The reason Google doesn't pay much tax in France is that Google isn't really in France.
I make iPhone apps. My company makes a profit. I pay corporation tax in the UK because that's where I'm based. I sell plenty of apps in France, but they don't get any tax from me (other than VAT which is managed by apple).
This is actually quite interesting. The interweb has enabled a whole load more large companies to do business globally without having significant local presence.
Governments don't like it when they can't get their 'share' of these offshore companies' profits...
the argument is that google has a monopoly on search and they are using that to lock other people out of other online businesses. (or at least to unfairly disadvantage them)
Expedia are one of the companies that complained.
Imagine that every time you searched for a flight on google, all Expedia results were completely ignored, and Google simply showed at the top of the page in a big box, the results from their recently acquired travel company.
It's pretty clear that in this case, they'd be abusing their dominance in search to push their travel company.
The allegation is that to a lesser degree, they are doing exactly this with Maps, Shopping, Travel (possibly others). Not excluding competitor results, but giving their own results unfair prominence.
It seems like a reasonable complaint if true. The 'if' is important.
He is one of the very few core VLC developers and has been for some time. He is involved in a lot of the hard bits of VLC's code, so it is very unlikely that his code could be replaced.
1) While people believe that the vaccination programs are part of a crazy conspiracy, then children will die. 2) On at least one occasion, (Osama Bin Laden), the USA has used a vaccination program as part of a conspiracy to find the guy they wanted to kill (and some of his family) 3) Now we need to convince people that all the _other_ conspiracy theories are crazy and would never happen. 4) Meanwhile in the same region, the USA (and others?) kill men women and children with rockets from their robot drones
costs can be awarded so that the loser pays, but is isn't as straightforward as the loser always paying what the winner's legal bills are.
the judge has a lot of discretion here.
nonetheless, you're right about the dynamic. The BPI is threatening the individuals here. The law is far from clear cut.
It is very unlikely that they would win and recoup their full legal bills from the opposition (even if costs are awarded, they don't generally actually cover the full legal cost of your case).
It is perfectly possible that they could lose and still have to pay massive legal bills for the BPI.
one of the consequences of free speech is that you get arses like the Westboro church.
speaking as UK citizen, I envy the ability of the USA legal system to say 'we hate what they're saying, but there is a bigger principle at stake here'.
the only other alternative is for someone somewhere to be in charge of deciding when the line has been crossed.
-westboro 'god hates gays' -pro life 'murderer' signs outside abortion clinics -islamist 'death to those who insult Islam' -atheist 'islam is stupid' -some guy 'some celebrity is fat and ugly'
for any place that you are willing to draw the line, I'll find some offensive speech that sits just above or below your line. The next person in the room won't quite agree with you on where the line has to go.
who decides which person goes to jail?
the Westboro baptist church, is actually something to be proud of. Not because it is hateful, but because it is allowed to be hateful.
failing to warn people that you have a problem with their actions, and just leaping straight to a court case is also bad.
I'm fairly sure that what you call 'threatening', the BPI would call 'fair warning'
Not that I support their case, just that if they are going to take it - I would absolutely require them to warn the pirate party, and attempt a settlement first.
I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure this is how the british legal system encourages people to act.
well - if you're a company that bought hundreds of the things, then it might help you a lot.
read the bottom of the press release; You can use the EU judgement in court as absolute proof that price fixing went on, and they specifically state that damages (payable to you) should not be reduced on account of the fine already levied.
frankly - if I had purchased an expensive TV in that period, I'd be tempted to take a small claims case now just for fun.
> If you can't link a sentence without paying for it, then you can't include it in search results either.
sure you can.
Google searches my entire site - but they definitely do not have permission to take all my content and reproduce it on their new site for supporting their remote control apps. Similarly with use of the news stories, there is a reasonable debate to be had about what constitutes fair use.
The newspapers are arguing (quite reasonably) that Google News (where summaries of news stories are presented in what is essentially a newspaper) is different from Google Search.
the point where they get unreasonable is in arguing that Google should pay for the snippets whilst failing to opt out of Google News (which they could easily do with their robots.txt)
that would be abusing the search ~monopoly for a different business.
there are two separate businesses here 1) google search (newspapers want to be in this, but possibly don't want snippets showing) 2) google news (newspapers want payment for snippets in this)
at the moment, they can opt out of 1, or 2 independently using robots.txt
if they switch to demanding payment for #2, then google should just de-list them from #2 until they pay an advertising fee (which is coincidentally equal to the government mandated copyright charge plus 15% admin cost).
if google removed companies from #1 as a result of their position on #2 then that would be a clear abuse of power.
