Legal and regulatory issues

Audiovisual

• EU - Ireland tries to re-open regulatory debate on transfrontier TV  +/-

  (EurActiv) At a meeting in Ireland, EU Ministers were presented with a report by the European Audiovisual Observatory which re-opens the debate on regulating transfrontier TV. The Commission is opposed to the idea. Transfrontier television in the EU has developed considerably over the last fifteen years, with now over 200 channels targeting viewers outside their country of origin, EU ministers were told at an informal meeting last week. The report came from the European Audiovisual Observatory and concluded that the question of which Member State has jurisdiction over which broadcaster becomes highly relevant in the current context of growth in the broadcasting sector. Moreover, the report goes on, new technologies such as online broadcasting over the Internet will make the issue all the more pressing in the near future. The presidency is currently trying to push for a revision of broadcasting rules that would tackle this issue. Dermot Ahern, the Irish minister for communications said ten EU countries gave support to his country's position to regulate stations originating from one country but broadcasting specifically into another. In Ireland's view, it is the target country that should be responsible for regulation, not the country in which the station is emitting as is the case under the current rules.

Competition

• EU - Commissioner Monti's statement on Microsoft  +/-

  (RAPID) I would just like to inform you that a settlement on the Microsoft case has not been possible. I therefore intend to propose to my colleagues in the Commission next Wednesday to adopt a decision, which has already received the unanimous backing of Member States. I would like to stress the constructive and co-operative spirit displayed by Microsoft in the last few weeks. I also want to acknowledge the high degree of professionalism of the members of the Microsoft team at all levels. We made substantial progress towards resolving the problems which have arisen in the past but we were unable to agree on commitments for future conduct. In the end, I had do decide what was best for competition and consumers in Europe. I believe they will be better served with a decision that creates a strong precedent. It is essential to have a precedent which will establish clear principles for the future conduct of a company with such a strong dominant position in the market.

• EU - Competition probe leads to decrease in tariffs for broadband access via line sharing in Germany  +/-

  (RAPID) Deutsche Telekom has committed vis-à-vis the European Commission to terminate the presumed margin squeeze with effect from 1 April 2004. This commitment leads to a significant reduction in the line sharing fee that competitors have to pay to Deutsche Telekom for shared access to its local loops.

• EU - Panel backs Microsoft ruling  +/-

  (BBC) A EU competition panel has unanimously backed a draft plan of action which could see US software giant Microsoft hit with fines and penalties. The EU advisory panel of national antitrust experts endorsed a decision drawn up by the European Commission. Reports say Microsoft will be forced to share proprietary details with rivals and provide a second, stripped-down version of its Windows system. Microsoft would have to offer consumers a choice of buying Windows with or without the company's own AV software. The panel is also expected to endorse a fine of hundreds of millions of euros against Microsoft, although not until a second meeting scheduled for 22 March.

Computer crime

• AU - New laws planned against internet predators  +/-

  (Sydney Morning Herald) Pedophiles who use the internet to procure children for sex could face 15 years in jail under proposed new Australian federal laws. Under the package of laws released for public comment, accessing, transmitting or making child pornography available on the internet would also be punishable by 10 years in jail.

• CoE - Entry into force of the Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime  +/-

  (Press Release) The Council of Europe's Convention on Cybercrime will enter into force following its ratification today by Lithuania as the 5th country. The convention, which is the first international treaty on crimes committed via the internet and other computer networks, is the result of four years' work by experts from the 45-member Council of Europe and from non-member countries including the USA, Canada and Japan. The main aim of the convention - which focusses in particular on child pornography, computer-related fraud and violations of network security - is to develop a common criminal policy on cybercrime by promoting international co-operation and the adoption of appropriate legislation.

• UK and US to act on web sex sites  +/-

  (BBC) Britain and the US are to set up a group to investigate ways of stopping violent internet sex sites. Initial steps were agreed by David Blunkett and US Deputy Attorney General Jim Comey during a meeting at the US Department of Justice in Washington DC. The Jane Longhurst case had 'horrified' US officials. Websites featuring extreme sexual acts were implicated in the trial of the man who murdered the Brighton teacher. Musician Graham Coutts, 35, from Hove, was convicted of strangling the 31-year-old teacher and jailed for life on 4 February. During the trial, the jury heard Coutts had strangled Miss Longhurst hours after he viewed sites which featured necrophilia and other extreme sexual acts.

