch, Hindi, French, and Korean.”

The company is also looking for an engineer to be the internationalization and localization evangelist at the company, further highlighting how important international markets are for Netflix.

Netflix has occasionally looked to hire employees to help with its internationalization efforts in the past, and job postings frequently contain countries that the company may not consider at all, just to make things less transparent for competitors. For example, in late 2011, a job offer listed “Turkish, Dutch, Russian, French, Hindi, German, Italian, Danish, Korean, Finnish, Japanese, and Spanish” as languages of interest.

Needless to say, Netflix hasn’t launched in Russia just yet. However, nine months after that job posting, the company announced plans to open shop in Northern Europe – including Finland and Denmark.

It’s very likely that South Korea, India and European countries such as the Netherlands, France and Belgium are at least under consideration as potential targets for further international expansion. Turkey seems less likely, but it’s certainly possible – the country has a thriving TV and movie industry, and it has seen an economic boom even as other parts of Europe have struggled.

Netflix is currently operating in over 40 countries, including the U.K. and Ireland, the Nordics, Latin America and Canada. It might take some time until we find out where Netflix will go next: executives said earlier this year that the company won’t embark on any further international expansions until late 2013 or early 2014. However, CEO Reed Hastings and CFO David Wells also made it clear that they definitely want to expand further, writing in their letter to shareholders:

“Our launch in the Nordics was very successful, confirming our belief in the large international opportunity for our service.”

Map courtesy of Flickr user kcp4911.

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According to Dow Jones Business News, Reding said:

“This case and the responses I received since I sent my letter have highlighted rather clearly just why the Commission cannot sit on the side-lines on enforcement issues,” she said. “The approaches to enforcement in these types of cases turn out to be very diversified and inconsistent at a national level. In at least 21 EU Member States Apple is not informing consumers correctly about the legal warranty rights they have. This is simply not good enough.”

Reding’s remarks echo comments she made in October 2012, in which she called Apple’s standard free offering of one year of warranty protection to its customers ”unacceptable marketing practices” according to EU laws. The EU requires that companies not only offer a two-year warranty for free, but companies also need to inform their customers of this right.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Italy has been the most aggressive EU member state in enforcing this law against Apple: It has fined the company for only advertising a free one-year warranty when selling iPhones, iPads and other electronics to customers, while selling AppleCare, a paid extended warranty option.

But Italy isn’t the only country Apple has run afoul of in this respect: earlier this week Apple informed its retail staff in Australia to start honoring free two-year warranties for its customers in the country to bring its practices in line with local consumer protection law.

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“I don’t want to say this, but … we are panicking a bit,” said Colette Maloney, head of European Commission’s smart cities and sustainability unit, during the Green Grid Forum in Santa Clara, Calif., on Wednesday. “We are way off target.” The commission aims to see its member countries cut their energy use by 20 percent — compared to the 2005 levels — by 2020, and the European Union has only hit a 13 percent reduction.

To meet its 2020 target, the commission is counting on the information and communication technology industry to do its part, and is focusing attention on data centers in particular, given that data centers account for about 25 to 30 percent of the energy use by the IT industry, Maloney said.

CTO, Verne Global, Tate Cantrell and Eirikur Hrafnsson, Founder GreenQloud at Structure Europe 2012

Not only that, the number of data centers will likely mushroom if the idea of “smart cities” becomes a reality. The term is really about the use of technology to help people use and manage resources – from water and power to transportation and communication systems – much more efficiently (see  this GigaOm Pro report, subscription required, called “Key technologies for the future of the smart city”). Using sensors to collect data and computers to analyze and disseminate them will be a big part of running a smart city, and that will require the construction of more data centers.

Figuring out how to measure and analyze energy savings and what data is acceptable to use for those calculations are among the big challenges for making data centers more efficient, Maloney said. And getting at least the majority of the IT industry to agree to a set of methods and data won’t be easy. The commission has been working with many companies and trade associations, but they haven’t reached a happy compromise yet. Implementing those standards once they are set will pose a new challenge, she noted.

Some of the standard-setting industry organizations are looking to adopt rules for promoting energy savings. The Green Grid, an IT industry association, came up with PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) to gauge the energy efficiency of data centers. Companies such as Google have promoted the use of PUE, which has some notable limitations.­­ EBay has a new metric for the MPG of a data center, too.

Maloney said PUE is useful, but the commission is looking at other metrics as well, especially since it wants to promote new business opportunities while achieving its energy savings target. Some of the opportunities it hopes to promote will involve making and selling efficient equipment and related services, but what constitutes green products and services has yet to be clearly defined.

In the mean time, the commission is funding research projects, such as Fit4Green and All4Green, that will come up with new ways to run data centers more efficiently. Later this year, the commission plans to call for research proposals on building and running green data centers in smart cities, Maloney said.

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Kroes has a 2020 goal for the “delivery” of 5G. That seems like a tall order, although the proliferation of IP-connected sensors in the internet of things may well necessitate a shift to even more efficient technologies than 4G.

“Rolling out today’s networks is important,” she said. “But what comes after? For the next global standard, and the next generation of technology, will Europe lead the world, or merely follow?”

