Hasta La Gadget!

ISPs in the US are just getting around to enforcing a “six strikes” policy against illegal P2P sharing, but France is now contemplating a crackdown on the streaming and direct downloads of pirated content. Hadopi, the government organization behind the country’s existing “three strikes” law, released a new report that proposes websites take a page from YouTube’s book and actively monitor content by using recognition algorithms and the like to take down things that are presumed illegal. If a site weren’t to cooperate after a round of warnings, it might face penalties including DNS and IP blocking, domain name seizures and even financial repercussions that involve having their accounts with “payment intermediaries” (think PayPal) suspended. As for enforcement of this potential government mandate, the dossier posits that it could lean on internet service providers instead of hosting services, which according to EU law, can’t be forced to conduct widespread surveillance. For now, these suggestions aren’t being made policy, but Hadopi is mulling them over.

[Image credit: keith.bellvay, Flickr]

Filed under: Internet

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Via: Ars Technica

Source: Hadopi (1, translated), (2, PDF)

France has just witnessed a PR stunt for Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance that involved slicing up a police car. Both Platimum games and Konami France came up with the idea to grab people’s attention. The police car had the Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance logo as well as Platinum’s logo just to make sure that everyone knew that it was just a PR stunt; not a threat. This is certainly much more entertaining than a press release.

The police car was cross-diagonally slashed, ripping clean through the car’s core components. It represents some of the fun things you’re able to do as Raiden in Metal Gear Rising. Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance focuses on Raiden, who’s a cyborg ninja, and his fight against Desperado Enterprises, a private military company. This game takes place 4 years after the end of Metal Gear Solid 4. Rising isn’t a stealthy game like the previous Metal Gear Solid titles. It’s all action-based, where you take Raiden and his sword-wielding skills and you go about slicing and dicing enemies (or vehicles).

The car was signed by both Hideo Kojima — producer of almost all of the Metal Gear Solid games, and Vice President of Konami Digital Entertainment — and Yoji Shinkawa, who worked on many Konami titles like Metal Gear Solid 2-4, Zone of the Enders, and of course Metal Gear Rising.

The sliced-up police car sold for 1610 euros, or $2100 on eBay. The car is one item, along with many others, that are being auctioned off by Konami France. All of the proceeds from the auctions will be donated to UNICEF Paris. Up for sale right now is a copy of Metal Gear Rising for the PlayStation 3 that’s been signed by Hideo Kojima and Yoji Shinkawa. Right now, the going price is 106.00 euros, or around $141. Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance was released in the U.S. today, and will be released in France on the 22nd.

[via Hideo Kojima]

Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance PR stunt involves slicing up a police car is written by Brian Sin & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Late last week, Google decided to pay $82 million to French publishers that would help their websites make money off of online advertisements. However, it seems there’s a little bit of jealously going around with other European countries. The European Publishers Council isn’t too happy about the exclusivity with France, so the EPC’s director, Francisco Pinto Balsemao, is asking Google to compensate publishers in all European countries, not just France.

Balsemao claims that search engines, like Google, get over 90% of revenues from online advertising, and a lot of that comes either directly or indirectly from news or entertainment content that’s available for free. He says that “this use is carried out without the authorization from copyright holders or without any payment in return,” which basically means that Google, and other search engines, should pay up.

The EPC represents 26 of the main media outlets that are operating in Europe, so that organization definitely has a some authority when it comes to this kind of stuff, and since ad revenue is falling throughout Europe, the group is wanting search engines to pay up a chunk, since the’re believed to essentially be taking ad revenue away from these European outlets.

Advertising revenues in Portugal fell by 90 million euros in 2012, down to 526 million euros, which is the country’s lowest since 1997. Google has declined to speak about on the situation, but according to TechCrunch, a source close to Google said that the EPC’s claim that the company gets over 90% of its revenue from web advertising is untrue.

[via Reuters]

Google asked to pay all European countries for content use is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

It keeps getting worse for French iPhone owners. The agency for telecommunications ARCEP has just announced that it would meet with the four French telcos to know if and when it should refarm Bouygues Telecom’s 1,800MHz band to bring LTE to the iPhone 5. The three other companies are begging the ARCEP to wait until at least 2014 to start this process, effectively lobbying for slowing down innovation in this industry.

Last July, Bouygues Telecom sent a request to the ARCEP to reuse its old 2G 1,800 MHz band for LTE communications. It would give a head start to the third largest telecommunications company. According to the French law, the ARCEP has up to eight months to reply.

That’s why the agency finally explained what it plans to do in the coming months. On February 7th, the four telcos will have to present their arguments. Bouygues Telecom wanted to reuse its 1,800 MHz band in early 2013. It definitely looks like the ARCEP will miss the mark. Even though it first agreed with Bouygues Telecom, Free now wants to wait as long as possible as the company is already having a hard time laying out its 3G network and meeting ARCEP’s coverage requirements.

Finally, Orange and SFR are acting like spoiled children, begging the ARCEP to wait until the end of 2013 or even 2014 before even thinking about refarming the 1,800 MHz brand. In 2012, the two companies bought the so-called “gold spectrum” in the 800 MHz band for around $1.6 billion (€1.2 billion). This band is effectively useless for the iPhone, many Samsung devices and many other brands as it only works with a few Android handsets, such as the HTC One XL and the Motorola Razr HD. It was overpriced.

All these companies are playing the job card as well. Delaying or refarming the 1,800 MHz band would create hundreds of jobs depending on which company you take side with. It will be a key argument for the ARCEP, even though the four companies are inflating those numbers.

Allowing LTE plans sooner than later would enable the four telecommunication companies to increase the average data plan subscription price. As plan prices have greatly decreased recently, those companies desperately need a new steady influx of money to invest in optical fiber and other infrastructure improvements.

According to Les Échos, the ARCEP won’t make any decision before the end of 2013. Other countries, such as the U.K., have allowed the 1,800 MHz band refarming for LTE — but bureaucracy, lobbying and general slugginess will once again hurt the end customers who won’t get LTE on their iPhone or Galaxy Note II devices any time soon.

While Google and France don’t always get along and agree with certain situations, the search giant is looking to patch things up by creating a €60 million ($82 million USD) fund for digital publishing “innovation” that it says will help French news websites make money off of online advertisements.

While Google doesn’t mention anything about a settlement in its blog post, we can only assume that the fund will resolve an ongoing case where news publishers claimed that Google’s practice of linking to news articles was copyright infringement. Along with the fund, Google has agreed to give French publishers discounted access to Google’s advertising platforms.

Google says that the new innovation fund was announced in France along with France’s president, François Hollande. The French government itself has been acting as a mediator for the copyright dispute between Google and French news publishers. However, it seems that the search giant and news outlets in France will live happily ever after for the time being.

This isn’t the first time that France and Google and tangoed, though. Back in October, Google threatened the French media that it would take block their search results from Google due to a new law that would force search engines to shell out money for content. And back in August, the company was in trouble with France over Street View data that wasn’t deleted, resulting in another cat fight between the two parties.

Google starts €60 million French digital publishing fund is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.