Content regulation

• UK - Gallery closed over naked pictures of girl  +/-

  (Guardian) Police were called to a fashionable art gallery when concerns were raised over an exhibition featuring photos of an artist's naked daughter. Scotland Yard was alerted after visitors to the exhibition at the Spitz gallery in London complained they considered the images, showing the girl as a baby, a toddler, and a five-year-old, to be pornographic.

Copyright, trademarks and patents

• DE - Massive sweep targets pirates  +/-

  (CNET News.com) German authorities conducted raids on more than 750 locations, seeking evidence of Internet movie piracy operations. The raids resulted in more than 15 detentions and confiscation of 19 servers, more than 40,000 CD-Rs and DVD-Rs, and more than 200 computers. The two-year investigation targeted online and offline distributors, Net-based 'release groups,' and a group that had hacked into university and corporate computers to store movie files.

• EU - Parliament adopts intellectual property enforcement directive  +/-

  (EurActiv) The Intellectual property enforcement directive has been approved by Parliament amid protests that it is impinging on consumers' rights. Member States will decide whether or not to criminalise infringers. The controversial directive on the enforcement of intellectual property rights (IPR) has been adopted in Parliament by a large majority amid protests that it is impinging on consumers' and citizens' rights. The compromise struck between the three institutions notably includes a provision that excludes any criminal sanction against infringers. It will be up to Member States to decide whether they want to impose criminal sanctions or not. However, Commissioner Bolkestein declared after the vote that the Commission would propose EU measures on criminal sanctions for IP rights violations 'in due course'. see also commentary (EDRI).

• US - Internet browsing patent annulled  +/-

  (M(BBC) Microsoft could be spared making costly changes to its widely used web browser Internet Explorer as a dispute over technology is overturned. Last year an Illinois court ordered Microsoft to pay out $521 million to private firm Eolas Technology for an alleged infringement of technology. Now the US Patent Office has invalidated the claim by Eolas.

• US - Lawrence Lessig on losing the Lessig case  +/-

  (Legal Affairs) When Eric Eldred's crusade to save the public domain reached the Supreme Court, it needed the help of a lawyer, not a scholar. If you know anything at all about this story, you know that we lost the appeal. You probably think there was no way this case could have been won. After our defeat, I received literally thousands of missives by well-wishers and supporters and from my client, Eric Eldred, thanking me for my work on behalf of this noble but doomed cause. But my client and these friends were wrong. This case could have been won. It should have been won. And no matter how hard I try to retell this story to myself, I can't help believing that my own mistake lost it.

• Web piracy laws risky, report warns  +/-

  (New York Times) The U.S. entertainment industry's pursuit of tough new laws to protect copyrighted materials from online piracy is bad for business and for the economy, according to a report by the Committee for Economic Development, a Washington policy group that has its roots in the business world, Promoting Innovation and Economic Growth: The Special Problem of Digital Intellectual Property.

Data Protection (privacy)

• EU - 'Biometric era' raises fears over privacy  +/-

  (EurActiv.com) The Liberal Democrats organised a public hearing in the European Parliament on 2 March to discuss plans to include facial and fingerprint biometric data in travel documents by 2005. 'Biometric identifiers' are observable biological characteristics which can be used to identify an individual, e.g. fingerprints, iris/retina patterns and facial patterns. Biometric devices consist of a reader or scanning device, software that converts the scanned information into digital form. The European Parliament is currently discussing proposals requiring Member States to integrate biometric identifiers into passports delivered to EU citizens as well as visas and residence permits for third-country nationals. The prevailing mood was that the decision to introduce biometrics in EU passports, visas and residence-permits may lead to infringement of privacy.

• EU - Proposal for a Council Regulation on biometric standards in passports  +/-

  (Eur-Lex) Proposal for a Council Regulation on standards for security features and biometrics in EU citizens' passports, COM 2004/116 (18.02.2004)

• HU - Ban on doctors' 'tips' website  +/-

  (BBC) An internet site showing how much doctors demand in cash tips has been branded illegal by the authorities in Hungary after it triggered a major row over the ethics of the practice. Hungary's data protection ombudsman told Hungarian TV that the Internet homepage halapenz.hu was unlawful because it had published personal data about doctors without their consent. Halapenz is Hungarian for gratuity.

