Legal and regulatory issues

Competition

• EU - Commission opens proceedings into collective licensing of music copyrights for online use  +/-

  (RAPID) The European Commission has warned sixteen organisations that collect royalties on behalf of music authors that their so-called Santiago agreement is potentially in breach of European Union competition rules. This is because the cross-licensing arrangements that the collecting societies have between themselves lead to an effective lock up of national territories, transposing into the Internet the national monopolies the societies have traditionally held in the offline world. The Commission believes that there should be competition between collecting societies to the benefit of companies that offer music on the Internet and to consumers that listen to it.

Data Protection (privacy)

• EU - Parliament rejects Council's request to vote again on passenger data  +/-

  (EurActiv) MEPs have refused to vote for a third time on the planned EU/US agreement on the transfer of passenger data. They are under pressure from airlines and US authorities to accept the agreement.

• UK - Naomi Campbell wins privacy appeal in House of Lords  +/-

  (out-law.com) By a three-to-two majority the House of Lords has upheld Naomi Campbell's appeal in her long running breach of confidentiality and Data Protection claim against the Daily Mirror. The Lords' decision re-instates the damages awarded in the High Court decision, and reverses the Appeal Courts' award of expenses in favour of the Daily Mirror against Campbell.

• UK - Publication of draft Identity Cards bill  +/-

  (out-law.com) The publication of the draft Identity Cards bill presents a paving bill for Ministers to establish the legal framework for the planned UK identity card scheme coupled with a national database. Most of the detail is left to unspecified future regulations. Unsurprisingly it was met with withering criticism from civil rights groups. Following the trial currently being carried out on the next-generation passport, and a consultation into the draft Identity Card bill announced yesterday, it looks likely that the bill will be laid before Parliament in the autumn. If all goes according to the Home Office plan, the first biometric passports will be issued during 2005, with voluntary ID cards available after 2007. The uptake of ID cards, passports and driving licenses will gradually increase until 2013 when, with around 80% of the population expected to have one of these documents, a Parliamentary vote on making ID cards compulsory is expected. Consultation paper including the draft bill (120-page PDF). see UK - ID Card Database emerges from the shadows.

Digital divide

• Has Africa's ICT renaissance begun?  +/-

  (ITU) The efforts deployed by Africa to extend Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) access are bearing fruit, with more and more African nations embracing full-scale regulatory reform. Market liberalization and regulatory reform are designed to attract a surge of investment in the ICT sector and exploit the potential of low-cost technologies to provide affordable access to ICTs. The number of voice telephony subscribers (fixed and mobile combined) in Africa has more than doubled in the last three years. In 2003, Africa had 73 million total voice telephony subscribers (22 million fixed and 51 million mobile, up from a total of 35.4 million in 2000 (19.7 million fixed and 15.7 million mobile)! Policy and regulatory reforms are the primary reason for this phenomenal growth that has been highest in the mobile sector, where 90 per cent of African nations authorize competition in the provision of mobile services. However, only 73 per cent of the countries actually had competitive operators active in the mobile sector in 2003. see also What Does Broadband Offer For Africa?, Africa's Booming Mobile Markets: Can the Growth Curve Continue? and Mobile, Regional Carriers Bridge Digital Divide.

• Saving Lives With a Simple PDA  +/-

  (Fortune) No single issue in IT is more important than figuring out how to use technology in the developing world. That's why Bridges.org, a unique nonprofit, wants to make sure the tools get used wisely.

Domain names

• .eu - A virtual identity  +/-

  (International Herald Tribune) The European Commission approved the policy regulations to make it possible for the EU to have its own top-level domain, or address level. That means that the Internet addresses of its residents, governments and the companies that do business here can be identified as www.name.eu, rather than www.name.co.uk, or even www.name.com. For businesses, the unifying address is a breakthrough. Since companies with any kind of EU business will be able to qualify for a dot-eu domain name, watch for a flood of commercial adoptions.

• EU - Public policy rules for the .eu Top Level Domain  +/-

  (Eur-Lex) Commission Regulation (EC) No 874/2004 of 28 April 2004 laying down public policy rules concerning the implementation and functions of the .eu Top Level Domain and the principles governing registration.

e-Government

• EE- Estonia opens politics to the web  +/-

  (BBC) In many countries, 'e-government' is more political rhetoric than hard reality. But not in the tiny Baltic nation of Estonia, where democracy is running about as close to real-time as you can get.

