Iceland’s Supreme Court ruled on 24 April 2013 that Valitor, Visa’s local partner in Iceland, had to resume processing online donations to WikiLeaks within two weeks or face a daily fine of around 5200 Euro in case of non-compliance, thus backing up the decision taken by a lower Icelandic court in July 2012.

“This is a victory for WikiLeaks and freedom of information.

In February 2013, EDRi wrote to European Commission President José-Manuel Barroso to highlight problems with the very divergent and contradictory approaches being taken by the Commission regarding the role of intermediaries in dealing with allegedly illegal content and to support the evidence-based approach of Commissioner Barnier and DG Internal Market.

The letter was motivated by two different developments in the Commission. Firstly, we have seen a constant trickle of “self-regulatory” initiatives proposed and funded by the Commission, such as the “CEO Coalition to make the Internet a better place for kids” (child protection, led by Commissioner Kroes) and the “Clean IT Project” (terrorism, funded by Commissioner Malmström).

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Deutsch: CleanIT laut Studie unklar und gefährlich

The University of Tilburg was requested by the Dutch National Coordinator on Counter-Terrorism and Security to comment on the fundamental rights implications of the so-called “Best Practices” that have been developed in the Clean IT project.

This report commented on a final very short document from CleanIT and not the more outlandish proposals leaked by EDRi several months ago.

The Tilburg report argues that, given the lack of clarity on the term “terrorist use of the Internet” and the unpredictability of the practical implementation

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Deutsch: Meinungsfreiheit: Türkischer Pianist wegen Twitter-Kommentaren verurt...

On 15 April 2013, the Criminal Court of Justice of Istanbul gave Turkish pianist Fazil Say a 10 month suspended jail sentence over comments on Twitter, deciding he was guilty of violating an article of the Turkish Criminal Code that forbids the “denigration of the religious values held by a section of society”.

The pianist was prosecuted in June 2012 by the Istanbul Public Prosecutor's Office after he had posted a series of tweets on Twitter and was accused of insulting Islam, while t

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Deutsch: Französischer Geheimdienst verlangt Löschung eines Wikipedia-Artikel...

The Wikimedia Foundation was asked on 4 March 2013, by French spy agency Direction Centrale du Renseignement Intérieur (DCRI), to remove its article in French “Station hertzienne militaire de Pierre sur Haute” (the military station of Pierre sur Haute) considered by the agency to contain classified military information the publication of which violated the French Penal Code.

According to a judicial source quoted by AFP, the request for the deletion of the article was due to the fact that

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Deutsch: Betreibt Facebook Zensur?

On 18 March 2013, the German radio presenter Jürgen Domian accused Facebook of censorship after some of his posts in which he had made some remarks about the new Pope, were deleted without warning by the social network.

Domian said he believed Facebook had taken down the posts after receiving complaints from Catholic users. "Clearly fanatical supporters of the (Catholic) church kicked up such a fuss with Facebook that they buckled," he wrote.

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Deutsch: Blogger haften nicht für Kommentare Dritter

Bloggers should not be considered liable for third-party comments on their posts in cases when they have not specifically intervened in the content at issue, as doing so would strongly affect freedom of expression.

This is the clear position of the EDRi-member Article 19 that comes in relation to a case now pending with the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in which a Polish municipal councillor was sued because there had been allegedly defamatory comments to one of his posts, addressed to the mayor of the town, during the electoral campaig

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Deutsch: ENDitorial: Porno, Parlament, Gepose, Politik und privatisierte Rechts...

There was a lot of noise surrounding the proposed “porn ban” that was voted on this week (on 12 March 2013) in the European Parliament. The draft Resolution, adopted by the Women's Rights and Gender Equality Committee (FEMM), called for the Commission to take action to implement the measures indicated in the 1997 Parliament resolution on advertising, in particular with regard to the ban on pornography that it proposed.