Google has gone to great lengths to clarify its revamped privacy policy, but a regulatory body in the European Union thinks the company is moving a little too fast. Today, European regulators formally requested that Google "pause" its rollout, in order to give the EU more time to investigate its forthcoming changes. "Given the wide range of services you offer, and the popularity of these services, changes in your privacy policy may affect many citizens in most or all of the EU member states," the EU's Data Protection Working Party wrote in a letter to Google CEO Larry Page yesterday. "We wish to check the possible consequences for the protection of the personal data of these citizens in a coordinated way." The body didn't specify how much time it would need to investigate, but it stressed that doing so would help to ensure absolute transparency among European users. "[W]e call for a pause in the interests of ensuring that there can be no misunderstanding about Google's commitments to information rights of their users and EU citizens, until we have completed our analysis," the letter reads.Viviane Reding, Europe's commissioner on data protection, heralded the move as an important step in asserting EU authority over online privacy and regulations, but Google was somewhat taken aback by the request. "We briefed most of the members of the working party in the weeks leading up to our announcement," said company spokesman Al Verney. "None of them expressed substantial concerns at the time, but of course we're happy to speak with any data protection authority that has questions." It's worth noting that Google isn't legally bound to heed the Working Party's request, though we'd expect the company to seek some sort of compromise with Europe's regulators, as it has in the past.
EU regulators ask Google to 'pause' its privacy changes, need more time to investigate originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 03 Feb 2012 07:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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It looks like Pirate Bay's legal drama has finally come to a close in Sweden, where the Supreme Court today turned down the site's final appeal. At the center of the case are the file sharing site's founders -- Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundstr
Samsung's European legal woes don't look to be abating anytime soon, as the EU today formally launched an investigation into the Korean manufacturers' competitive practices. At issue are, not surprisingly, a collection of patents that Samsung has used to launch a series of lawsuits against rival companies. The manufacturer maintains that these patents are essential to complying with European mobile standards, but the EU says Samsung may be in violation of a promise it made more than ten years ago. Back in 1998, the firm said it would license these essential telephonic patents to competing manufacturers, under the terms outlined in FRAND. The Commission explained the obligation and its potential ramifications in the following statement: 
About a week after suffering a legal setback in Germany, Samsung received another bit of bad news this morning, when the Mannheim Regional Court rejected the second of its patent infringement claims against Apple. As with last week's ruling, today's decision addresses one of Samsung's arguments that Apple's 3G / UMTS technology infringes upon its patents. Judge Andreas Voss officially shot down these claims early this morning, though he didn't offer an immediate reason for his ruling. As FOSS Patents points out, however, these initial decisions against Samsung may be based on the validity of the specific patents themselves, and would therefore have no bearing upon the outcome of the Korean manufacturer's three other claims -- all of which are based upon different 3G / UMTS patents. In addition, the company is pursuing two lawsuits based on patents not related to 3G standards, including one, apparently, that details a way to type smiley emoticons on a mobile handset. We're still awaiting more information on today's outcome and will update this post as soon as we hear more.
After having already acquired Napster here in the US, Rhapsody has taken its expansion one step further, with the acquisition of Napster International. Under the deal, announced today, Rhapsody will continue to offer Napster-branded services across the UK and Germany, as promised, and will eventually migrate Napster subscribers to its own infrastructure in March, with existing personal libraries remaining intact (Napster is already live in the UK, but has yet to make its official German launch). The move will also bring changes to Napster users' mobile apps and web clients, with Rhapsody promising improved offline playback and enhanced library management tools "in the coming months." For more details, check out the full PR after the break.
As SOPA's aftershocks continue to ripple across the US, a slightly different brand of techno-political drama is unfolding over in Europe, where the European Commission today announced a new set of online privacy regulations. The new legislation, unveiled this morning, was crafted with the intent of giving consumers more control over their online data, and places more pressure upon private companies to protect user information. According to Reuters, offending firms could be fined at rates of up to two percent of their yearly turnover. The laws, designed to overhaul the 1995 Data Protection Directive, will also make it easier for users to access their data, giving them the power to demand that their personal information be deleted, as long as there are no "legitimate reasons" for a company to store it. Companies, meanwhile, will be required to inform authorities of a data breach as soon as possible, "if feasible, within 24 hours."
Pardon us Americans as we act surprised, but it turns out that we have one more thing in common with our Euro brethren: a growing number of us dislike shopping in stores. According to Kelkoo estimates, online spending in the European Union is projected to continue its upward trend, which is said to reach somewhere in the neighborhood of €232 billion before year's end. If the estimate holds, this would be a 16 percent increase over the €200 billion raked by e-tailers during 2011, and is naturally assumed to come at the expense of traditional brick and mortar outfits, whose growth is projected to increase by a mere 1.8 percent.
Germany's Mannheim Regional Court has just issued a decision on one front of the ongoing dispute between Apple and Samsung, ruling against one of the Korean manufacturer's several patent infringement claims. At issue is a Samsung patent pertaining to the 3G / UMTS standard -- one of seven that Apple has been accused of infringing. Today, Judge Andreas Voss rejected Samsung's claim, though the reasoning behind this decision remains somewhat murky. According to FOSS Patents, however, the validity of the patent itself probably wasn't the driver behind Voss' ruling, since any doubts would have resulted in a stay, rather than an outright rejection. FOSS speculates that the court determined either that Apple wasn't infringing upon Samsung's patent, or that Samsung has simply exhausted its IP rights.
