This fight has been going on behind the scenes for some time, but recently came to light when Irish lawyer Simon McGarr wrote about attempts by the Irish newspaper industry’s licensing body to charge one of his clients (a charity called Women’s Aid) a fee for linking to newspaper content. According to McGarr, the newspaper licensing group told the charity it had to pay an annual license fee: 300 Euros for one to 5 links, 500 Euros for 6 to 10 links — with a sliding scale extending all the way to 50 links, which would theoretically cost the charity 1,350 Euros. According to the licensing body:

“a licence is required to link directly to an online article even without uploading any of the content directly onto your own website.”

Not surprisingly, this position has been ridiculed by a number of media-industry observers, including journalism professors Jay Rosen and Jeff Jarvis, as well as George Brock of City University in London — some Irish journalists have even apologized on Twitter for their country’s behavior. But in a press release on Friday, the group that represents most of Ireland’s papers maintained that it has every right to charge websites for links, and that it believes linking to newspaper content for commercial purposes should constitute copyright infringement.

When I talk about "legacy" media it's not some buzzword. It has a referent. Behavior like this: bit.ly/UiBc2I via @Tkeala

—
Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) January 01, 2013

Links are copyright infringement, Irish newspaper group says

In the release, the National Newspapers of Ireland — which represents 16 national daily, Sunday and weekly newspapers and 25 regional newspapers — tries to differentiate between links that are for “personal use” and links that are for commercial purposes. The statement says none of the group’s members have ever objected to people who hyperlink to newspaper stories, and that the licensing arm of the NNI usually only goes after sites that also engage in other forms of “copying activity” in addition to links, such as reproducing the article “or an extract from it.”

However, the industry group’s statement also says that it has made a submission to the Irish government’s copyright review committee — which is considering changes to the country’s copyright laws — arguing that a simple hyperlink by any commercial entity or for commercial purposes constitutes infringement. The committee is considering a clause that would specifically state that hyperlinks don’t constitute copyright infringement, and the NNI says it is opposed to such a change:

“The NNI made a submission to the effect that our view of existing legislation is that the display and transmission of links does constitute an infringement of copyright.”

Irish newspapers aren’t the first to try and monetize links, or to try and draw a distinction between commercial linking and any other kind: Britain has a newspaper licensing body that fought a long battle with Meltwater — a commercial clipping service that provides summaries of newspaper stories along with links to the original — and recently won a court decision (the Associated Press newswire has also sued Meltwater claiming copyright infringement). And the German government has said it is considering a similar licensing scheme that could even apply to Google News. Most of those cases involve excerpts as well as links, however (which is permitted in the U.S. under the “fair use” principle).

If the Irish industry’s position sounds like a throwback to the early days of the web, that’s because it is: lawsuits over what was called “deep linking” were fairly commonplace in the late 1990s, and some companies even tried to specifically forbid linking in their terms of service. It seems Irish papers would rather turn back time instead of trying to adapt to it. Update: The Irish Times has said that it “does not see links as copyrightable” and encourages readers to share its content, but does take issue with “scraping, summarisation and aggregation of its content.”

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Denise Chan

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NewBay’s M.O. was to build operators their own branded cloud media management services such as digital photo and video storage, network-based address books, and even social networking. NewBay’s carrier customers, which include Verizon Wireless and several major European operators, could then use that software to compete against third-party platforms like Apple’s iCloud and Amazon Cloud Drive.

When RIM bought NewBay in October 2011, we expected to see RIM create its own cloud storage platform as well. With NewBay now going to Synchronoss, RIM hasn’t necessarily given up on a cloud storage service, but it’s not going to launch it with NewBay’s software. If you think about it though, RIM already runs one of the largest cloud platforms in the world through its core push-messaging apps and enterprise synchronization apps. Maybe buying didn’t work out, but it could always build or partner.