Digital signatures

• EU - Position Paper on the e-Signatures Review  +/-

  (AmCham EU) Electronic-Signatures (e-Signatures) are a vital part of creating an environment of trust in which electronic commerce (e-Commerce) is encouraged and promoted. They also provide citizens with new and effective methods for communicating with government bodies and agencies. The American Chamber of Commerce to the European Union (supports the work of the European Union in this area and welcomes the review of the legislative framework that is currently underway. In anticipation of the European Commission?s report to be published later this year, we would like to draw attention to some issues that we believe should be considered in the context of the Directive.

Domain names

• ICANN - External forces chip away at Internet’s overseer  +/-

  (IHT) After years of criticism, Icann - the organization spun off by the U.S. government to oversee the smooth flow of the world’s dot-com addressing system - is still trying to prove that it has the world’s interests at heart.

• ITU Workshop on Internet Governance  +/-

  (ITU) The archived audiocast of the ITU Workshop on Internet Governance as well as all the presentations and contributions to the workshop are available on the ITU website.  For ease of access, the agenda page has the bios of the speakers and their contributions as well as the audiocast of each session.

• Mobile phone giants unite in search for domain name  +/-

  (Independent) A new internet domain name for web surfers using mobile phones and other hand-held gadgets is being sought by some of the biggest names in the technology and telecoms industries.Microsoft has joined forces with Nokia, Vodafone, Samsung and Sun Microsystems in seeking a new so-called 'top level domain name' to identify websites designed specifically for use on mobile devices. Following the use of top level domain names such as dot.com, dot.gov and dot.org, the new mobile domain name is expected to be dot.mob or something similar to help mobile internet users search for web pages that will be formatted for mobile phone screens.

e-Government

• EU - Consultation on single European telephone number to report lost and stolen cards  +/-

  (RAPID) The European Commission has launched a public on-line consultation on the possible establishment of an EU-wide system for cancelling lost and stolen credit and payment cards ('Card Stop Europe'). Such a service would be based on a single easy-to-remember phone number. Comments are invited until 30th April 2004. The Commission would like to encourage all European citizens to take part in the on-line survey. To make it as easy and quick as possible for people to respond, the Commission is using its Interactive Policy Making (IPM) tool for this exercise. IPM aims to improve governance by using the Internet for collecting and analysing reactions.

• EU - eDemocracy seminar  +/-

  (Europa) On 12 and 13 February 2004, over 250 international experts in the field of eDemocracy assembled in Brussels to discuss the implications information technology has, and is having upon our democracy. The presentations and conclusions of the eDemocracy seminar are now available online.

• EU - Framework for "good practice" in eGovernment  +/-

  (Europa) The eGovernment Unit has just issued the draft version of a document introducing a Framework for "good practice" in eGovernment. This Good Practice Framework should facilitate the take-up and exchange of good eGovernment practices and stimulate the learning from them. The Framework consists of several elements, with an 'intelligent database' for easy extraction of good eGovernment examples at the core of it. The document is currently available for consultation. Your comments and suggestions are most welcome. Deadline for comments: 12 March 2004.

• Government Gazettes Online  +/-

  (University of Michigan) This website attempts to list all online government gazettes and their characteristics to aid researchers. The listing is alphabetical by country, and includes the gazette title, url, languages, free or fee, range of coverage, format of, and an abstract about, respective content.

Information society and Internet policy

• EU - Information society: new Member States catching up but still long way off  +/-

  (Euractiv) The digital divide remains wide as the EU's ICT catch-up programme for candidate countries comes to an end: 23 per cent of the population does not know how to use a computer. The E-Europe+ Action Plan is the roadmap for information society designed specifically for acceding and candidate countries. It was launched at the Göteburg European summit in 2001 to enable them to catch-up with the 15 EU Member States that had already embarked on a programme of their own. A ministerial conference in Budapest on 26-27 February marked the end of the catching-up period for the new Member States under e-Europe+ with the presentation of a final progress report. They are now joining the EU 15 on the e-Europe 2005 Action Plan. However, the remaining three candidate states (Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey) continue to stay within the framework of e-Europe+.

Junk mail (spam)

• EU - Position Paper on SPAM  +/-

  (AmCham EU) The American Chamber of Commerce to the European Union (AmCham EU) welcomes and supports the increased political attention being given to the issue of spam by the European Commission and EU Member States. This reflects a more global concern that will no doubt be discussed at the forthcoming Organization for Economic Cooperation and development (OECD) conference. AmCham EU would like to provide some recommendations to guide the Commission’s and Member States' future endeavours in this area. We highlight six areas in particular definition, transposition, application, enforcement, remedies and technical measures.