Electronic commerce

• WTO - Challenge to ban on Net gambling upheld  +/-

  (Reuters) Tiny Antigua and Barbuda have successfully challenged a U.S. ban on Internet gambling, dealing the United States another setback at the World Trade Organization. A WTO panel had issued a final report that was 'largely unchanged' from its preliminary ruling against the U.S. ban one month ago.

Health

• EU - e-Health: better health and healthcare through the use of information and communications technologies  +/-

  (RAPID) An action plan adopted by the European Commission shows how information and communication technologies can be used to deliver better quality health care Europe-wide. The "e-Health action plan" covers everything from electronic prescriptions and computerised health records to using new systems and services to cut waiting times and reduce errors. The proposals will contribute to better care at the same or lower cost. The action plan sets out the objective of a "European e-Health Area" and identifies practical steps to get there through work on electronic health records, patient identifiers and health cards, and the faster rollout of high speed Internet access for health systems to allow the full potential of eHealth to be delivered. To add momentum Member States should develop national and regional e-Health strategies and work needs to progress to allow measurement of the impact of eHealth technologies on the quality and efficiency of services, as well as overall productivity. By the end of the decade, e-Health will become commonplace for health professionals, patients and citizens.

Information society and Internet policy

• ITU - Internet Governance: The Way from Geneva to Tunis  +/-

  (ITU) Presentation (PDF) by Markus Kummer at ITU TELECOM Africa in Cairo, Egypt. The United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, has chosen Mr. Kummer, a Swiss diplomat, to head the Secretariat for the Working Group on Internet Governance.

Junk mail (spam)

• CA - Untouchable?: A Canadian Perspective On The Anti-Spam Battle  +/-

  (Michael Geist) The Canadian perspective encompasses an overview of the issues facing all Internet users and of the current US and European approaches. [Ed: Recommended].

• Regulating spam: Directive 2002/58 and beyond  +/-

  (Amsterdam Institute for Information Law) Study (commissioned by Sybari software) about the impact of the new anti-spam regulations in the EU. Their conclusion is not encouraging. "An important limitation on the effectiveness of the E-Privacy Directive is the simple fact that most spam originates from outside the EU. (...) Beyond that, the effectiveness of the E-Privacy Directive depends on its implementation in national legislation. So far, implementation has been rather slow in a number of countries." The study warns about large differences in the EU in the legal protection of corporate users and users which are not subscribers. The most important recommendation is for the EU to take additional actions to promote effective enforcement mechanisms. [from EDRi-gram]

• US - CAN-SPAM Library  +/-

  (GigaLaw) The CAN-SPAM Library is the most comprehensive collection of legal documents about the CAN-SPAM Act, including copies of and links to legislative history and current lawsuits filed under the act.

Mobile and wireless

• EE- Estonia embraces web without wires  +/-

  (BBC) Wireless net access, or wi-fi, is quickly becoming the rule, not exception, in the Estonian capital. That is due largely to the hard work of Veljo Haamer, editor of the wifi.ee website. Working with local net providers, Mr Haamer started pushing wi-fi as a cheap, effective way for Estonians to get online.

Protection of minors

• Choices: Teens and Buddy Lists  +/-

  (Washington Post) It's 3:30 p.m. Do you know who your kid is Instant Messaging online? In some households IMing can be as intense as any telephone obsession adults may remember from their middle school and teen years. At least back then the phone was easier to monitor. This week's Choices column, Buddy Lists and Mixed Messages, examines the Internet-age phenomenon of kids and buddy lists and why parents have yet another area of their childrens' lives to monitor.

• EU - Commission proposes new Recommendation on protection of minors and human dignity  +/-

  (RAPID) The European Commission has adopted a proposal for a Recommendation of the European Parliament and of the Council on the protection of minors and human dignity and the right of reply in the European audiovisual and information services industry. This Recommandation is a follow-up to the second evaluation report of 12 December 2003 on the 1998 Recommendation of the Council on the protection of minors and human dignity in audiovisual and information services. Viviane Reding, European Commissioner in charge of Education, Culture and Audiovisual, said: "The new Recommendation builds upon the original 1998 Recommendation, which remains valid. The proposal addresses questions of media literacy (e. g. media education programmes), the cooperation and the sharing of experience and good practices between self-, co- and regulatory bodies, which deal with the rating or classification of audiovisual content and action against discrimination based on sex, racial or ethnic origin, religion or belief, disability, age or sexual orientation in all media, and the right of reply in a cross media approach."

