Eight years of EDRi-gram

The first newsletter of EDRi-gram was published on 29 January 2003. Then we
were talking about the EC copyright directive, data retention, software
patents or governmental censorship on websites in Germany.

The Whistleblowers were the Time’s Person of the Year announced in December
2002. The number of Internet users was approx 600 million in January 2003.
The most popular search keyword in 2003 was KaZaa. The top US Internet
company in the same year was Time Warner with its AOL and almost everyone
used Internet Explorer as a browser.

Eight years later there are probably 2 000 million Internet users worldwide.
We have Facebook with 550 million registered users and its owner has been
recently named Time’s Person of the Year. (preferred by Time’s editor to the
Whistleblowers’ facilitator ranked #1 by Time’s readers!). We see Google’
services everywhere and Firefox as the most used browser.

And the challenges for the digital rights seem to have increased in the past
years. Data retention is now a directive obligatory for EU member states.
The IPRED directive has increased the enforcement of copyright in the
digital world. Censorship in the form of Internet blocking might become a
reality in February 2011 all over Europe.

We wrote about all these old and new threats to digital civil rights in the
past 8 years. We’ve covered news and opinions on digital civil rights from
European Union institutions, international organizations (Council of Europe,
WIPO, OECD, Internet Governance Forum etc.) and almost all European
countries. But we couldn’t have done it all though without Sjoera Nas, who
was the initiator and the editor of EDRi-gram in the first 3 years, without
OSI, who has been constantly supporting our work, without
all the authors that have contributed with their articles to the newsletter
or all other persons that have just pointed to national and international
subjects that we shouldn’t miss.

This is also a reminder for everyone that we are welcoming articles, tips
and events for the EDRi-gram. We hope to have a big support also in the
future.

And, of course, now you are one of the over 5 800 subscribers that are
receiving its latest issue. So we just thought it would be a good time to
THANK YOU as well for reading us!

EDRi-gram number 1 (29.01.2003)
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number1

EDRi-gram complete archive (2003-2010)
http://www.edri.org/archive/list

Subscribe to EDRi-gram
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/subscribe

(contribution by Bogdan Manolea – EDRi-gram editor)