Synchronoss has been on a buying spree. Last January it bought mobile social networking company Miyowa and in July 2010 it bought mobile contact and content management provider FusionOne. Synchronoss is most famous for handling the at-home activations of the first generation of iPhones, allowing Apple to turn iTunes into a mobile-provisioning platform. The company, however, has been gradually expanding into the further reaches of the cloud, focusing on the synchronization of content and data between devices after the initial activation.

Photo courtesy by Flickr user fontplaydotcom

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With €481.7m going into the Irish government’s coffers by the end of this year, that’s a pretty timely Christmas present for a country whose economy remains somewhat shaky these days. The winning bidders – Three, Meteor, O2 and Vodafone – will pay out the remaining €373m in spectrum usage fees up until 2030.

And with the ensuing 4G rollout likely to lead to serious improvements in Irish broadband coverage, there should be further economic benefits too.

“I expect that the telecoms companies who were the successful bidders will move quickly to build the infrastructure so that we can start to benefit from 4G mobile broadband services in 2013,” communications minister Pat Rabbitte said. “This will be an important dimension of Ireland’s competitiveness in the coming years.”

So, who bought what?

All the carriers picked up spectrum in the 900MHz and 1800MHz, bands which had previously been used for 2G communications. Meteor, O2 (Telefonica) and Vodafone also acquired spectrum in the 800MHz band, previously used for analogue TV services as in the neighbouring United Kingdom.

Vodafone bought the most spectrum, and will be paying out a total of €280.6m for the privilege.

“We now have the best possible combination of available spectrum and work has already commenced on upgrading our network nationwide,” Vodafone Ireland CEO Jeroen Hoencamp said. “Our customers have access currently to the fastest data network and from next year, they will experience the next generation of mobile technology, 4G.”

Meanwhile over in the UK, it looks like early preparations are underway for the release of even more mobile broadband spectrum, this time in the 700MHz band.

Yes, 700MHz is already used in the U.S. and Asia for LTE services, but it’s yet to be freed up for such purposes in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. UK regulator Ofcom said on Friday that it was starting to plan the switch of digital TV services from the 700MHz band to the 600MHz band.

Given that it will take until 2018 for all the requisite international agreements to fall into place (it helps if everyone frees up 700MHz at more or less the same time, due to the global nature of the handset industry), it seems that this spectrum will be end up being home to 5G services. (And yes, it still feels like a joke to write ’5G’, but it will be a thing.)

So the auctioneering – and those handy proceeds for Irish and other governments – will continue for some time yet.

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Now the publishers says GetBulb, a web service that lets users make data-driven infographics, has won its Irish Times Digital Challenge.

GetBulb wins a €50,000 convertible loan note from DFJ Esprit, but each of the other four finalists are also now working with the publisher, have already received free accounting services from KPMG and will get marketing via the publisher valued at €10,000.

1. MyIFli.com – a simple mobile website creator
2. Storyflow – visualises news story events
3. PicTurk – amateur photography contest platform
4. KnockOn.ie – grassroots rugby community
5. GetBulb – data graphics creator

The Irish Times Digital Challenge is one of the ways in which some established media companies are now trying to work alongside start-ups. The BBC this summer also launched BBC Worldwide Labs, helping to mentor six tech start-ups in London – Flooved, Foodity, KO-SU, Krowd 9, MiniMonos and wireWax. The newspaper’s bosses have described their learnings…

Irish Times editor Kevin O’Sullivan (via release):

“The Irish Times Digital Challenge has shown that media organisations can, and I think should, work with early stage digital companies. We have a lot to offer each other. Other media organisations can, and I expect will, embrace this model. Newspapers talk about adapting to the new realities, but if they are going to fully change and engage their core audiences they must open up to the most disruptive external influences and endure all that this entails”.

Irish Times managing director Liam Kavanagh (via release):

“There were risks. Serious ones. We have been a very heavily print dominated and very traditional news organization. This project required us to come out of our comfort zone. I was conscious that the organization could have rejected the digital disruptors when they arrived, which would have posed serious difficulties. If we did not embrace this Challenge then it would have said serious things about whether the organization could change. I took the risk. My faith paid off”.

