Mikhail Khodorkovsky 'exhausted but happy to be free' after Putin's pardon

Former oligarch's release and flight to Berlin proceeds like military operation amid rumours and misinformation

Like his arrest in 2003, Mikhail Khodorkovsky's release was akin to a military operation. Then, masked special forces stormed his private jet as it stood refuelling on the tarmac at a Siberian airport. On Friday, he walked free, but his release and subsequent flight to Germany remained shrouded in secrecy.

The former oligarch arrived in Berlin on Friday afternoon, after his surprise pardon by Russia's president, Vladimir Putin. He touched down in Sch enefeld airport on a chartered flight, where he was met by former German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, who had helped organise his travel. The German embassy in Moscow had facilitated the trip, reportedly fast-tracking his visa application.

Genscher told Der Spiegel that Khodorkovsky was "exhausted, but very happy to finally be free".

Khodorkovsky issued a statement via Facebook saying that he had asked the Russian president to pardon him for personal reasons and was glad of the positive decision. He emphasised, however, that "the issue of admission of guilt was not raised". For many years Khodorkovsky has refused to ask for a pardon, as doing so requires a de facto admission of guilt.

Russia's former richest man personally thanked Genscher for his support and spoke of how much he was looking forward to "the minute when I will be able to hug my close ones and personally shake hands with all my friends and associates".

Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told journalists in Moscow on Friday evening the president had received two documents from Khodorkovsky last month: a request for a pardon, and a "long" handwritten letter "with his explanation". Peskov declined to reveal the contents of the letter.

"Of course any request for pardon is a significant decision that requires a lot of thinking," said Peskov, adding that Putin had decided to act favourably "on humanitarian grounds". "He committed a very serious crime, but he has served a very serious sentence for it."

Peskov denied any kind of deal had been struck to ensure the former oligarch remain in exile: "I don't know why he flew to Germany but it's his personal decision. A Russian citizen cannot be forbidden from returning to Russia, of course."

The recent chatter in Moscow had been of a new, third case against Khodorkovsky - named a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International - designed to keep him behind bars when the sentence he had been serving ran out next August. Instead, following Thursday's shock announcement that he planned to release the oligarch, Putin signed a decree which pardoned Khodorkovskyon Friday morning. That sparked a day of rumours and misinformation, during which there were hours of abject confusion about Khodorkovsky's whereabouts.

Journalists gathered outside the prison in Segezha, northern Russia, where the former tycoon had been serving his time, but did not see him leave. Later, there were rumours that he had boarded a helicopter at the local airfield and was headed to St Petersburg. Russia's prison service put out a statement saying that Khodorkovsky had flown to Germany, where his mother was receiving medical treatment.

The confusion lifted only briefly, however, as it soon became apparent that Khodorkovsky's mother is in fact currently at her home just outside Moscow. Genscher later said that in the rush to issue his release, Khodorkovsky hadn't realised that his mother had already finished treatment in Berlin's Charit Campus Virchow clinic, and had been discharged on 11 December. Marina Khodorkovsky told Reuters she was ready to fly anywhere to meet her son. : "I want to just hug him. I don't even know yet what I am going to say to him." She is due to fly to Berlin to be with her husband today.

The private plane Khodorkovsky flew in to Berlin is owned by the German businessman Ulrich Bettermann. Bettermann, Genscher and Khodorkovsky met at an event at Berlin's Hotel Adlon in 2003, where Khodorkovsky had spoken in highly critical terms about corruption and party finances in Russia.

Genscher's spokesperson, Nicola Maier, released a statement welcoming Putin's decision, describing it as "significant and very encouraging". It revealed that Genscher had met Putin in person twice to talk about Khodorkovsky, and that he had been aided in his efforts by chancellor Angela Merkel, the former German foreign minister and Berlin's ambassador in Moscow. Merkel's spokesperson said: "The chancellor welcomes Mikhail Khodorkovsky's release. Over the last few years she has repeatedly lobbied the Russian president for Mr Khodorkovsky's release."

In Moscow, opposition-linked political analyst Dmitry Oreshkin said there were only cynical motives for Putin's decision to free Khodorkovsky. "Putin has seen there is a real problem with his and Russia's image in the west, and the Olympic games are coming. This was a carefully planned decision timed to happen just before Christmas, so everybody could write about it, think how great it is, and then forget about it in the new year."