Mobile and wireless

• Workshop on Shaping the Future Mobile Information Society  +/-

  (ITU) The ITU/MIC Joint Workshop on 'Shaping the Future Mobile Information Society' was held on 4-5 March 2004, at the Coex Intercontinental (Seoul, Republic of Korea). see the Chairman's report and the presentations covering the 2 background papers: Broadband mobile communications towards a converged world, Ki-Chul Han, Vice President, ETRI, Social and human considerations for a more mobile world, Lara Srivastava, Telecom Policy Analyst, ITU.

Racism and xenophobia

• UK - 'Far-right' website investigated  +/-

  (BBC) The Home Office is investigating a website that publishes the home addresses and telephone numbers of anti-racism campaigners, politicians and journalists. The website, Redwatch, publishes photographs and contact details of individuals under the slogan 'Remember places, traitors' faces, they all pay for their crimes'. A Home Office spokeswoman said 'We are aware of the anxiety caused by the presence of such material on the internet'"

Safer Internet awareness

• European Commission proposes stepping up EU action to combat child porn, racism and spam on the internet  +/-

  (RAPID) Safer Internet plus, a new 50 million euro, 4-year programme to make the internet safer for children, has been proposed by the European Commission. This programme, running from 2005 to 2008, would build upon EU work under way since 1996 to combat illegal and harmful internet content. Encompassing new media, such as videos, and new issues such as "spam", it would bring in accession countries, and focus more closely on end users: parents, educators and children. It aims to mobilise talent in the public, private and voluntary sectors to prepare hard-hitting safety campaigns. Its four action lines are: fighting illegal content; tackling unwanted and harmful content (including spam); promoting a safer environment, and awareness-raising. see Safer Internet plus proposal COM(2004) 91. see also EU plans safer net for children (BBC).

  11 March 2004

  US cracks down on internet spammers (FT)
  Four of the largest US internet service providers filed lawsuits against hundreds of people accused of sending junk e-mail messages, the first broad action under a new US anti-spam law that came into effect on January 1. The new law, known as the Can-Spam Act, criminalises particular tactics that spammers use to send junk e-mail, such as using deceptive subject lines or routing e-mail through third-party computers. AOL was joined in the suit by Microsoft, Earthlink and Yahoo.

Security and encryption

• ENISA: European Network Information Security Agency  +/-

  (ENISA) This dedicated web site for the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) has been created in order to provide easy access information on the activities of the Agency. All public documents as well as the information related to ENISA, will be regularly added during its implementatio ENISA aims at ensuring particularly high levels of network and information security within the Community. The Agency assists the Commission, the Member States and, consequently, the business community in meeting the requirements of network and information security, including present and future Community legislation. ENISA will ultimately serve as a centre of expertise for both Member States and EU Institutions to seek advice on matters related to network and information security.

• US - Companies Seek Online Warning Network  +/-

  (Washington Post) A group of technology and business associations today released a series of recommendations for minimizing the threat of cyber-crime and hacker attacks, including a request for congressional funding of an early warning alert network and a national media campaign to promote safer Internet use at home. The National Cyber Security Partnership, which includes the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Software Alliance and the TechNet lobbying group, also asked Congress to provide money to help develop a cybersecurity information clearinghouse for the business community.

Telecommunications

• EU - Telecommunications Council March 2004  +/-

  (Press Release) 2568th Council - Transport, Telecommunications and Energy - Brussels 8-9 March 2004 (provisional version) . Council conclusions on e-Europe 2005 Mid-Term Review, Situation of the electronic communications sector in Europe, Unsolicited communications for direct marketing purposes or "spam", Follow-up to the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS).

• US - Court rebuffs FCC's new telecom rules  +/-

  (CNET News.com) A federal appeals court has handed local phone companies a strong legal victory, throwing out key restrictions included in a recent regulatory overhaul but keeping controversial broadband rules opposed by their rivals. In an order combining challenges from big local phone companies and their competitors, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia said that the Federal Communications Commission was wrong to force local phone companies to share specific parts of their networks with rivals like AT&T or MCI, as well as to push important decisions about the telecommunications competition to the states.

