The vote on the Draft Directive on the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights, originally foreseen for the meeting of the Judicial Affairs Committee of the European Parliament last Monday, has been postponed again. The Rapporteur, Janelly Fourtou (Conservative, France) had to give in to a request for delay supported by a majority composed of Social Democrats, Liberals, Greens and the Left. They argued more discussion was necessary to be able to understand the problems in connection with the Directive.
The next date scheduled for the vote in committee is 27 November, in Brussels. It is unlikely that there will be a vote in the Plenary of the European Parliament before the end of the year, because the EU Council has already presented an alternative version of the Directive, which will inevitably lead to more discussions before the report can be voted in Plenary.
Additionally, it seems, the Italian Presidency, whose term ends at the end of the year, is not particularly keen on dealing with the issue. The software industry seems to have higher expectations of the upcoming Irish Presidency, and is already lobbying heavily in order to have the Directive passed before the enlargement of the European Union by the middle of next year.
Mrs. Fourtou's Compromise Amendments
http://www.europarl.eu.int/meetdocs/committees/juri/20031104/511548EN....
(Contribution by Andreas Dietl, EDRI EU affairs director)
The European Commission has concluded a three-day hearing against Microsoft. Several competing companies made presentations to the Commission during the hearing. RealNetworks and Sun Microsystems, as well as the Computer and Communications Industry Association have accused Microsoft of abusing its dominant position in the market. The hearing, which took place on 12, 13 and 14 November, is the last step in a lengthy anti-trust probe.
The Commission has been investigating Microsoft practices since 2000, following a complaint by Sun Microsystems. Sun accused Microsoft of abusing its dominant position in the market by not releasing crucial information about the communication between computers and servers running MS Windows. The Commission is also investigating the tying of Windows media player into the Windows operating system. This makes competition for other media players very difficult.
In August 2003 the Commission gave Microsoft the conclusions of the probe and the preferred remedies. Microsoft should be obliged to reveal interface information so that rival vendors of low-end servers are able to compete on a level playing-field. For Windows media player the Commission set out two remedies: offering Windows without Windows media player or a 'must-carry' provision to offer competing media players with Windows. The Commission can additionally fine Microsoft to a maximum of 10% of its yearly turnover.
The European Commission is expected to produce a draft ruling before the end of 2003. After comments from the national anti-trust regulators of the EU member states, the European competition commissioner, Mario Monti, can present the ruling in the first two months of 2004.
Various reports speculate on Microsofts willingness to agree to a settlement before the ruling is finished. In a statement Microsoft said that it "is committed to applying the energy and creativity needed to achieve a constructive outcome". The statement is seen as a strong signal that Microsoft is ready to settle.
European Commission statements on the case against Microsoft
http://europa.eu.int/comm/competition/antitrust/cases/index/by_nr_75.h...
Microsoft press releases
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/legal/european/
On 13 November, the UK House of Lords unexpectedly approved a very controversial 'Snoopers' Charter'. The three pieces of secondary legislation approve a 'voluntary' data retention scheme, and give a long list of government agencies self-authorised access to phone and Internet logs.
Throughout the debate it appeared that the government's proposals to place every UK email and phone account under surveillance was doomed. Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Cross Bench peers had vowed to oppose them. The Joint Human Rights Committee of the Parliament had expressed 'grave reservations' about the plans. Independent legal analysis had ruled them unlawful. Grim faced Home Office Officials sitting in the Advisors Box of the Lord's had admitted they were expecting the worst. But in spite of all that, at the eleventh hour the government snatched victory from the jaws of defeat.
EDRI-members Privacy International and the Foundation for Information Policy Research, which have campaigned to defeat the proposals, were delighted that two important motions were approved by the Lords.
Lord Phillips proposed that the Interception of Communications Commissioner must let people know when their privacy has been improperly invaded. In the past no such disclosure was made.
Baroness Blatch also succeeded in a groundbreaking motion requiring the government to report to Parliament the extent of overseas access to personal information stored by communications providers. Such access is widespread, and available to many developed and developing countries.
However, despite these successes, Privacy International commented: "A government ignoring adverse findings from the Parliament's own Human Rights watchdog is something we would have expected from a Banana Republic. This is a shameful episode".
(Contribution by Ian Brown, FIPR)
Pointing to different persons on a website and making them recognisable by naming them or in any other manner is an act of processing of personal data and must therefore be dealt with under EU Directive 95/46/EC. That's the substance of a recent judgement of the European Court of Justice (reference number C-101/01; case Bodil Lindqvist). It is the first time this court has ruled on the scope of the data protection directive and freedom of movement for such data on the internet.
Back in 1998, the Swedish Mrs. Bodil Lindqvist had posted personal information, meant to be humorous, about herself and 18 of her colleagues at a local church. Among other things she mentioned that one of her colleagues had fallen off a ladder and broken her ankle. In 2001, she was convicted to pay approximately 500 Euro for an infringement of PUL, the Swedish Data Protection law. Mrs. Bodil complained with the Higher Court, the Göta Hovrätt. This court, located in the town of Jönköping in Central Sweden, said it would not decide before a verdict from the Strasbourg court on the question whether the PUL was in line with the Data Protection Directive. In the meantime, Mrs. Bodil got much support from the Union of Investigative Journalists and other activists who claimed her case was about freedom of speech. The EU Court of Justice now confirmed the ruling by the court of first instance on the basis of the PUL, making it more than likely that the Göta Hovrätt will rule likewise.