Oreshkin noted that Khodorkovsky's sentence was due to come to an end in nine months, and he is confident Russian officials had "given him no option" but to ask for a pardon. "Previously, Khodorkovsky has always refused to ask for a pardon, as it would suggest he recognises the legitimacy of the system and of the court cases against him. Whether they threatened him with a new case and a further seven or eight years in prison, or whether it was a statement about his mother's failing health, who knows."

On Friday evening, Khodorkovsky called the editorial offices of Russian magazine the New Times, which has published a series of his sketches from prison. He said: "After 10 years, I now have an unbelievable feeling of freedom. I am grateful to you and to everyone who supported me all this time ... I love everyone, I am happy. The most important thing now is freedom, freedom, freedom."

Germany Passes New Internet Copyright Law After Watering It Down To Spare Google From Having To Pay

The German Bundestag passed an addendum to the country’s copyright laws earlier today, the so-called “Leistungsschutzrecht,” that allows publishers to charge aggregators and search engines for the content they index and re-publish on their sites and in their apps.

An earlier version of the ancillary copyright law would have meant that Google, Google News and other aggregators and search engines would have had to pay, even if they just displayed “single words or very small text excerpts” from copyrighted text. Before passing the law, however, the Bundestag watered it down considerably and now allows for the use of snippets.

Sadly, though, as Der Spiegel reports today, it’s unclear how the law actually defines the word “snippet”; the current assumption is that everything up to about 160 characters would still be okay.

A number of German publishers lobbied their government to push the stronger version of the law, but the government decided to at least make the law compatible with the way Google currently indexes and displays snippets. Thanks to this, Google will likely not have to pay for uses of text up to about 160 characters. Startups and aggregators like Flipboard and others will likely have to reconsider how they use texts in Germany or start paying a license fee (content older than one year is excluded from the law).

A Google spokesperson told Der Spiegel that the company thinks the new law is “neither necessary nor useful” and that it will only “hurt German Internet users and the country’s economy.”

The organization of German publishers, of course, is rather happy about the new law (though given that they do seem to be a bit behind the times, they would have probably preferred linking to their texts to be made illegal) and argues that it provides publishers with a framework for licensing their content to aggregators.

While the German newspaper industry is still in relatively good shape compared to the U.S., most of the publishers also know that the age of the printed paper can’t last. Just like most of their counterparts in the rest of the world, though, they struggle with finding new ways to monetize their online content. While they had originally hoped that Google could subsidize their operations through licensing fees for a while, chances are they will now have to sue aggregators and startups instead.

There is a very small chance that the Bundesrat (the upper house of the German Parliament) could still kill the bill. Most pundits, however, currently think that this is very unlikely.

Disclaimer: I built a small German tech aggregator that could’ve been affected by the original version of the law.

Image credit: Digitale Gesellschaft

Samsung's Ill-Conceived Apple VoiceOver Suit Stayed in Germany

Samsung has suffered another setback in its smartphone patent brawl with Apple, this one on the German front, and over a particularly contentious feature: Mobile device accessibility.

A Mannheim Regional Court on Friday ordered a stay of a Samsung suit against Apple that alleges the iPhone maker’s VoiceOver screen-access technology violated its patent on display into speech data.

The mechanics of this particular spat and the court’s ruling on it are a bit too byzantine to dive into here, but it’s worth a look in broad strokes simply as an example of just how low players are willing to stoop in IP battles like the one between Apple and Samsung. So, in short: Samsung holds a patent on a feature that allows devices to read text aloud to their users with the press of a button. The company asserted that patent against Apple’s accessibility features, specifically VoiceOver which is specifically designed for anyone with impaired vision. Caught in the middle: The blind, low-vision users, folks with dyslexia and anyone else who might benefit from having what appears on their computer screen described to them out loud.

Yes, this move by Samsung against Apple was a tactical one in a nasty battle in which billions of dollars are at stake. Yes, it’s just business. But it’s ill-conceived. Even leaving aside the ethics of asserting a patent against a feature designed to help the blind, this is unwise. It’s the PR equivalent of punching yourself in the face. Samsung has now identified itself as a company willing to accept the loss of accessibility for the vision-impaired as collateral damage in its battle with Apple. It has made a big public move to make it more difficult for the blind to use computers. That’s just foolish — more so, now that the judge presiding over the case has stayed the suit. Again, this is just business and battle, but there’s a PR war being fought here, as well. And Samsung is not doing itself any favors with poorly thought-out assaults like this one.

