The Swedish government indicated today that it will impose a total ban on bestiality starting January 1, 2014. The previous law only punished cases of bestiality in which the animal in question was visibly injured or abused. Sweden’s Minister for Rural Affairs, Eskil Erlandsson, said the new law will erase any and all ambiguity:

“The government is now tightening the rules surrounding bestiality so there will be no doubt about the fact that it is prohibited to inflict suffering on animals.”

Once the new law takes effect, those caught performing any sexual act with an animal with be punished with a fine, up to two years in prison, or both. It’s actually a pretty light sentence compared to other countries where such acts carry a prison sentence of six or more years.

As expected, many animal rights groups and veterinary groups voiced support for the law. Many say taking a hardline stance against bestiality is required as it was sometimes hard to convict somebody of animal cruelty in the past. The new law will make it much easier to ensure those convictions in place.

The original report, however, did not gauge the response from pro-bestiality factions in Sweden. Granted, there may not be any, but the spirited response from zoophiles in Germany certainly has one expecting protests from those who claim they just love their pets a little bit more than others.

Once Sweden joins Germany in banning bestiality, it will be the seventh country in the European Union to do so. Countries such Poland, Italy, Finland and Belgium do not have any laws on the books banning bestiality. There is, however, an EU directive that tasks countries to ban the practice. So zoophiles hoping to escape a country that bans the practice may not have anywhere else to run if more countries begin to ban the practice.

[h/t: AAP via News.com]

Here is the list of Google’s proposals, as shared in the EU’s announcement:

Google offers for a period of 5 years to:

(iv) no longer impose obligations that would prevent advertisers from managing search advertising campaigns across competing advertising platforms.

A third party would be required to monitor Google’s implementation of its commitments.

It was clear from the beginning that competitors did not think these went far enough, though they did go further than Google’s actions settling a similar investigation in the U.S.

Reuters now reports that EU Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia said the commission will press Google for further concessions, though the report does not get into specifics. It does say that Almunia said “Google would almost certainly be asked to improve its proposals.” Foo Yun Chee writes:

The EU competition authority initially gave complainants until May 26 to comment, but later extended the deadline to June 27 following pressure from the companies.

“After, we will analyse the responses we have received… almost 100 percent we will ask Google: you should improve your proposals,” Almunia told lawmakers during a Tuesday hearing at the European Parliament.

Meanwhile, reports have recently emerged that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has been mulling opening up a new probe, this time into Google’s display advertising business.

After being tossed out of every port it came across, TorrentFreak reports that The Pirate Bay has finally found a home in Iceland. Its new .is domain reflects the move, and any attempt to visit old domains will redirect you to the new one.

So, why Iceland? It seems that the company that operates the .is domain – ISNIC – won’t take any action against The Pirate Bay, or at least not yet. The company told TorrentFreak that it’s not responsible for what Web sites do on its domain. The only possible way for The Pirate Bay to be booted from its new .is domain is if the Icelandic courts issued a court order.

For now, it looks like The Pirate Bay is safe in its new home. ISNIC has a good track record of hosting controversial sites without any issues. The country’s anti-piracy group will also probably stay away for a while as it’s still reeling from a piracy-related PR disaster from earlier this year.

“Music first launched on Google Play in Europe in November 2012, and the fast rollout to more countries today is due to the multi-territorial licensing process, as recommended by the European Commission last year,” explains Google Play head of international music partnerships, Sami Valkonen. “We have 14 multi-territorial licenses for composition rights covering Europe and representing the vast majority of the world’s music, and have recently welcomed the members of AKM/AUME in Austria, SABAM in Belgium, SPA in Portugal, and IMRO in Ireland into our growing list of author’s society partners.”

Google is also launching Artist Hub in these countries. This is a platform for independent musicians to sell their music directly to fans. This is discussed a bit more here.

In addition to the five new countries, Google Play Music is available in the following European countries: the UK, Germany, France, Spain and Italy.