Judgement by EU Court of Justice (06.11.2003)
http://www.curia.eu.int/jurisp/cgi-bin/gettext.pl?lang=en&num=7996...()
Bodil Lindqvist's homepage (in Swedish)
http://biphome.spray.se/mors/
(Contribution by Andreas Dietl, EDRI EU affairs director)
On 6 November the Hungarian Big Brother Awards were presented to the police office of Budapest, to the small company Szabo Gardentechnics and to the under-secretary of the ministry of internal affairs. With the Big Brother Awards governments, companies and people are named and shamed for large scale privacy invasions.
The Budapest police earned the detested award by examining the identity papers of drug addicts that applied for free disposable needles. The Hungarian Data Protection Commissioner explained that the police didn't have a general right to go into the trailer of the Baptists (where the needles were distributed). They could only enter in hot pursuit of a criminal or to prevent someone from committing a crime. The Budapest police was also reproached for needlessly searching young men and women in the street - in name of the fight against drug abuse.
The owner of the small company Szabó Kerttechnika won the award for using the CCTV system for total surveillance of his employees in the office and in other rooms. The video's were stored for more than a week. A personal award was presented to Dr. Zoltán Tóth (under-secretary of the ministry of internal affairs. He backed the idea of a universal chip-card that would store three different kinds of personal identification numbers. Though the Hungarian parliament rejected this proposal, the jury wanted to warn against the fundamental privacy-invasion of the idea.
Pictures of the presentation in Budapest (06.11.2003)
http://home.sch.bme.hu/~bond/peticio/
Schedule worldwide Big Brother Awards
http://www.bigbrotherawards.org/
(Thanks to Dr. Zoltan Galantai, associate professor Budapest University of Technology and Economics)
The German civil rights and privacy-organisation FoeBuD is the winner of an idea-contest for a national awareness campaign about the infringement of civil liberties through new technologies. With the price of 15.000 Euro, FoeBuD wants to develop a 'Dataprivatizer', a tool to detect RFID's, minuscule spy-chips that are increasingly built into consumer goods.
RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) are tiny computer chips with an antenna that can be read without touching or even seeing it. These transponders can be built into every yoghurt cup or piece of clothing. The chips can secretly divulge information about the buyer. With these data firms can set up profiles about the shopping behaviour and leisure activities of their customers.
This is not a remote future. The German chain of supermarkets and DIY-stores Metro AG already won a Big Brother Award last month for implementing this technology.
Idea contest (winner announced 06.11.2003)
http://www.bridge-ideas.de
The ad-hoc French organisation 'halte au spam' (stop spam) organised a successful forum on spam in Paris on 3 November. The forum was attended by more than 200 people, including 25 journalists. During the forum an interesting new study was presented about the privacy-dangers of social internet-tools like Plaxo. Plaxo's service invites you to upload your Outlook address book to a central server. The server then sends mails to everybody asking them to update their information.
These kinds of services are very successful, thanks to being free and using viral marketing schemes, but concerns from anti-spam devotees seem justified. For example, the marketing approach is not at all in accordance with the French privacy authority's opinion on sponsorship-based data collection. In the activity report about 2002, the commission recalls that internet users who wish to act as sponsors are to 'get prior consent from their sponsorees, before their personal data is communicated to a company with which they have no relationship. In Belgium this kind of viral marketing is forbidden since March 2003.
A former senior analyst from Forrester Research is quoted in the report to believe that the only way Plaxo can make money is by offering paid spam filters. "These filters would block all incoming e-mail that isn't in your address book. Since the majority of e-mail traffic is with people in your address book your e-mail would be spam free."
Study 'Do social applications pose a threat?' (03.11.2003)
http://www.halte-au-spam.com/social-applications.pdf
(Thanks to Frédéric Aoun, internet consultant, co-organiser Paris Spam Forum)
EDRI-member Electronic Frontier Finland collected 2295 signatures in one week on its online petition against software patents. The petition was presented to the Finnish parliament on 14 November.
Ville Oksanen, vice chairman of EFFI, who acted as the head of the delegation comments:"We were received by MPs from every major parliamentary group, which was a great success considering that the topic of the petition was relatively obscure. The feedback from the MPs was also very promising. They are going to follow the process closely and EFFI will be invited to parliamentary hearings. The letter from Linus Torvalds was also well known and one group (Swedish minority party) even pledged to support his position."
An international coalition of consumer, civil liberty and privacy organisations, including European Digital Rights has published a position statement on the use of RFID on consumer products. The statement formulates principles of fair information practice that should be applied on the use of RFIDs, such as transparency, purpose specification and collection limitation.
The organisations also outline which use of RFIDs is unacceptable; forcing customers into accepting RFID tags in the products they buy, human tracking and tags in currency.
The statement appeals to the industry to begin a voluntary moratorium on the item-level RFID tagging of consumer items until a technology assessment process is finished that involves consumers.
RFID position paper (14.11.2003)
http://www.privacyrights.org/ar/RFIDposition.htm