“I think, knowing what we know now, that the incubator inside the media organization model is something that others need to consider. And we would like to help them with that”.

Irish Times chief innovation officer Johnny Ryan (via release):

“The next Challenge, when we announce it, will be more focused. That’s a key lesson: select startups that can work on one common area of the organisation so that their impact is maximised”.

“Incentivising staff to work with startups is key. We are going to build in measures that make it easier for our staff to buy-in and feel attached to the startups’ projects”.

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The Irish data protection commissioner (DPC) issued his assessment (PDF) on Friday of Facebook’s compliance with recommendations the regulator made last December. The DPC had been forced into the issue following complaints by a group of Austrian law students calling themselves ‘Europe v Facebook’, and had told Facebook that it had to be more upfront about giving users privacy choices.

The review suggested that Facebook had “fully implemented” most of the DPC’s recommendations, and those that had not been implemented would be taken care of “with a clear timescale” in place.

And one of those moves is apparently to stop recording people’s facial characteristics in order to automatically suggest photo tags.

“I am particularly encouraged in relation to the approach it has decided to adopt on the tag suggest/facial recognition feature by in fact agreeing to go beyond our initial recommendations, in light of developments since then, in order to achieve best practice,” DPC Billy Hawkes said in a statement. “This feature has already been turned off for new users in the EU and templates for existing users will be deleted by 15 October, pending agreement with my Office on the most appropriate means of collecting user consent.”

Facebook, which was targeted in Ireland because that’s where all its non-North American business is based, is also crowing about going beyond the call of duty:

“The latest announcement is confirmation that we are not only compliant with European data protection law but we have gone beyond some of their initial recommendations and are fully committed to best practice in data protection compliance.”

But guess what? That’s not the end of the story.

Facebook’s been under fire over precisely the same feature in Germany, where privacy chiefs have accused the social network of “illegally compiling a vast photo database of users without their consent” – remember, this is the home of data protection law we’re talking about here.

When that last bit of bother struck just one month ago, Facebook insisted that:

“We believe that the Photo Tag Suggest feature on Facebook is fully compliant with EU data protection laws.”

So what gives?

Essentially, Facebook has found itself fighting on too many fronts. What began as an obscure concern of people in German-speaking countries has spread: the Norwegian data protection regulator also started probing the feature, and – crucially – so did the Article 29 Working Party (WP29).

The WP29 is a group of privacy regulators from all over the EU, and its recommendations get taken very seriously indeed. In July it said facial recognition features such as photo-tag suggestions should only be allowed when the user gives their explicit consent (and that means the user being tagged, as well as the one doing the tagging).

So yes, Facebook has just gone beyond the Irish DPC’s original recommendation, but only because a higher authority is waving a bigger stick at it, and because the company’s realized it’s not going to win this one.

In any case, even though Facebook is wiping the facial recognition templates it’s already recorded for its EU users, it intends to bring the system back once it’s figured out a “holistic approach” to properly informing those users.

As for Europe v Facebook, they’re still not happy (no surprise there) but tell me this victory is “totally going in the right direction”.

To give Facebook its due, here are the areas in which the DPC says the company has fully implemented its recommendations:

• The provision of better transparency for the user in how their data is handled,
• The provision of increased user control over settings,
• The implementation of clear retention periods for the deletion of personal data or an enhanced ability for the user to delete items,
• The enhancement of the user’s right to have ready access to their personal data and the capacity of FB-I [Facebook Ireland] to ensure rigorous assessment of compliance with Irish and EU data protection requirements.

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The Irish Times also just started its Digital Challenge – an eight-week programme in which it is giving desk space to and getting to know five fledgling ideas…

1. MyIFli.com – a simple mobile website creator
2. Storyflow – visualises news story events
3. PicTurk – amateur photography contest platform
4. KnockOn.ie – grassroots rugby community
5. GetBulb – data graphics creator

Irish startup incubator NDRC LaunchPad is running the project with the 153-year-old newspaper’s new chief innovation officer Johnny Ryan. Arthur Cox and KPMG are each providing €10,000 in legal and consulting fees. Each startup will get to pitch at Dublin Web Summit and receive advice from a range of outside personalities.

