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August 12, 2003

France: 2 court cases about liability of intermediaries

While the E-commerce directive (2000/58/EC) is not yet transposed, in France the liability of intermediaries is decided via jurisprudence. In April the owner of the discussion-website percussions.org was convicted to pay half of the legal costs made by the company Eurodim, because a visitor of the website posted a negative message about the head of […]

August 12, 2003

Deep-linking legal in Germany

The German Federal Supreme Court ruled on 17 July that deep links from a news search engine to articles on a publishers web site do not violate German copyright or competition law. The plaintiff, a media group that publishes several newspapers and magazines, including ‘Handelsblatt’ and ‘DM’, sued the search engine provider www.paperboy.de for forbearance. […]

August 12, 2003 · Blogs

New German idea-competition

BRIDGE, the German foundation for civil right in the digital society (Burgerrechte in der digitalen Gesellschaft) has opened an interesting idea-competition. People and organisations are invited to come with ideas for a public campaign to raise awareness about threats to freedom in the digital society. Topic and timeframe must be clearly defined. The winner, to […]

July 30, 2003 · Blogs

EDRI-gram – Number 14, 30 July 2003

July 30, 2003

Big brother in the supermarket

The UK supermarket chain Tesco has confirmed that it is testing a controversial surveillance system that tracks customers in one of their stores in Cambridge. Anyone buying certain products will have their picture taken. Twice. The system uses Radio Frequency Identifiers (RFIDs) to trigger CCTV cameras to take a picture of the customer. In the […]

July 30, 2003

Dutch MEP announces court case about PNR-data

A Dutch member of the European Parliament is threatening to take the European Commission to court for failing to protect the digital privacy of its EU citizens. EU MP Johanna Boogerd is also vice-chairman of LIBE, the parliamentary committee on Citizens’ Freedoms and Rights, Justice and Home Affairs. She opposes the agreement between the Commission […]

July 30, 2003

Landwell scares Spanish peer-to-peer users

On 17 July, Landwell, a Spanish legal firm related to Price-Waterhouse-Coopers, issued a press release stating that they were planning to present a lawsuit against 4.000 Spanish Kazaa users for illegally downloading copyrighted material such as movies, songs or software. They announced they had identified a total of 95.000 Spanish file-sharers, and were going to […]

July 30, 2003

Analysis of draft IP enforcement directive

The EU parliament Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market will vote on 11 September on the proposed EU Directive on the enforcement of intellectual property rights. The Directive proposes to harmonize IP law in such a way that all enforcement measures available to IP owners in any EU member state must be available […]

July 30, 2003

French IP commission promotes internet-surveillance

On 26 June a special copyright advisory board within the French Ministry of Culture published a report supporting government plans to increase surveillance of Internet users as part of a wider bid to stop the online copying of protected works. The Superior Council for Artistic and Literary Intellectual Property (Conseil Supérieur de la Propriété Littéraire […]

July 30, 2003 · Blogs

European Commission rejects Greek gaming law

On 22 July, the European Commission announced legal steps against the government of Greece for it’s unjust anti-gaming law. The Commission questions the compatibility of the law in question (of 29 July 2002) with the provisions of the EC Treaty on the free movement of goods and services and the freedom of establishment. The Greek […]

July 30, 2003

Report about Paris inter-sessional WSIS meeting

Between 15 and 18 July an inter-sessional meeting for the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) took place in Paris, with a special focus on human rights in the information society. In this Human Rights caucus, made up of 25 organizations, 2 EDRI-members participated, the French IRIS and the Danish Digital Rights. The HR […]

July 19, 2003

French consumer unions fight CD copy protection

In a first result of legal procedures against record companies instituted by two French consumer unions, EMI Music France is condemned for deception. Within a month, they must print the following warning on copy protected CD’s: ‘Attention, this CD cannot be read by all players or car-radio’s.’ Late in May, the 2 unions started legal […]