The regulation is required if you do not think that visa/mc/paypal should be the ones deciding which companies should be allowed to accept payments online.
there is an implicit assumption here that he can build something bigger.
Lots of people believe that they can be serial successes, but lots of people fail to do anything special after their first good idea.
Kinda like the many many one-hit-wonders in the music industry.
still - if he gets a good offer here, then selling sounds smart. It's probably easy enough for Facebook to just reproduce his work, open source it and maim his business.
It may tell you that you are massively overengineering your solution, and that therefore your cost is higher than it needs to be (or your capability lower than it needs).
We can build cars that are much more resilient to crashing, but at some point, they become too slow, too heavy, too expensive and they're only really useful as tanks.
the calculation assumes a bunch of stupid stuff - like paying a judge to watch every minute uploaded.
you can make some reasonable assumptions to come up with a _much_ smaller number
1) your employee will work for $35k/year (I'm sure you could get lower than this if you outsourced) 2) screener on average only has to view 1/10 of the video to figure out whether it is likely to be infringing 3) half of uploads are content that is already known to the system (re-uploaded)
that's a factor of 100. Suddenly it costs $0.37 billion. a lot clearly - but less obviously unsupportable.
I'm not saying Google should screen all content, but I am saying that the calculations in the article are absurd enough to be meaningless.
Slashdot Mirror
EU anti-competition regulators can fine up to 10% of worldwide turnover.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_competition_law#Enforcement
There isn't really a loophole here.
The reason Google doesn't pay much tax in France is that Google isn't really in France.
I make iPhone apps. My company makes a profit. I pay corporation tax in the UK because that's where I'm based.
I sell plenty of apps in France, but they don't get any tax from me (other than VAT which is managed by apple).
This is actually quite interesting. The interweb has enabled a whole load more large companies to do business globally without having significant local presence.
Governments don't like it when they can't get their 'share' of these offshore companies' profits...
I would think it was pointless.
Gilding the lilly. Why tarnish science with make believe?
the argument is that google has a monopoly on search and they are using that to lock other people out of other online businesses. (or at least to unfairly disadvantage them)
Expedia are one of the companies that complained.
Imagine that every time you searched for a flight on google, all Expedia results were completely ignored, and Google simply showed at the top of the page in a big box, the results from their recently acquired travel company.
It's pretty clear that in this case, they'd be abusing their dominance in search to push their travel company.
The allegation is that to a lesser degree, they are doing exactly this with Maps, Shopping, Travel (possibly others). Not excluding competitor results, but giving their own results unfair prominence.
It seems like a reasonable complaint if true. The 'if' is important.
so you would advise Gmail to block these users from the free service, and only give them access if they purchase one of the paid services?
He is one of the very few core VLC developers and has been for some time. He is involved in a lot of the hard bits of VLC's code, so it is very unlikely that his code could be replaced.
What secrets?
There is no magic here - it's not a technologically advanced bit of kit. Just good execution, and marketing.
1) While people believe that the vaccination programs are part of a crazy conspiracy, then children will die.
2) On at least one occasion, (Osama Bin Laden), the USA has used a vaccination program as part of a conspiracy to find the guy they wanted to kill (and some of his family)
3) Now we need to convince people that all the _other_ conspiracy theories are crazy and would never happen.
4) Meanwhile in the same region, the USA (and others?) kill men women and children with rockets from their robot drones
Why don't they just trust us?
costs can be awarded so that the loser pays, but is isn't as straightforward as the loser always paying what the winner's legal bills are.
the judge has a lot of discretion here.
nonetheless, you're right about the dynamic. The BPI is threatening the individuals here. The law is far from clear cut.
It is very unlikely that they would win and recoup their full legal bills from the opposition (even if costs are awarded, they don't generally actually cover the full legal cost of your case).
It is perfectly possible that they could lose and still have to pay massive legal bills for the BPI.
and there you have your dilemma.
one of the consequences of free speech is that you get arses like the Westboro church.
speaking as UK citizen, I envy the ability of the USA legal system to say 'we hate what they're saying, but there is a bigger principle at stake here'.
the only other alternative is for someone somewhere to be in charge of deciding when the line has been crossed.
