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CETA to get priority ahead of EU Charter of Fundamental Rights
CETA will undermine EU Charter of Fundamental Rights In February 2016, the European Commission and Canadian government published the final draft text of the EU – Canada trade agreement (CETA), prior to its approval or rejection by the Council, European Parliament and, possibly, national parliaments. The Court of Justice of the EU in October 2015 […]
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EUIPO publishes final report about ‘Youth and Intellectual Property’
On Wednesday 6 April the “European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO, formerly known as OHIM)” published its report on ‘Youth and IP’, which followed the 2013 study on “European Citizens and Intellectual Property: Perception, Awareness and Behaviour”. The survey tracks citizens’ perception of “intellectual property” (“IP”) and the relevant drivers of consumer behaviour. The study […]
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The biggest data breach in Turkish history
About 50 million personal records of Turkish citizens have been made publicly available in a searchable database on the internet. Ironically, although the site that holds the database is open to the entire world, it is one of the 110,000 sites blocked by Turkish government and can only be accessed from Turkey via a virtual […]
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New data protection law in Turkey
Turkish Parliament enacted the Data Protection Law on 24 March 2016 and it entered into force on 7 April. There had been several attempts for enacting the Law over the course of more than 10 years, but all of the bills were later withdrawn by the AKP – Justice and Development Party (the ruling party […]
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Trilogues: the system that undermines EU democracy and transparency
Most of the legislation of the European Union (EU) is today adopted using an informal, non-democratic, non-accountable and non-transparent process. This mechanism is known in the EU bubble as “trilogues” or “trialogues”. Trilogues are a set of informal negotiations between the European Parliament, the Council of the European Union and the European Commission to fast-track […]
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Countering terrorism, a.k.a. the biggest human rights threat of 2016
United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on counter-terrorism and Human rights, Ben Emmerson said “the central challenge for human rights in 2016 [is] ensuring governments continue to support a human rights agenda” while seeking to end terrorism. The European Union is also faced with this challenge. In the EU, there is currently a proposal for a […]
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Huge protest against corruption & surveillance in Macedonia
The political crisis in Macedonia deepened on 12 April when the President Gjorgi Ivanov announced that he would issue a blanket pardon to 56 politicians suspected of involvement in serious crimes. Over the last eight days, tens of thousands of citizens took to the streets of the capital city Skopje and about a dozen other […]
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Press Release: Vote on Data Protection and Passenger Name Record package
The European Parliament looks set to adopt two proposals on data protection and a proposal on the profiling of air passengers (PNR, Passenger Name Records) tomorrow, 14 April. The two data protection proposals seek to protect our fundamental right to privacy. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) covers the protection of personal data across all […]
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Special report: Poland’s secret services are still using and abusing telecom and Internet data
With almost two million requests for telecommunication data and more than two thousand requests for Internet data concerning Polish citizens in 2015, it is clear that the access to metadata in Poland by the country’s secret services is still out of control. Compared to 2014, the Polish Panoptykon Foundation found that the number of requests […]
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EDRi joins open letter asking for an ambitious copyright reform
In light of the planned copyright reform by the European Commission, EDRi today (7 April, 2016) sent an open letter addressed to President Juncker, First Vice-President Timmermans, Vice-President Ansip and other commissioners. In the letter, we demand an ambitious copyright reform that “that upholds and strengthens fundamental principles such as the limitation of intermediaries’ liability […]
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Swedish Supreme Court rules against Freedom of Panorama
Wikimedia’s Swedish chapter was sued in 2013 by BUS (Visual Arts Copyright Society in Sweden) for the site Offentligkonst.se, a site where you can upload your own images of public art so that others can easily find them. BUS claimed that Wikimedia Sweden violated copyright law by publishing images of public artwork online. The Supreme […]
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Commission launches consultations on ancillary copyright and panorama
It is time for new courses in the EU copyright reform menu: How about a neighbouring right for publishers and an EU-wide panorama exception? In December, Commissioner Oettinger presented the what could only be described as the “appetiser”: Citizens should be able to access subscribed streaming services when going on holiday in the EU (imagine, […]
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