The winning startup will receive Irish Times marketing worth €10,000 and, perhaps most importantly, a convertible loan note for €50,000 investment from DFJ Esprit. Ryan tells paidContent:

“I remember being involved in a startup that had a great technology but could not get users. What we needed was something like this – it would have saved us going to VCs to get cash to buy ads/attention to secure eye balls.

“Large organisations like The Irish Times when I arrived six months ago, they have a very narrow bandwidth to work with startups. We needed to take some major steps internally to widen that, and to lower the barriers to outside ideas.”

Part of the aim may be to kickstart Ireland’s tech economy, which has benefitted from large overseas factory and office locations but which has struggled to generate ideas that reach large audiences; but The Times is not doing this out of the goodness of its heart…

The newspaper is hoping to get to use some of the products being developed during the programme, as it – like all publishers – faces its own migration challenges. And, doubtless, it can learn plenty from the upstarts.

Some of the ideas aren’t necessarily brand new, but several could be of use in an Irish context – notably to the Times or other online news publishers. For example (I’m speculating here), MyIFli.com could, in theory, be marketed to Irish Times advertisers who need simple mobile websites.

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One day after Philipp Humm’s surprise resignation from T-Mobile, Vodafone announced he has joined its ranks. Humm won’t just be supervising one of Vodafone’s numerous European subsidiaries – he will take charge of eight of them: Germany; the UK; the Netherlands, Turkey, Ireland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Romania.

That explains Humm’s sudden departure. T-Mobile USA’s parent company Deutsche Telekom is one of Vodafone’s biggest competitors. In fact, by running Vodafone Germany Humm will be going head-to-head with T-Mobile Germany, the DT subsidiary he once led.

Vodafone announced the appointment as part of a larger European reorganization. Vodafone is splitting the continent into two operating regions. Italy CEO Paolo Bertoluzzo will run the second region which encompasses southern Europe and includes Vodafone’s carriers in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Albania, and Malta.

The move is definitely a step up for Humm. While T-Mobile USA is a huge operator by European standards, it’s the smallest of the U.S. Big 4 by far. In several of the countries Humm will be supervising, Vodafone’s carriers are the No. 1 and No. 2 players. He no longer has to assume the role of the scrappy challenger.

Humm won’t assume his new Vodafone mantle until Oct. 1, which is the day after his contract with Deutsche Telekom officially ends. It’s now pretty clear Humm isn’t being punished for his role in the AT&T-Mo debacle. Quite the opposite, he’s being rewarded with an even more important job (albeit by a different company).

That leaves T-Mobile in a bit of turmoil. It needs to scramble to find a permanent CEO while in the process of overhauling its network, launching LTE and executing its new “challenger strategy.” As I wrote yesterday though, the last thing a new T-Mobile CEO should do is try to ‘shake up’ the company, as new chiefs are wont to do. Humm and team had put together a compelling plan to take on T-Mobile’s larger rivals, and whomever winds up running T-Mo should give it a chance to work

Image courtesy of Flickr user LGEPR

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“Given our expected return to global profitability in Q2, and how well we’ve been received in the UK, we’ve decided to open an additional attractive European market in Q4 of this year,” the company said in its Q1 earnings disclosure.

When planning the expensive UK and Ireland launch amid the controversial company restructuring that saw it lose domestic customers in 2011, Netflix had warned the company would go in to the red, forcing it to freeze indefinitely plans to roll out in any more countries until profitability could be restored.

The company did not specifically report how many subscribers it has attracted in the UK and Ireland, citing “competitive reasons”, but said sign-ups in its first 90 days there exceeded those gained in Canada during the same period.

Growth in the latest countries, along with sign-ups in existing territories of Canada and Latin America, helped Netflix’s international subscriber base almost triple during Q1 to 3.07 million.