Terrorism

• EU - Legislative instruments relevant to the fight against terrorism  +/-

  (Europa) Existing legislative instruments relevant to the fight against terrorism, and draft measures already on the Council table. The Union has already put in place a series of legislative measures to combat terrorism. But implementation of these measures is often slow, poor an inadequate. The 5 Member States which have not yet taken the necessary measures to put the European Arrest Warrant(1) into their national law should do so as a matter of top priority. And transposition is not enough: the Commission will report at the end of this year on the measures Member States have taken and on the operational working of the European Arrest Warrant, a matter which the Commission and Eurojust are monitoring constantly; "

Market & Technology

Junk mail (spam)

• Anti-Spam Solutions and Security  +/-

  (SecurityFocus) As a brief review from part one of this article series, current anti-spam solutions fall into four primary categories: filters, reverse lookups, challenges, and cryptography. Each of these solutions offers some relief to the spam problem, but they also have significant limitations. Spam filters do not stop spam. In all cases, the spam is still generated, still traverses the network, and still gets delivered. And unless the user does not mind missing the occasional misclassified desirable email, the spam is still viewed. While filters do help organize and separate email into spam and non-spam groupings, filters do not prevent spam. The first article looked at filters and reverse lookup solutions. This second part now focuses on the various types of challenge-based systems and cryptographic solutions.

Mobile and wireless

• Wireless internet stumbles ahead  +/-

  (BBC) The spread of wi-fi is being hampered by increasing complex and incompatible products, an industry body promoting the technology has said. The Wi-Fi Alliance said 22% of new wireless devices it tested did not work properly on the first attempt.

Portals, browsers and search engines

• EU aims to improve net searching  +/-

  (BBC) A European-funded project aims to revolutionise the way internet search engines work. Some of Europe's leading academic researchers will work to find a way of making search engines behave more like humans. Sorting information among the masses of unstructured text on the net is a growing problem for surfers. The project's aim is to develop a way for search engines to work out the overall subject matter of a web page. SEKT (Semantic Knowledge Technologies) is made up of 12 partners from the world of commerce and academia. It includes BT's research wing BT Exact and the universities of Sheffield, Innsbruck and Barcelona

Rating and filtering

• US - Zittrain and The OpenNet Initiative Take on Internet Filtering  +/-

  (Berkman Center for Internet & Society) The OpenNet Initiative is a project documenting filtering and surveillance practices worldwide. On this project, the Berkman Center is working in partnership with the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto, and the Advanced Network Research Group at the Centre for Security in International Society at Cambridge University. Professor Jonathan Zittrain leads the Berkman Center portion of the team.

Standards

• Microsoft on every DVD?  +/-

  (CNET News.com) An industry standards group has made a preliminary decision to include Microsoft's video compression technology in a next-generation DVD format, giving the company a key boost in the digital media arena. The steering committee for the DVD Forum announced provisional approval for Microsoft's VC-9 and two other video technologies- H.264 and MPEG-2 - as mandatory for the HD-DVD video specification for playback devices. VC-9 is the reference title for the underlying video decoding technology within Windows Media Video 9.

Statistics

• Study: Very few bloggers on Net  +/-

  (CNN) Despite the potential of turning every Internet user into a publisher, relatively few have created Web journals called blogs and even fewer do so with regularity, a new study finds. Some bloggers indeed update their journals often, in some cases several times a day. But it's clearly a minority who are taking advantage of the blog and its potential to steer the online discourse with personal musings about news events and daily life. The Pew Internet and American Life Project found that somewhere between 2 percent and 7 percent of adult Internet users in the United States actually keep their own blogs. However, 44% of Internet users have created content for the online world through building or posting to Web sites, creating blogs, and sharing files.

• US - Web Access at 75 Percent  +/-

  (Reuters) Nearly three of four people in the United States have Internet access at home, Nielsen/NetRatings said. In a February telephone survey, an estimated 204.3 million people, or 74.9 percent of the population above the age of 2 and living in households equipped with a fixed-line phone, had Internet access, up from 66 percent in February 2003. Women were slightly more likely to be Web surfers than their male counterparts.

Technology

• Enthusiasts Call Web Feed Next Big Thing  +/-

  (Associated Press) E-mail is crippled by an irrepressible spam stream. Web surfing can be equally confounding. And that may explain the excitement these days over a software tool that automatically delivers updated information to your computer directly from your favorite Web sites. Enthusiasts see these Web feeds as sketching the outline of the next Net revolution. The technology behind them is called RSS

• UK - Net chatbots to catch paedophiles  +/-

  (BBC) Smart software is being used to fool paedophiles into thinking they are talking to children in net chatrooms. To make itself sound plausible in net chatrooms the software scours the net for current references to pop and youth culture, New Scientist magazine reports If the 'nanniebot' software spots signs of paedophile activity, it sends out an alert to its creators.

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