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

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”.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

• paidContent understands Spotify is soon to announce its expansion to Ireland. Australian launch will also be announced next week.
• Meanwhile, competitor Rdio has moved closer to launching in more European countries after gaining a license to play UK artists to users across the continent.

Spotifireland

paidContent understands Spotify held talks with Irish ISPs about going to market with a bundled deal like that with Telia which has made it popular in Sweden. But, speaking with paidContent, Eircom’s consumer managing director Stephen Beynon said there will be no Eircom-Spotify deal.

The introduction of new legal music services like Spotify in Ireland, whether through ISPs or not, represents a market maturation of the kind labels have sought. They have sued Irish ISPs since 2008, winning an out-of-court settlement from the largest, Eircom, which committed to warn and disconnect persistent illegal downloaders amongst its customers and to launch its own legal music service.

As of November 2011, a whole quarter of Spotify Premium subscribers in Sweden were acquired through Telia, the Swedish broadband, mobile and telco provider with which Spotify signed a bundling deal in October 2009.

Rdio Free Europe

Spotify, Rdio, Deezer and Rhapsody and other music services are right now launching in to new territories around the world, as they each try to capitalise on labels’ newfound enthusiasm for the subscription-access model as a new source of revenue.

Rdio recently launched in Germany, Spain and Portugal and is set to roll out elsewhere in Europe and farther afield soon. On Thursday, UK royalty collector PRS For Music announced it had granted Rdio a license to play the UK songwriters, performers and publishers PRS represents in the European countries where Rdio aims to operate.

This is just one in a complex patchwork of licenses Rdio and its peers need in order to operate. Several major music publishers have, in fact, pulled out of PRS For Music, leaving operators like Rdio needing to broker several more such deals.

Rdio this month rejected reports it was due to launch in the UK this week, but launch there is nevertheless understood to be imminent.

PRS For Music declined to confirm to paidContent whether Rdio would pay its standard, industry-wide online music license rates, citing commercial confidentiality.

The Dublin- and Rome-based company is buying Cidade Internet, a Brazilian portal which publishes 10 popular websites and other blogs inluding Fofocando, Automovel and Das Marias.

Formerly known as GoAdv, Populis operates the Nanopublishing and Blogosfere blog networks, has built up through acquiring Italy’s Blogo.it network from Dada, Germany’s Mokono network. It also owns Excite Europe, the Better Deals repository of user-created consumer guides and the Koego blog platform. In all, the company sels ads against the thousands of articles contributed by its hundreds of users each month across what is now a portfolio of several hundred websites.

Brazil’s consumer internet economy is taking off, with online ad spend surpassing that in the UK in 2011 (source and more data: IAB Brasil).

Cidade’s properties will be fully integrated under the Populis banner. Populis is gaining Cidade’s Rio and Sao Paulo offices, intends to open another this year and add 30 staff.

By trying to operate so strongly in non-English languages, Populis claims to avoid the “Demand Media clone” tag – complementarity that could ultimately make for an exit to such a group.

Today, Deutsche Telekom (NYSE: DT), owner of T-Mobile, and Groupon said they would collaborate to offer Groupon’s local deals to Deutsche Telekom’s subscriber base across Europe. It represents the first carrier deal for Groupon, and a big step for T-Mobile in how it hopes to use its network for more mobile data and mobile commerce activities.

The deal will include marketing activities as well as “deeply integrating” Groupon’s offers into Telekom’s services. While the deal looks like it is mainly aimed at T-Mobile wireless customers, the joint press release also notes that “selected fixed” services will also get the Groupon treatment.

One of the key gating factors for any mobile service not directly integrated into the fabric of a phone’s OS is that users have to make the effort to download apps; many phones still require users to “turn on” those services to get automatic notifications. Mobile web services are even less automatic. This is one area that this deal hopes to address most immediately: starting sometime in the first half of this year, Groupon’s local offers will be pinged directly to subscribers “without the need for a separate download,” say the companies.

