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UK Government proposes copyright term extension
According to an article in the Sunday Times, the UK government is considering an extension of the copyright term for recordings. James Purnell, the minister for broadcasting, creative industries and tourism, suggested to extend the term from the current 50 years to the more generous US figure of 90 years. According to him record companies […]
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German court protects privacy P2P users
The Higher Regional Court of Hamburg (Hanseatisches Oberlandesgericht) has squashed an earlier verdict forcing an ISP to hand over data about customers suspected of running an FTP-server with copyrighted music tracks. Being a mere access provider, the paragraphs in the Copyright Act that specify an information duty don’t apply, the court writes. Those provisions only […]
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Conference report Access to Knowledge
On 12 and 13 May 2005 the Trans Atlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD) organised a successful conference in London to make progress on a draft international treaty on Access to Knowledge (A2K). It was the third meeting of a very diverse expert group of academics, educators, representatives of libraries, consumer organisations and people from the open […]
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Report about UNESCO conference St. Petersburg
From 17 to 19 May UNESCO organised a large conference in St. Petersburg, Russia, ‘Between two phases of the World Summit on the Information Society’. The 450 participants from all over the world were invited to the luxurious Konstantinovsky Palace. In her opening speech Françoise Rivière, the Assistant Director-General of UNESCO, described the context of […]
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Council of Europe declaration on human rights and Internet
On 13 May 2005 the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers adopted a declaration on human rights and Internet that was prepared by a special committee of academic experts and government representatives. According to the press release, “the declaration is the first international attempt to draw up a framework on the issue and breaks ground […]
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French court forbids DVD copy protection
On 22 April 2005, a Paris appeal court has outlawed the use of a copy protection mechanism on a DVD. The case was launched by the French consumer union UFC-Que Choisir early in 2004, on behalf of a customer who had unsuccessfully tried to copy a DVD of David Lynch’s film Mulholland Drive. She tried […]
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Policing rights for entertainment industry Finland
The Finnish Electronic Frontier Foundation is raising alarm about a proposed last-minute change in the new Finnish copyright law that would grant the entertainment industry the right to obtain identifying information about alleged infringers from service providers. The legislative committee of the Finnish parliament produced a statement on 17 April 2005 in which they agreed […]
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Council of Europe draft statement on human rights and Internet
On 6 and 7 April 2005 a committee of the Council of Europe debated on the merits of a new recommendation on human rights and Internet. On behalf of European Digital Rights Meryem Marzouki from the French digital rights organisation IRIS attended, in fact as the only NGO present. This second meeting of the Multidisciplinary […]
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New wave of lawsuits against European P2P users
The music industry has launched a new wave of lawsuits against individual P2P users in Europe. For the first time individual users were targeted in Finland, Ireland, Iceland and the Netherlands. These countries join Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy and the UK, where litigation started last year. During a press conference in the Netherlands on […]
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EDRI statement at WIPO Development Agenda meeting (IIM)
After signing an international petition urging the WIPO to open its doors to non-governmental organisations for the important debates on developing an alternative development agenda, European Digital Rights was awarded last-minute ad hoc accreditation on 11 April 2005. The German DRM-expert Volker Grassmuck was able to make a statement on behalf of EDRI during a […]
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Bulgarian ISPs ordered to remove websites
On 24 March 2005 the Bulgarian Ministry of the Interior issued a radical order to Bulgaria’s largest internet providers. Within 7 days the ISPs “must remove all free hosting servers which offer works, audio records, entertaining or business software, images, pictures, books, graphical logos, etc.” and notify the department. Remarkably, the order isn’t limited to […]
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First P2P prosecution case in Sweden
In Sweden, for the first time an individual internet user is prosecuted for file-sharing. A young man from Västerås has shared the film ‘Hip Hip Hora’ via the Internet and is theoretically facing a maximum of 2 years prison sentence. But the public prosecutor doesn’t have a lot of confidence in the case. “As these […]
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