The €50 million for 5G research includes €16 million for the METIS project we reported on in December. The goal here is to research faster, more spectrally efficient and more power-efficient mobile broadband than 4G – which in itself seeks to tick all those boxes, but which is not as Europe-led as 2G and even 3G were.

The EU’s investment is for the public part of an industry-wide public-private partnership – the companies involved, including some of the continent’s big carriers (Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom, Telefonica, Telecom Italia, Portugal Telecom) and infrastructure players (Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, NSN), will have to stump up more, although they would be doing that anyway.

“Europe used to lead the world on wireless… European 5G is an unmissable opportunity to recapture the global technological lead,” Kroes said.

Of course, coming up with the technology is one thing, and deploying it is another. That’s where those complaints over EU spectrum harmonization come in – as Kroes puts it, the continent’s spectrum allocation map currently resembles “a bowl of spaghetti”, which is one reason why South Korea (population 50 million) has more 4G subscriptions than the whole of the EU (population 500 million). Kroes is really not happy that 17 of the 27 EU member states still don’t have 4G at all:

“We’ve already fixed a target to find a total of 1200MHz of spectrum for wireless broadband. But on average national governments have only awarded 65 percent of the spectrum we have already harmonised in the EU. So when Member States aren’t implementing legal commitments, we will use our full… powers.”

This should come as music to the carriers’ ears, as will her promise to cut down on the bureaucracy around infrastructure planning permits and inter-operator network sharing. Kroes has traditionally used her MWC speeches to lambast the carriers over issues such as roaming charges – this time she’s on their side:

“I am still determined to deliver broadband for all: and for that we must improve the market. So that it works for you in the industry, works for consumers, works for the economy. A European telecoms market more coherent, more integrated, more efficient; with lower investor risks and higher investor rewards.”

Spectrum allocations are a pain to fix, but they are fixable. As for 5G, €50 million isn’t a game-changing amount but it may be enough to stimulate research at this very early stage of the technology’s development. It’s true that Europe let itself fall behind on 4G, and that has real knock-on effects in terms of competitiveness. The EU would be smart to avoid making that mistake again.

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This week Tamiz made wave with an appeal against Google, which he was trying to sue over defamatory comments about him made on Blogger posting. In a case that goes back to 2011, Tamiz had argued that Google was effectively the publisher of a series of comments calling him, falsely, a thief and a drug dealer, and should have deleted them as soon as they were made aware of them. Google did delete the comments, but only after a five week gap.

Tamiz is familiar with online controversy: one reason he was a lightning rod for angry comments in the first place was because, he stepped down as a local election candidate in 2011 after calling Margate’s women “sluts” on Facebook. And so, when he did not originally win his case — the first judge ruling that Google was not the publisher of the comments — he appealed to a higher court. There Google’s inaction was found to be troubling, though it did not actually overturn the libel ruling itself.

As the Financial Times reported:

Although Lord Justice Richards and Lord Justice Sullivan agreed with the original ruling that Google was not the primary or secondary publisher of the content it hosted, they said it was “at least arguable that some point after notification Google became liable for continued publication of the material”.

The Lords Justice likened the situation to a 1930s court case in which a golf club was held responsible for defamatory material left on its noticeboard because it failed to remove it after it was notified.

Cue the shrill sound of the press screeching into action. “Blogger.com libel case opens door for internet giant being required to monitor users’ posts”, squealed the Daily Mail with barely contained delight. Except, as it outlines in the story, the headline is essentially trolling — Tamiz was denied his libel claim and asked to pay 50 percent of Google’s legal costs: likely to be a tidy sum. And it’s a stretch to suggest, as much commentary does, that this is another step towards internet regulation — asking a company to respond to notices of illegal content may not be popular (just see the DMCA) but it is reasonable to expect them to comply with local jurisdiction.

Still, Tamiz — and the kerfuffle around his case — does show the amount of energy being expended around online libel in Britain right now.

Defamation laws in the U.K. are notoriously harsh, in large part because they lean in favor of the plaintiff and put the burden of proof on the defendant: it’s a case of “prove your comments were true” rather than “prove their comments were false”.

And the precedent for defamation in online publishing stretches back 15 years, to the case of Godfrey v Demon Internet Service, in which a physics lecturer sued an ISP over comments made in a Usenet group it hosted: the ISP settled the case, because a pre-trial ruling intimated that it was potentially culpable since, despite knowledge of the situation, refused to act for 10 days. Although the award was small — just £15,000 in 1997, the equivalent of around $33,000 today — it has laid the groundwork in Britain.

It’s one major reason many media companies employ battalions of comment moderators, and carefully police the comment threads on their own stories.

But remember, we are all media companies now. And that means that we are all open to the same set of rules. There have also been plenty of high-profile cases on Twitter and Facebook against individual users, but so far there has not been much success in taking on platform providers themselves. Just last week a judge in Northern Ireland ruled that while anonymous comments made on Facebook were defamatory, Facebook itself was not liable.

Still, with Godfrey in the background and more and more cases coming along, you can understand why people see Tamiz’s case as another push at a brick in the wall between platforms and publishing.

Yes, everyone’s a media company now: and eventually that will go for Google, Facebook, Twitter and the rest as much as it does you and me.

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