And Netflix hit its overseas targets. International revenue came in at $43 million. International losses hit $103 million, thanks to the costs of acquiring content and marketing itself to a new audience. That is huge outlay but still less than the up to $118 million Netflix had expected to lose on globalisation, thanks to “slightly higher revenue combined with lower than expected content, subtitling and marketing expenses”.

The company reiterated that it sees News Corp’s Sky Movies, which has exclusive subscription-window deals with six Hollywood studios, as its main competitor, and not Amazon’s Lovefilm.

Netflix reckons its Canadian operation will turn a profit this coming Q2, two years after launch, but reckons the UK, Ireland and Latin America will take longer.

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Not that the students, whose group is less-than-subtly named “Europe v Facebook”, are satisfied. They say Facebook holds way more information about its users than it generally lets on, and they remain convinced that its refusal to cough up is illegal in Europe.

To tackle their nemesis, the group complained last year to the Irish data protection commissioner (DPC), since Ireland is where Facebook has its HQ for all operations outside North America. In December, the DPC decided Facebook was breaching EU data protection law and gave the company a stern telling-off, along with a list of things it should change.

And now we see the fruits.

“Starting today, you will be able to download an expanded archive of your Facebook account history,” a note on Facebook’s somewhat-obscure European public policy blog stated on Thursday.

Since 2010, Facebook has provided a download tool that gives you some of what the company knows about you — timeline information, photos and videos, messages, wall posts and so on — but now it includes more than before.

Now you can access additional categories of information, including previous names, friend requests you’ve made and IP addresses you logged in from,” Facebook said in its note. “This feature will be rolling out gradually to all users and more categories of information will be available for download in the future.”

“Users are again fooled,” Europe v Facebook immediately retorted. The group reckons Facebook’s now including 39 categories of information in the downloads, but that it actually holds about 84 categories on each person. The company’s move is in line with what the DPC asked it to do.

So what are we still not getting to see? “One was ‘Like’ button information,” Europe v Facebook leader Max Schrems told me, explaining that this category kept a record of every webpage a user had visited which had a ‘Like’ button on it (the user doesn’t need to click the button for the tracking to happen).

“We found Like buttons on porn pages. Facebook holds this data in a personal form for 90 days and then — according to Facebook — depersonalizes it,” Schrems said. “According to EU law they have to give out all the personal information that they have about a user. They have to put out the information in raw format within 40 days.”

Clearly not satisfied with the changes forced by Ireland’s privacy regulators, the group is now urging people to complain directly the European Commission about Facebook’s alleged law-breaking.

Nitpickers? Perhaps. A Facebook representative pointed out to me that several categories of data can be viewed in the new ‘activity log’.

But this small group of students has managed to get one of the world’s biggest tech companies to alter its policies for all its users. They’re not satisfied, and I wouldn’t bet against them wrangling out even more concessions in future.

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Netflix put the finishing touches on mobile-device rollouts in the regions it’s aggressively expanding into. The company announced Wednesday that its streaming video service is now available on Windows Phone in Latin America, the U.K. and Ireland.

Of course, Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system only controls a small portion of the global smartphone market — it’s only around 2.5 percent in the U.K., for example. But this rollout — coupled with earlier launches of Netflix apps for iOS and Android — means that Netflix’s device rollout in key expansion areas is nearly complete.

In Netflix’s fourth-quarter earnings report to investors in February, company CEO Reed Hastings specifically pointed out the need for better device penetration in regions like Latin America in order to spur subscriber growth. The company added 380,000 foreign subscribers in the quarter but had expected more.

The new app — which is available to Windows Phone compatible devices made by HTC, LG, Nokia, Samsung and other manufacturers — can be downloaded right now for free from the Windows Phone Marketplace.

A Netflix app for Windows Phone users in the U.S. and Canada has been available since November 2010. Netflix has also upgraded that app to include enhancements in browsing and streaming quality, as well as support for subtitles, captioning and alternate audio.

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