French privacy watchdog CNIL has been very vocal about Google’s policies since they went into effect last year. If you’ll recall, Google essentially consolidated the privacy policies of its various products into one central policy, which better allows it to share data from one of its products to the next, effectively turning Google into one main product, as opposed to a bunch of separate ones. Google’s policy does this without changing anything about how it shares data with third parties.

CNIL says in a statement:

From March to October 2012, the Article 29 Working Party investigated into Google’s privacy policy with the aim of checking whether it met the requirements of the European Data Protection Directive (95/46/CE). In view of the findings of this analysis which was published on 26 October 2012, the EU Data protection authorities asked Google to comply with their recommendations within 4 months.

After this period has expired, Google has not implemented any significant compliance measures.

On 19 March 2013, representatives of Google Inc. were invited at their request to meet with the taskforce led by the CNIL and composed of data protection authorities of France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United-Kingdom. Following this meeting, no change has been seen.

The article 29 working party’s analysis is finalized. It is now up to each national data protection authority to carry out further investigations according to the provisions of its national law transposing European legislation.

CNIL goes on to say that all the authorities composing the task force have launched actions.

Meanwhile, Alma Whitten, Google’s first privacy director, is stepping down after three years in this position.

Reuters is reporting:

Alberico Fernandes, head of the Portuguese Confederation of Social Communication Media, told Reuters that the global Internet services group’s Iberian and Portuguese units rejected the demand at a first meeting last week but agreed to continue negotiations.

He said Google “showed readiness to collaborate with media groups to help us modernize and make our content more profitable”, something it had agreed to do in France earlier.

Earlier this year, Google announced an initiative to “help stimulate innovation and increase revenues” for French publishers. Google agreed to create a €60 million fund called the DIgital Publishing Innovation Fund to “help support transformative digital publishing initiatives for French readers.” Google said it would also “deepen” its partnership with French publishers to help increase their online revenues using Google’s ad technology.

The announcement followed a similar one Google made in December, when it reached an agreement with publishers in Belgium after six years of litigation, which saw publishers sue Google claiming that it violated their copyrights by displaying snippets in Google News and linking to cached copies of their pages in Google search.

As part of the agreement in Belgium, Google said it would advertise its services on publishers’ media, and publishers would optimize their use of AdWords. Google would also work with Belgian French-language publishers to “help increase publishers’ revenue,” collaborating on ways to make money with Paywalls and subscriptions, and with AdSense and the Ad Exchange. Google would also work with Belgian publishers to implement Google+ social tools and launch YouTube channels.

At the time, Google said it would like to come to similar terms with publishers around the world. Perhaps Portugal is next.

Amazon announced today that the 16GB Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ now retails for $269. The 32GB model now retails for $300. The Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ 4G LTE also got a price cut as the 16GB model now retails for $400, while the 64GB model retails for $500.

The price cut coincides with the tablet’s launch across select European countries and Japan. The Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ will set UK consumers back £229 ($341 USD) for the 16GB model or £259 ($386 USD) for the 32GB model.

“We’re thrilled with customer reaction to Kindle Fire HD 8.9”. Customers tell us they love our large-screen version of Kindle Fire HD for web browsing, email, gaming, watching TV shows, reading magazines, and more,” said Dave Limp, Vice President, Amazon Kindle. “As we expand Kindle Fire HD 8.9” to Europe and Japan, we’ve been able to increase our production volumes and decrease our costs. Across our business at Amazon, whenever we are able to create cost efficiencies like this, we want to pass the savings along to our customers.”

With the price cut, the Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ is now the most affordable tablet of its size. Apple and Google best be taking notes on how to subsidize costs through content sales because Amazon has proven that it’s still king of this rather risky, but so far profitable, venture.

Google has a post on its Europe Blog today discussing the matter. William Echikson, Head of Free Expression, EMEA at Google writes:

In the case before the CJEU today – one that is representative of around 180 similar Spanish cases – Google declined to comply with an order from the Spanish Data Protection Authority. We were asked to remove links from our search results that point to a legal notice published in a newspaper. The notice, announcing houses being auctioned off as part of a legal proceeding, is required under Spanish law and includes factually correct information that is still publicly available on the newspaper’s website.

