Author: Jennifer Baker

Uber has been hit with a €800,000 fine for running an illegal transport service and breaking privacy laws in France.

The penalty was dished out to the ride-sharing app by a French court on Thursday. Additionally, Uber’s EMEA director Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty and Thibaud Simphal—the company’s boss in France—were slapped with fines of €30,000, and €20,000 respectively. The two men were taken into custody by French authorities a year ago.

Half of those sanctions—and the €964,000 (€800,000 plus court fees) that Uber must pay—are “suspended sentences,” meaning they need only pay 50 percent of the fines providing there are no further breaches of the law.

After a decades-long battle, the Bundesverfassungsgericht (the supreme German Constitutional Court) has overturned a ban on a song that used a two-second sample of a Kraftwerk recording.

In 1997, music producer Moses Pelham used a clip from 1977 release Metall auf Metall (Metal on Metal) in the song Nur mir (Only Mine) performed by Sabrina Setlur.

Lead singer of Kraftwerk, Ralf Huetter, sued Pelham, and in 2012 the electropop pioneer won his case for copyright infringement in Germany's Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof), gaining damages and a block on Nur mir. However, in today’s judgment, the eight judges of the First Senate of the Federal Constitutional Court decided that the lower court did not sufficiently consider whether the impact of the sample on Krafwerk might be “negligible.”

As expected, the European Commission has nixed plans to impose blanket rules on Web-based platforms as part of its Digital Single Market plans—but Netflix, Amazon, and other on-demand video providers will face movie and TV quotas and a tax to help fund EU productions.

Vice president Andrus Ansip said that rather than onerous regulation, problems will be addressed “individually as they arise by sector.”

Although the commission wants to totally eliminate geoblocking for the purchase of online goods and services, for the time being, copyrighted audiovisual content will be exempt from the rules.

Google’s Paris offices have been raided by hundreds of French investigators—the search giant is suspected of avoiding tax in the country to the tune of €1.6 billion (~$1.78 billion, £1.22 billion).

The French financial prosecutor’s office (Le parquet national financier, PNF) which carried out the raid in the early hours of Tuesday morning, confirmed that the searches were the result of a preliminary investigation opened in June last year into possible “aggravated tax fraud and organised money laundering.”

Google’s European headquarters are based in Ireland, which boasts a tiny 12.5 percent corporation tax—the lowest in the European Union.