Reached for comment, Samsung offered a boilerplate statement on the larger IP battle. “For decades, we have heavily invested in pioneering the development of technological innovations in the mobile industry, which have been constantly reflected in our products,” a company spokesman told AllThingsD. “We continue to believe that Apple has infringed our patented mobile technologies, and we will continue to take the measures necessary to protect our intellectual property rights.”

Eurozone recession set to continue

European commission backtracks on previous forecasts, blaming a lack of bank lending and record unemployment for the delayed economic recovery

The eurozone will remain mired in recession in 2013 and leading nations such as France and Spain will miss debt-cutting targets, the European commission has admitted, backtracking on forecasts that the 17- country bloc will grow this year.

The European Union's executive body blamed a lack of bank lending to households and businesses, and record joblessness, for delaying the recovery. Unemployment in the eurozone is set to peak at 12% in 2013, or more than 19 million people, it said. Greece and Spain will be the worst-hit countries, with jobless rates of 27% this year.

The estimate highlights the widening chasm between Germany and France, the two largest eurozone economies, amid warnings this week that France is drifting closer to the bloc's periphery than its main economic rival. The commission predicts that Germany will grow by 0.5% this year, while France is expected to eke out just 0.1% growth. Joblessness among the French is expected to hit 10.7%, compared with 5.7% in Germany.

A senior ally of German chancellor Angela Merkel accused France of being a "problem child" in the eurozone. Michael Fuchs told German radio the French needed to save, implement economic reforms and work longer hours. "Other countries have done their homework a lot more intensively, for example Spain and Italy ... but the French believed they could escape this," he said.

Marco Buti, the commission's director general for economic and financial affairs, said unemployment remained unacceptably high. This had grave social consequences, he said, and could weigh on growth in the future if it becomes entrenched. The figures also have consequences for the UK because the eurozone is the economy's largest trading partner and is the fulcrum of hopes for an export-led recovery in Britain's finances.

The commission said the threat of a breakup of the eurozone had receded and financial market conditions had improved substantially, but the impact had not yet fed through into the real economy. As a result, it said the 17 eurozone economies would contract by 0.3% in 2013 rather than grow by 0.1%, as previously predicted.

The figures harboured bad news for Spain and France's debt-cutting targets. Under EU budget rules, eurozone states can face fines if they fail to take action to meet deficit targets - the difference between income and spending - set by EU finance ministers. The main strggler is Spain, which badly missed the deficit target of 6.3% of GDP for 2012 with a result of 10.2%. This year, Madrid will have a deficit of 6.7% rather than the 4.5% it has been set. And unless government policies change, Spain will have a gap of 7.2% in 2014 against the target of 2.8%, the commission said.

France will also miss its targets. This year's shortfall will be 3.7% rather than the 3% agreed with the EU, because of weaker-than-expected growth.

There was a silver lining in the figures for the wider zone, however. The commission said the region has bottomed out and it expects economic activity to gradually accelerate, with GDP 0.7% higher in the last quarter of 2013 than in the same period last year. The commission expects domestic demand to rebound in 2014 and take over from exports as the main driver of strengthening GDP growth.

Economists said the grim forecasts could prompt the commission - which is part of the troika of lenders to crisis-hit countries - to ease its demands of austerity from eurozone governments, while the European Central Bank may be moved to adopt measures to boost the economy.

Chris Williamson, chief economist at Markit, said: "A downward revision to the EC's economic growth forecasts for the eurozone suggest that governments will be given more time to reduce budget deficits without implementing harsher austerity measures, while at the same time putting more pressure on the European Central Bank to provide a further boost of stimulus, perhaps via a cut in its main policy rate."

Williamson said the weaker forecasts were a blow for the UK, which depends on the eurozone for export growth. "Given the outlook of persistent weak demand at home and a further year of contraction in the eurozone, there appear to be few drivers of UK economic recovery in 2013," he said.

The commission predicts that the UK economy will grow by 0.9% this year, although joblessness will rise to 8%. The wider European Union of 27 member states is expected to grow by 0.1% this year, with a jobless rate of 11%.