Regardless of what you might think about the origins on The Pirate Party, there’s no denial that the movement resulted in a substantial number of votes across Europe. While it’s almost a given that the Pirate Party would have no success in U.S. (we doubt the well-lobbied legal system would refuse the registration of such political option) and many other ‘advanced’ parts of the globe – in Europe the situation is different.

The Pirate Party managed to enter European Parliament and several parliaments across Europe, and immediately begun with its campaigns to modify copyright laws. In a recent post on TorrentFreak, Rick Falkvinge, the founder of Pirate Party highlighted perhaps a key highlight in a short, not-even-decade old political initiative.

As noticed by Falkvinge, it is strange that the mainstream media failed to report that Julia Reda, representative of German Pirate Party is currently working on revising the copyright law in the European Union:

“The collateral damage to liberties has been immense, and has spilled far outside the net. In the US, people are complaining that copyright monopoly law is now unintentionally preventing them to modify items they legally own, such as cars or games consoles. They’re absolutely wrong: that was the exact intention with the most recent round of revisions to copyright monopoly law – to limit property rights and to lock people out of their own possessions. (The copyright monopoly is, and has always been, a limitation on property rights.)”

One such example of how EUCD and DMCA legislations were used was Neste Oil’s attack on Greenpeace by threatening the internet provider of Greenpeace. Then again, Europe always had different approach to copyright when it compares to the U.S. In 2005, European Commission refused to accept software patents which are at the core of many lawsuits in the U.S. and in front of the WTO.

If we forego the political boasting of the post, Falkvinge revealed that a Pirate Party member of the European and German parliament is working on the “European Union’s official evaluation of the copyright monopoly, and listing the set of necessary changes.”

What those changes might be remains unknown at this point in time, but if European Union adopts the report on April 16, 2015 (it needs a majority vote to pass), we just might see a very interesting change in dynamic in negotiations between MPAA / RIAA-led U.S. negotiators and the European Union. As a reminder, right now the members of U.S. is trying to create not just Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), but to create a single market between U.S. and the E.U.

Even if they fail in this attempt, there’s no denying that Pirate Party is creating an impact of copyright legislature. Time will tell how hard MPAA / RIAA-backed lobbyists can reply.

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Philae is the name given to the Rosetta mission lander of the European Space Agency (ESA). It’s preparing to land on a comet 405 million kilometers from Earth. The tongue-twisting name of that comet is 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko.

Five potential landing sites had been suggested. The press was notified of the final choice in a briefing today in Paris. Site “J,” judged to be the least risky landing location, is on the smaller, 4 km wide lobe, of Comet 67P. This space voyager will have a visitor on November 11 if all goes as planned. The alternative site “C” would place the lander on the larger section of the comet which looks like two irregular pitted balls connected at the hip. The sites were chosen for having maximum daylight hours and a flat landing surface.

67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko close-up. Credit ESA/ATG medialab

The 100 kg (220 pound) lander will be taking measurements while resting directly on the comet’s surface as it whizzes through space. Jean-Pierre Bibring, a lead lander scientist and principal investigator of the CIVA instrument (Comet nucleus Infrared and Visible Analyze) at the Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale (IAS) in Orsay, France said: “We will make the first ever in situ analysis of a comet at this site, giving us an unparalleled insight into the composition, structure and evolution of a comet.” Seven micro cameras will take a 360 degree panorama of the landing site.

On August 6, after more than 10 years journeying in space, the lander arrived at the comet. Then, discussions and analysis of potential landing sites commenced. When Philae, 405 million kilometers from Earth, was able to hover within 30 km – less than 19 miles – above the comet a final decision could be made.

Dordain explains Rosetta’s mission at ESOC conference

“After ten years, five months and four days travelling towards our destination, looping around the Sun five times and clocking up 6.4 billion kilometres [over 4 billion miles] we are delighted to announce finally ‘we are here’,” says Jean-Jacques Dordain, ESA’s Director General.

Just nine months ago, the hibernating spacecraft woke up and commenced reactivating the orbiter’s 11 science instruments and 10 instruments on Philae in preparation for making scientific observations. As a bonus, on its way to rendezvous with 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, the space probe was able to come close enough to asteroids Šteins and Lutetia to get never-before-possible views of the space junk and gather science data about them as well. At its destination, Philae will attempt to send and detect radio waves through the comet’s interior to learn more about its internal structure. Scientists hope to glean information about the comet’s make up and activity.

For a year, Rosetta will hang out with the comet on its elliptical 6.5 year obit swinging around the Sun as it heads back out towards the planet Jupiter. They will pass between the orbits of Mars and Earth as they fly by at 55,000 kilometers or 34,175 miles per hour. Hang on to your hat.