Rating and filtering

• US - Official anti-censorship site blocks content  +/-

  (CNET News.com) by Declan McCullagh. The U.S. government concocted a brilliant plan a few years ago: Why not give Internet surfers in China and Iran the ability to bypass their nations' notoriously restrictive blocks on Web sites? Soon afterward, the U.S. International Broadcasting Bureau (IBB) invented a way to let people in China and Iran easily route around censorship by using a U.S.-based service to view banned sites such as BBC News, MIT and Amnesty International. But an independent report reveals that the U.S. government also censors what Chinese and Iranian citizens can see online. Technology used by the IBB, which puts out the Voice of America broadcasts, prevents them from visiting Web addresses that include certain verboten keywords. see Unintended Risks and Consequences of Circumvention Technologies: The IBB's Anonymizer Service in Iran (OpenNet Initiative).

Telecommunications

• EU - New Member States under pressure to implement telecoms package  +/-

  (EurActiv.com) A number of new Member States appear to have failed to meet the 1 May deadline for transposing the EU's regulatory framework for electronic communications. While declining to give precise numbers, Commission services told EurActiv that 'not all of the countries have put the regulatory framework in place', adding that those who had done so needed to 'clarify more detailed secondary rules'. The current perception is that all major enlargement countries including Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic have yet to fully implement the rules.

Market & Technology

Internet access and use

• IRC - Pirates and hackers roam in the Internet's Wild West  +/-

  (New York Times) Even as much of the Internet has come to resemble a pleasant, well-policed suburb, a little-known neighborhood known as Internet Relay Chat remains the Wild West. While copyright holders and law enforcement agencies take aim at their adversaries on Web sites and peer-to-peer file-sharing networks like Kazaa, IRC remains the place where people with something to hide go to do business. Probably no more than 500,000 people are using IRC worldwide at any time, and many of them are engaged in legitimate activities, network administrators say. Yet that pirated copy of Microsoft Office or Norton Utilities that turns up on a home-burned CD-ROM may well have originated on IRC. And the Internet viruses and "denial of service" attacks that periodically make news generally get their start there, too. see also NY Times Discovers IRC, Freaks Out (Silicon Valley - Dan Gillmor's eJournal).

• With digital cameras, the world is watching  +/-

  (New York Times) To the legions of Internet photo-bloggers who make a habit of snapping and circulating digital pictures of everyday life, the unofficial images of Iraqi prisoner abuse appearing in news reports recently may be shocking, but the fact of their existence is unremarkable. "People just capture whatever goes on in front of their eyes, and then it's on the Internet two minutes later," said Marc Brown, co-founder of Buzznet, an online repository for amateur photographers. "That's the whole ethos of this technology." "This is as far as I know the first instance where digitally generated images made by an amateur photographer have erupted onto the scene of current events and had an impact," said A.D. Coleman, a photography critic and historian. "But it won't be the last."

Statistics

• UK - Illegal film downloading triples  +/-

  (BBC) An estimated 1.67 million people download illegal film or TV files, compared to 570,000 last year, the British Video Association (BVA) found.

• US - AOL Teen Wired Survey  +/-

  (AOL Red Service for Teens) According to a recent America Online/Digital Marketing Services online survey conducted in Opinion Place of more than 2,000 teens aged 13 -19 years and parents of teens aged 13 - 19 years (both AOL and non-AOL members), the following facts were uncovered. About eight in ten (82%) teens are online four or more days per week. Teens use the Internet to send email (82%), exchange instant messages (72%), do homework or research for school (71%) and play online games (65%) at least once per month. If teens had to give up something forever, 25% would miss instant messaging or emailing with friends and family the most. Approximately 81% of teens and parents talk about online safety.

Useful addresses

• New issue of EDRI-gram  +/-

  (EDRI-gram) Bi-weekly newsletter about digital civil rights in Europe. Number 2.9, 5 May 2004. Conntents: 1. New EU proposal to store telecom data 450 million citizens 2. EU parliament ditches PNR transfer for the third time 3. Ireland cancels e-voting 4. Privacy International report on ID-cards and terrorism 5. Romania implements Cybercrime Convention 6. Business interest first served at .EU domain 7. Update on EU Copyright Directive 8. Council accepts Spanish PNR-proposal 9. Final French vote about digital economy law 10. Survey about WIPO broadcasting treaty 11. Collecting societies warned about breaking competition rules 12. Recommended reading: regulating spam.

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