There are clear societal reasons why this kind of information should be publicly available. People shouldn’t be prevented from learning that a politician was convicted of taking a bribe, or that a doctor was convicted of malpractice. The substantive question before the Court today is whether search engines should be obliged to remove links to valid legal material that still exists online.

We believe the answer to that question is “no”. Search engines point to information that is published online – and in this case to information that had to be made public, by law. In our view, only the original publisher can take the the decision to remove such content. Once removed from the source webpage, content will disappear from a search engine’s index.

This has pretty much been the way Google has always operated. Here’s an explanation from Matt Cutts about why Google won’t remove pages about you.

Google is also facing antitrust issues in Europe, but according to a recent report, the European Commission will not reach a decision on that until at least August.

Ars Technica reports that the final CleanIT report has been published ahead of its final conference on Wednesday. The report discusses methods in which the government, private companies and individuals can help reduce the proliferation of terroristic content on the Internet. The report suggests that EU member states work together to decrease the amount of terroristic content online, while Internet companies should “state clearly in their terms and conditions that they will not tolerate terrorist use of the Internet on their platforms.”

So, you’ve seen what the government wants itself and companies to do, but what should you, the model EU citizen, do? The report calls for a reporting mechanism to be built into Web browsers so citizens can flag terrorist content:

Challenge:
While content portals (like social networks, image or video portals) can offer ‘flagging’ opportunities, other platforms (like hosted websites) often lack such a mechanism. Moreover, there is not one international, user-friendly reporting mechanism available to all Internet users, irrespective of which part of the Internet they are using at the moment they notice what they think is terrorist use of the Internet.

Best practice:
A browser-based reporting mechanism could be developed to allow end users to report terrorist use of the Internet.

In essence, the CleanIT group wants to put a little panic button at the top right of your browser that’s for terrorist reporting. If you see a terrorist Web site, you click the button and the URL is sent away to the Internet police. What could possibly go wrong?

As Ars Technica puts it, “plenty” could go wrong. The main concern is that nobody can agree on what constitutes terroristic content. Is it a blog post of somebody using violent rhetoric? Is it the Twitter account of a known terrorist cell? Does anybody even have the right to remove such content, or does it fall under free speech protections? Can people abuse the reporting system to have content removed without due process? These are questions that the group will have to answer at its conference on Wednesday.

The proposals will also face some serious scrutiny at the conference as it has already been reportedly criticized by lawyers, civil rights groups, and even the peer reviewers that evaluated the final report. One of the peer reviewers criticized the CleanIT report saying that it “does not clearly explain how the objective is to be reached… Therefore I have substantial doubts if it possible to achieve the desired objective this way.”

As the peer reviewer points out, stopping the flow of terroristic content on the Web, or any content for that matter, is incredibly difficult. The U.S’s Bipartisan Policy Center said just as much in a report it published last year about terroristic content online. The report said that the best chance of stopping terrorism online is to reduce the supply and demand for such content. Drawing attention to it, which CleanIT’s proposal may very well do, is only going to further the cause of those who use the Internet to recruit and communicate with other terrorists and ne’er-do-wells.

Those who have already downloaded music, can of course still listen to their downloads, and those who have unused credits may still use them. They’re just not allowing new ones.

On an FAQ page, Spotify says, “We’re currently not offering new download purchases on Spotify. You can still use downloads you’ve already purchased.”

You can still re-download a track you’ve already bought.

TechCrunch shares a statement from the company, saying, “We recently updated Spotify to further simplify the service and pave the way for new features announced at the end of last year. In-app purchases aren’t part of this update but we’re not ruling out their return. Credits/gift cards already purchased are still redeemable.”

Rumor has it that Apple may release a “Pandora competitor” this month, and really, that means a Spotify competitor as well. With Apple’s iTunes having such a presence in the music downloads space, it seems like this is something Spotify would want to offer. Apparently for now, it’s not in the cards, however.

Spotify currently has over 20 million subscribers, and gained 2 million paid subscriptions in 2012. In November, the company got a $100 million round of funding.