September 11, 2013 · Blogs

US and UK intelligence campaign against encryption

Top-secret files obtained by the Guardian from former contractor Edward Snowden reveal that NSA and GCHQ, that is the US and British intelligence agencies, cracked the online encryption used by people to protect their personal information such as emails, banking and medical records. The guarantees offered by Internet companies to their consumers that their personal […]

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January 14, 2015 · Blogs

ENDitorial: Paris attack: Imagine if political leaders were leaders

Imagine if our political leaders were leaders. Imagine if our “leaders” defended our freedoms by defending our freedoms. Imagine if, instead of dragging another set of restrictive measures from the shelf where they sat waiting to exploit the next atrocity, Europe’s leaders decided that the principles that Charlie Hebdo defends are actually worth defending. Imagine, […]

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February 25, 2015 · Blogs

Turkish academics threaten Twitter with legal action

On 20 January 2015, two Turkish law professors sent a legal notice to Twitter representatives in Turkey and the US demanding to cease the removal of content and blocking individual accounts that have been requested by Turkish government. The notice points out examples of alleged violations of freedom of expression in court orders restricting internet […]

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May 16, 2018 · Blogs | Privacy and data protection | Data protection standards | Privacy and confidentiality | Surveillance and data retention

Bavarians protest against vastly extended police powers

A large anti-surveillance rally took place in Munich on 10 May 2018. 30 000 protesters showed their dismay about the Bavarian plans to reform the law on the tasks of the state’s police. Even the organisers were surprised by the scale of the demonstration – they had expected fewer than 10 000 people.

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January 29, 2003 · Blogs

Action against governmental censorship in Germany

EDRI-member FITUG (Forderverein Informationstechnik und Gesellschaft) launched an urgent public campaign against government censorship of websites. A year ago, the district government of Dusseldorf county in Germany passed orders to more than 80 internet providers to block access from their users to some foreign websites. Providers and civil rights groups united in protest against the […]

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June 4, 2014 · Blogs

Google takes the first steps to comply with European Court ruling

The noise, misunderstandings and confusion about the alleged “right to be forgotten” has increased in amplitude since the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) issued its ruling on the so-called “Google case”. Like a politician’s use of statistics, the phrase  “right to be forgotten” has been used by critics of privacy law like […]

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December 3, 2014 · Blogs

Danish court orders a UK company to block Danish IP addresses

In Denmark, and in most other EU member states, furniture design is protected by copyright for 70 years from the death of the designer. However, a few member states have shorter protections for furniture. In the United Kingdom, for example, Article 52 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act of 1988 limited the protection for […]

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January 31, 2007

Italian Supreme court decision on file-sharing case – nothing new

(Dieser Artikel ist auch in deutscher Sprache verfügbar) There has been wide reporting, in Italy and internationally, that an Italian court “ruled not-for-profit file-sharing legal”. That statement is grossly overstated, if not completely wrong. The “dismal” state of Italian copyright legislation remains, unfortunately, unchanged. One might argue that the media hype, per se, is an […]

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April 26, 2016 · Blogs | Information democracy | Transparency

#ReadAnneDiary (if you can)

The chaotic and outdated copyright framework in the European Union (EU) negatively impacts citizens by placing absurd restrictions on use of cultural goods. These restrictions benefit neither authors nor  society in general. The European Commission (EC), in its quest to achieve a Digital Single Market, is aiming at reforming the situation and is trying to […]

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May 19, 2004

10 years of internet prosecution in Italy

On 18 May 2004, the Italian Senate turned a highly controversial new decree into law that puts heavy fines and even prison sentences on the download of movies, music or other copyrighted works even when done without any commercial purpose. Though the law speaks of penalties when ‘making a profit’, jurisprudence in Italy has already […]

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February 1, 2012

FAVA'S bill: Another attempt to limit civil rights in Italy

This article is also available in: Deutsch: [Das FAVA Gesetz – ein neuer Versuch zur Beschneidung der Bürgerrechte in Italien | https://www.unwatched.org/EDRigram_10.2_Das_FAVA_Gesetz_ein_neuer_Versuch_zur_Beschneidung_der_Buergerrechte_in_Italien] There is a wide (and mainly unjustified) hype, in Italy, about a draft law proposed by a Mr. Fava, an MP belonging to the right wing party “Northern League”. He asked the Italian […]

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October 22, 2014 · Blogs

Google pushes forward with its voluntary pro-copyright policing

For the past number of years, Google has chosen to impose US copyright law on the world, completely de-indexing any website which fulfils the non-judicial criteria of a valid order under American law. Last year alone, it removed 222 000 000 links, which means 74 links per second. In addition to applying US copyright law […]

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