Michael Shim, the ex-Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) executive who decamped to Groupon about a year ago to become its VP of mobile marketing and partnerships, is the man behind Groupon’s partnerships, and it looks like this could be the start of other, similar deals with other carriers. The Deutsche Telekom deal announced today, it should be noted, does not appear to extend to T-Mobile USA. That is slightly bizarre, given that it’s Groupon’s biggest market, and therefore a more likely place for those deals to get grabbed up.

In the lead-up to Groupon’s initial public offering in 2011, the company had to weather scrutiny from more than a few people over whether it would be able to sustain its basic business model, offering daily deals on goods and services to a subscriber base. The rapid rise and success of the company led to hundreds of similar companies, which in turn led to an increase in the rise of the syndrome commonly known as “daily deal fatigue.”

But in this age of growing smartphone penetration and usage, it’s easy to see the mobile opportunity for Groupon. Location-based offers, based on a user’s actual purchasing history, using the phone’s own charging capabilities to complete the transaction and then broadcasting (read=marketing) that deal to their friends? It seems like a no-brainer.

So far Groupon has not capitalised on that opportunity as much as one might think — perhaps not because it can’t but perhaps because the scale for such services still isn’t quite there. Taking just the first of that chain of events described above — location-based services — a recent report from Forrester notes that only six percent of consumers in the smartphone-friendly U.S. use location-based apps on a regular basis. If the U.S. is producing such a low number, what does that mean for the rest of the world?

Nevertheless, this deal with Deutsche Telekom could be a crucial step in getting Groupon more easily integrated into those services, and it gives Deutsche Telekom another partner in its quest to drive more service revenues from its consumers not only from mobile data, but from other, more lucrative services like mobile commerce.

It is not the only carrier eyeing up this space: O2, owned by Spain’s Telefonica (NYSE: TEF) has been ramping up its own local deals and location-based services in the UK and Ireland — a service that it will likely try to extend to Deutsche Telekom’s home market of Germany, where it is a spirited competitor to the incumbent. That could be another fire driving the Deutsche Telekom/Groupon engine.

Earlier this week, Netflix and the BBC announced that the service would feature several, but not necessarily all, popular programs from the broadcaster. The BBC would push episodes from current shows like Top Gear, but only six months after the programs were broadcast on the BBC itself. Other shows, like Fawlty Towers, are no longer in production and will probably see more flexible terms for the content.

Now it’s being reported that a deal with the UK’s biggest commercial broadcaster, ITV (LSE: ITV), may not include episodes of some of its most popular shows, such as the costume drama Downton Abbey, penned by Academy Award-winner Julian Fellowes. (To be clear, no deal between the two has been announced yet.)

An article in Bloomberg cites sources that paint a challenging picture for Netflix, whose entry into Europe comes as local broadcasters are establishing their own streaming services as a way of shoring up their traditional TV businesses.

These broadcasters will want to promote their own services first before passing their top content to third parties like Netflix. The pay TV market in Europe is currently worth some $76 billion, and PwC says it will grow to $95 billion in the next four years — although Netflix has not yet announced plans to offer content in other European markets beyond its launch for the UK and Ireland.

In addition to the BBC, Netflix has signed deals with MGM, Lionsgate (NYSE: LGF) and Miramax for films. Amazon-owned Lovefilm has managed to wrest Sony (NYSE: SNE) away for itself with its own exclusive deal.

In truth, it seems that Netflix’s dealings with European broadcasters are a very mixed bag. Beyond the BBC and possibly ITV, Mediaset in Italy seems open to collaboration, while RTL seems to only be interested if it can sell ads alongside whatever content it licenses.

That makes Europe not unlike Netflix’s situation in the U.S., where it looks like it will lose access to content from Starz and does not carry any from Time (NYSE: TWX) Warner’s TBS, but has forged deals with many of the main broadcasters for selected content.

Bloomberg reports that the company lost some 800,000 customers when it changed its pricing this year, but as of September still had 23.8 million subscribers and remains the biggest paid streaming property in the U.S. At peak times, Netflix can apparently account for 25 percent of all internet traffic in the U.S., according to network management firm Sandvine, cited by Bloomberg.

Correction: An earlier version of this report incorrectly referred to an article from Reuters; (NYSE: TRI) it was from Bloomberg.