-westboro 'god hates gays'
-pro life 'murderer' signs outside abortion clinics
-islamist 'death to those who insult Islam'
-atheist 'islam is stupid'
-some guy 'some celebrity is fat and ugly'
for any place that you are willing to draw the line, I'll find some offensive speech that sits just above or below your line. The next person in the room won't quite agree with you on where the line has to go.
who decides which person goes to jail?
the Westboro baptist church, is actually something to be proud of. Not because it is hateful, but because it is allowed to be hateful.
failing to warn people that you have a problem with their actions, and just leaping straight to a court case is also bad.
I'm fairly sure that what you call 'threatening', the BPI would call 'fair warning'
Not that I support their case, just that if they are going to take it - I would absolutely require them to warn the pirate party, and attempt a settlement first.
I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure this is how the british legal system encourages people to act.
how about VLC Streamer ?
It's an app I wrote...
http://hobbyistsoftware.com/vlcstreamer
developers get 70% on Android too.
well - if you're a company that bought hundreds of the things, then it might help you a lot.
read the bottom of the press release; You can use the EU judgement in court as absolute proof that price fixing went on, and they specifically state that damages (payable to you) should not be reduced on account of the fine already levied.
frankly - if I had purchased an expensive TV in that period, I'd be tempted to take a small claims case now just for fun.
I think you mean a 'ding'
> If you can't link a sentence without paying for it, then you can't include it in search results either.
sure you can.
Google searches my entire site - but they definitely do not have permission to take all my content and reproduce it on their new site for supporting their remote control apps. Similarly with use of the news stories, there is a reasonable debate to be had about what constitutes fair use.
The newspapers are arguing (quite reasonably) that Google News (where summaries of news stories are presented in what is essentially a newspaper) is different from Google Search.
the point where they get unreasonable is in arguing that Google should pay for the snippets whilst failing to opt out of Google News (which they could easily do with their robots.txt)
that would be abusing the search ~monopoly for a different business.
there are two separate businesses here
1) google search (newspapers want to be in this, but possibly don't want snippets showing)
2) google news (newspapers want payment for snippets in this)
at the moment, they can opt out of 1, or 2 independently using robots.txt
if they switch to demanding payment for #2, then google should just de-list them from #2 until they pay an advertising fee (which is coincidentally equal to the government mandated copyright charge plus 15% admin cost).
if google removed companies from #1 as a result of their position on #2 then that would be a clear abuse of power.
that's kinda the point.
The broader question : which companies/organisations are ok.
e.g. a company selling sex toys (totally legal in their market) and another selling horror movies have been denied service by visa/mc/paypal
http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=http://christianengstrom.wordpress.com/2012/11/13/eu-maste-reglera-hur-visa-mastercard-och-paypal-far-bete-sig/
The regulation is required if you do not think that visa/mc/paypal should be the ones deciding which companies should be allowed to accept payments online.
can you post any example implementations?
one thing I can't see immediately is the ability to manage subgroups.
e.g.
My company
-product1
-product2
would you have to set up multiple groups to do this?
there is an implicit assumption here that he can build something bigger.
Lots of people believe that they can be serial successes, but lots of people fail to do anything special after their first good idea.
Kinda like the many many one-hit-wonders in the music industry.
still - if he gets a good offer here, then selling sounds smart. It's probably easy enough for Facebook to just reproduce his work, open source it and maim his business.
A perfect record might be a really bad sign.
It may tell you that you are massively overengineering your solution, and that therefore your cost is higher than it needs to be (or your capability lower than it needs).
We can build cars that are much more resilient to crashing, but at some point, they become too slow, too heavy, too expensive and they're only really useful as tanks.
this seems to ba a cache of her dmca request:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:mITGdka0BHcJ:chicksandpolitics.com/+&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk
did America vote to reject ACTA?
the calculation assumes a bunch of stupid stuff - like paying a judge to watch every minute uploaded.
you can make some reasonable assumptions to come up with a _much_ smaller number
1) your employee will work for $35k/year (I'm sure you could get lower than this if you outsourced)
2) screener on average only has to view 1/10 of the video to figure out whether it is likely to be infringing
3) half of uploads are content that is already known to the system (re-uploaded)
that's a factor of 100. Suddenly it costs $0.37 billion.
a lot clearly - but less obviously unsupportable.
I'm not saying Google should screen all content, but I am saying that the calculations in the article are absurd enough to be meaningless.
are you aware of the actual tweet?
"Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You've got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!!"
even the airport management at the time considered it to be not credible as a threat.