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November 19, 2003

Finnish petition against software patents big success

EDRI-member Electronic Frontier Finland collected 2295 signatures in one week on its online petition against software patents. The petition was presented to the Finnish parliament on 14 November. Ville Oksanen, vice chairman of EFFI, who acted as the head of the delegation comments:”We were received by MPs from every major parliamentary group, which was a […]

November 5, 2003 · Blogs

EDRI-gram – Number 21, 5 November 2003

November 5, 2003

New anti-spam legislation in NL and Austria

On the 31st of October, the European Directive on Privacy in electronic communications (2002/58/EC) went into force. Only a minority of countries has implemented the directive in time, but any European citizen can now directly appeal to the directive in their national courts. Most recently, the Dutch Lower House accepted the spam-ban on 4 November, […]

November 5, 2003

NGOs urge ICANN to safeguard privacy

More than 50 consumer and civil liberties organisations from around the world have written to ICANN to urge the organisation to limit the use and scope of the WHOIS database to its original purpose – the resolution of technical network issues – and to establish strong privacy protections based on internationally accepted privacy standards. The […]

November 5, 2003

Big Brother Awards presented across Europe

Privacy and civil liberty activists across Europe have presented their Big Brother Awards to governments, companies and persons that have excelled in violating the right to privacy. In a weeks period Award ceremonies were held in Germany (24 October), Spain (25 October), Austria (26 October) and Switzerland (1 November). In Germany prices went to German […]

November 5, 2003

State take-over of top-level domain in Ukraine

The government of Ukraine is trying to take-over the national .ua top-level domain. Via a new act on the administration of the .ua domain, adopted on 22 July 2003, the new enterprise Ukrainian Network Information Centre was established and made responsible. The act was apparently adopted after complaints in the media by government officials about […]

November 5, 2003

European campaign for safe e-voting

A coalition of technical, legal and political experts launched a campaign on 4 November to ensure that electronic voting can be trusted by voters and politicians across Europe. Voters and candidates must be able to feel certain that voting intentions are accurately recorded. If any doubts do arise then all stake-holders must be able to […]

November 5, 2003

New telecommunication law in Germany

On 15 October the German Federal Government adopted a draft new telecommunication act. The draft aims, inter alia, at implementing the European Directive on privacy and electronic communications (2002/58/EC), but will not introduce the spam-ban described in Article 13 of the Directive. In Germany spam will be banned through an update of the Act against […]

November 5, 2003

Lawsuit about website French trade union

On Monday 3 November, in intermediary proceedings against not-for-profit provider RAS in a Paris court, two telemarketing companies demanded the immediate take-down of the website of the radical trade union SUD PTT. The lawsuit was brought against the ISP and the trade union by the companies Ceritex and Mediatel. According to their complaint, some remarks […]

October 22, 2003

Dutch Big Brother Award for Minister of Justice

The Dutch Big Brother Awards were presented in front of a 300 person audience in Amsterdam on the 11th of October. With the Awards the person, company, governmental institution and initiative are rewarded for damaging the privacy of citizens in 2003 the most. The 4 winners of 2003 are: minister of Justice Piet Hein Donner; […]

October 22, 2003

White paper on notice and take-down

The RightsWatch Project, a research project funded under the European Commission’s Information Society Technology programme, produced a white paper on notice and take-down of websites. During a 2 year project RightsWatch tried to develop consensus between providers, right holders and internet users about self-regulatory notice and takedown (NTD) procedures. The attempts miserably failed, since self-regulation […]

October 22, 2003

Report of WSIS prepcom 3

From 15 to 26 September 2003 governments and civil society assembled in Geneva for the third preparatory conference for the World Summit on the Information Society. The two weeks ended with many key issues still unresolved, and with a last-minute proposal to reconvene for an extra session from 10 to 14 November. EDRI members IRIS […]