Created in 1975, ESA’s mission is to “ensure that investment in space delivers benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world.” The ESA is made up of twenty states, most of which are members of the EU. It works with cooperative agreements with non-member states and Canada. NASA also contributed to the Rosetta mission. Here is also an animated version of the landing, via YouTube

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Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) may be facing an antitrust investigation from authorities in the European Union over allegations that it has abused its dominant market position, according to a report from Reuters.

The complaint against Qualcomm in the EU comes as Qualcomm finds itself mired in an investigation from Chinese authorities over patent disputes and so-called abuse of its dominant position. Chinese authorities, likely under orders from Beijing to make the environment hostile to American Qualcomm, are investigating whether Qualcomm holds monopoly power over key mobile technologies by refusing to license them to its Chinese competitors. Qualcomm, for its part, has said that some Chinese firms that license its technologies were behind on patent payments and others were refusing to pay a fair market price for the patents.

In the EU, the possible investigation stems from a four-year-old complaint from Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA). Details of the complaint are sealed, but it’s believed that the complaint revolves around allegations from Nvidia that Qualcomm was using anti-competitive tactics to price other chipset vendors out of the market. Nvidia, which at the time had just recently finished the purchase of UK-based baseband maker Icera, found itself unable to fairly compete in this market.

If found guilty of breaching EU rules, Qualcomm could face a fine of up to $2.5 billion.

Facing down the courts

There wouldn’t be many that disagree with the idea that Qualcomm is a dominant player in the global cellular baseband market. According to a report by Strategy Analytics, Qualcomm had a 64 percent revenue share in 2013, followed by MediaTek (TPE: 2454) with 12 percent revenue share and Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) with 8 percent revenue share.

But the problem with allegations that Qualcomm is abusing its dominant position in the market, is that many of its competitors simply cannot build a mobile SoC and baseband that’s competitive with Qualcomm. The mighty Intel is seemingly years behind Qualcomm. It’s SoFIA platform isn’t out yet, and it has to spend enormous amounts of money in “contra revenue” to convince vendors to take its silicon. This also partially applies true with Nvidia: the company announced earlier this year that it would substantially shift the focus of Tegra because it couldn’t find the consistent hardware wins it hoped for.

Of course, Qualcomm has a better chance of a fair trial in the EU than it does in China. Until then, allegations of abuse of its dominant position are merely allegations — brought forward by competitors that can’t build competitive silicon.

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Within the past few days there have been multiple stories of banks trying to scrub the web of their mistakes. One story involves a Goldman Sachs contractor accidentally sending an email to a random Gmail user instead of sending it internally to a Goldman employee (@gmail.com vs @gs.com). In the story, Goldman Sachs demands that Google delete or ‘unsend’ the email from the Goldman contractor to the Gmail user. Unfortunately for Goldman, Google really has no reason to comply with Goldman’s request even if it was entirely erroneous. Goldman went as far as to sue Google in court demanding that they ‘unsend’ their email from Gmail’s servers, however this would be tantamount to effectively deleting a user’s email without their consent. Additionally, there really isn’t any legal precedent for Google to remove the email from the user’s inbox, especially if the mistake came from Goldman’s end and not Google’s. A typo is a mistake, and people make mistakes and it’s Goldman’s problem to deal with, they can’t just wish it away.

However, Goldman Sachs is not alone in trying to scrub the web of their mistakes. Merrill Lynch is attempting to do the same with Google searches by claiming to use the European privacy law to remove negative search results about their former CEO during the company’s rockiest times. Merrill Lynch’s old CEO, Stan O’Neil, was CEO of the company up until 2007 when he was forced to resign as CEO and was ultimately replaced by John Thain. Many attribute the decisions and choices made by Stan O’Neil to the company’s ultimate absorption into Bank of America in order to keep the firm solvent and alive. Wikipedia calls it a merger, but the reality is that it really was a bailout to save Merrill Lynch from going under. Business Insider reports that multiple entries regarding Stan O’Neal’s mistakes and role in Merrill’s near demise have been scrubbed from Google searches even though they were factually accurate and represented a fair summary of the events that led to his departure from the company.

The problem with these occurrences is that they basically exemplify the exact fears and problems that the new European law about having the right to be ‘forgotten’ would create. They allow people with money and power to effectively scrub anything about them that seems undesirable off the internet. The above examples are two perfect examples of wealthy banks and bankers trying to use their clout to manipulate how the world sees them with their money and power. But they aren’t alone, businessmen, politicians and virtually anyone with any kind of power would obviously like to curate the results about them on the internet and get rid of the ‘bad’ results. But then we no longer have an open and free internet and we’ve basically just got an incomplete picture of the world. One that we had before such laws were passed. Sure, there are probably examples where such things could be useful, but the reality is that you could be trying to hire someone and do a few Google searches and find out that person is clinically insane and tried to murder someone with a hammer. That is pertinent information that reflects upon someone’s character and may make them look bad, but is still an important part of how the information on the internet works.

Update: It looks like Goldman was actually successful in getting Google to comply with the request, even though Google said that they would first need a court order before they did so. It still isn’t clear if Google was served a court order or not, but based on Reuters’ reporting it seems as though the court case is still pending. The case is currently titled as, Goldman, Sachs & Co v. Google Inc, New York State Supreme Court, New York County, No. 156295/2014.

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Intel has lost a challenge in court today against the European Commission’s original judgement against them that found them guilty of breaching anti-trust laws and fined them $1.4 billion. This finding was originally handed down in 2009 after a long investigation and ruling process, even though the behavior happened well before 2009. In fact, Intel’s challenging of this ruling has pushed back the $1.4 billion fine nearly 5 years, which may have been part of Intel’s original strategy.

They can, however, further delay the process by taking the European Commission’s ruling and the denial of a challenge to the Court of Justice of the European Union which is the highest court in all of Europe on such matters. However, there is a possibility that the Court of Justice may not even hear their case as all previous courts have agreed with another on the gravity of the fine and the guiltiness of the party involved, Intel.

The $1.4 billion fine was based upon the EU watchdog’s calculation of 4.15 percent of Intel’s 2008 turnover, as opposed to the 10% maximum that the EU is allowed to fine. And considering the behavior that Intel participated in during those years, it shouldn’t come as any surprise to anyone involved that they got fined $1.4 billion for their behavior. That year Intel posted $5.2 billion in profits on $37.5 billion in revenue, a $1.4 billion fine seems more than reasonable in terms of gravity of the deed and their overall size and profitability. In fact, Intel should be thankful it was calculated based on 2008 numbers, because if it were calculated based on 2013 revenue they would be going off $52 billion in revenue, which would make the 4.15 percent figure a whopping $2.1 billion, an increase of more than 50 percent.

Either way, there’s no doubt that based on our experiences with Intel over these past 5 years, they greatly regret their actions and are forced to behave in certain ways as a result of it. In fact, Intel is still walking on egg shells as a result of their behavior more than 5 years ago. However, that doesn’t mean that they’re without their faults or that they couldn’t do something like this again. Intel should be thankful that they got off with what they did and pay the fine and move on, because when things like this come up again from the past, it simply doesn’t reflect well upon Intel. They need to pay the fine and make it go away, because the current Intel doesn’t reflect the Intel of the past and they need to make sure these ugly things don’t rear their heads again.

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The European Commission, a part of the European Union, has been handing out warnings to various smartphone manufacturers letting them know that their frivolous lawsuits and patent attacks are not going to be welcome by the European Commission. In two separate statements, the European Commission has reprimanded Motorola Mobility and worked with Samsung (after reprimanding them) in regards to anti-trust behavior pertaining to injunctions on their competitors they have sought based on essential patents. Interestingly enough, both of these cases pertain to 3G and GSM patents that Motorola and Samsung had brought against Apple and requested that there be injunctions against Apple’s products being imported into those countries based on those ‘infringements’. This is without a doubt a win for Apple, even though they themselves are the responsible party for the start of all these patent wars among all of the smartphone manufacturers.

Sure, there was a time when Qualcomm and Nokia had patent wars with each other, but that was a very long standing battle that didn’t really bring anyone else into the industry and well pre-dated all of these ludicrous battles between Microsoft, Google, Apple, Samsung, Motorola, HTC and many others.

The European Commission has reached an agreement with Samsung that they will not seek injunctions in Europe on the basis that its standard essential patents for mobile devices against licensees who sign up for a specified licensing framework. According to the EU agreement, under such a framework, any dispute over what are fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms for the standard essential patents in question will be determined by a court, or if both agree, an arbitrator. These commitments will create a “safe harbor” for all potential licensees of relevant Samsung standard essential patents. Any licensees that agree to such a framework agreement will essentially be immune to any sort of standard essential patent litigation in Europe and such a model is likely to be applied to Motorola as well, in order to prevent any sort of anti-competitive behavior.

What is most amusing is that in the frequently asked questions, the European Commission answers a lot of questions about these two cases, but doesn’t address the fact that both of these companies have partaken in anti-competitive behavior solely because they were sued in the US and other places by Apple. Perhaps, then, it would explain the reason why the European Commission chose not to fine either company for their behavior, which is rare on the European Commission’s part because they have fined people for having done much less. If anything, it may just serve as a nice warning to Samsung and Motorola, and setting an example for others not to try to do the same thing. I just wish the European Commission would at least openly admit that the core of this patent war started with Steve Jobs and his desire to crush Android.

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