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A Russian court has dismissed a penal case against a Russian teacher, Alexander Ponosov, that bought computers for its school with unauthorized Microsoft programs. The case become well-known when the former Soviet president Gorbachev made a public appeal to Bill Gates, asking to intervene in this case.

Ponosov was charged in a penal case by the Russian prosecutors of copyright law violations, considering that it had caused damages of 7 600 euros. The maximum sentence forseen by the Russian copyright law for this major violation is five-year inprisonment. The Russian teacher (but also principal) of a small town in the Ural Mountains was found to have bought 12 computers with unauthorized Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office.

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Instead of scouts cookies, evildoers sell copied Britney Spears CDs and counterfeit medicines manufactured using child labour, and that must be stopped, in particular since legit Britney Spears CDs cause enough harm as it is and everyone is tired of Viagra spam. The Criminalisation Directive, also known as IPRED2 or the directive on "criminal measures aimed at ensuring the enforcement of intellectual property rights", is officially geared at combating these organised criminals and terrorists by hitting them where it hurts: fund raising.

The Commission proposed to concretise this aim by going after secondary telephone directory providers, farmers with fields cross- pollinated by genetically modified crops, and MP3 player

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The Germany society for musical performing and mechanical reproduction rights GEMA has obtained temporary injunctions from the District Court in Cologne against the operator of data exchange services RapidShare.de and RapidShare.com.

The so-called "sharehosters” services operate in a similar way, allowing users to upload content on virtual storage space, thus making the respective content publicly available. They are considered to have used copyrighted works of GEMA members "in an unlawful fashion".

GEMA asked from RapidShare’s operator to reveal the number of copyrighted files of GEMA artists presently stored without license. According to GEMA spokesman Hans-Herwig Geyer, RapidShare.de has boasted of having some 15

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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 indicator of wider awareness of how overly strict copyright laws and rules stand in the way of free expression. In time this might indicate a shift in the public opinion, and even some hope that legislators and legal courts will be more aware of the problem. But it would be exaggeratedly optimistic to expect any truly relevant changes in the next few years.

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The French Minister of Culture, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, considered in December 2006 that there should be no prison for those downloading only a few works from the Internet. However, just a couple of weeks after this statement an Internet user was condemned by a French court to imprisonment for having downloaded movies from the Internet.

"Prison for Internet users is over" was the statement of the Minister of Culture.

Howeve, on 11 January 2007 in Nantes, an Internet user was sentenced to two months of imprisonment and payment of damages - 10 euro/film to SEV (Video Editor Union) and the national film federation.

As a clarification to the DADVSI law, a letter from the Ministry of Justice

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A few interesting decisions regarding the copyright infringement by fileshares have been taken in the last weeks by courts from different states in Europe. Usage of p2p programms has been considered totally different in decisions in Finland, Sweden and Spain.

At the end of October 2006, a judge from Turku, Finland convicted 22 people for copyright infringement deciding on a fine of more than 420 000 euros in damages, in favour of several plaintiffs including music, game and film producers. The plaintiffs had claimed 3.5 millions euro as damages.

The group of sentenced people had a peer-to-peer file sharing network with about 10 000 users, called Finreactor, and the judge ruled that the network

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A Danish court ruled against the Danish ISP Tele2 and ordered to block all access to the site Allofmp3.com. According to the ruling, the ISP is willingly infringing copyright if its customers use AllofMP3 to download music.

IFPI Denmark sued the ISP, Tele2, in July 2006. It asked the judge to force the ISP to block access to AllofMP3.com. A few days ago, the judge ruled in favor of the IFPI, but Tele2 will appeal this decision.

The verdict hasn't been taken well by ISPs from all over the world. It is a milestone in the IFPI's efforts. According to the IFPI it will be referenced in future cases, not only against Danish ISPs, but ones in other EU countries too.

The verdict could have very strong implications for the future. It clearly

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Andreas Bawer was accused in 2005 of sharing a film, called Hip Hip Hora, breaching the Swedish Penal Code. He was found guilty in the Swedish Court of First Instance, (Västmanlands Tingrätt) in December 2005. However, in a recent decision on 2 October 2006 of the Swedish Appeal Court (Svea Hovrätt) he was acquitted, the court identifying several faults in the digital evidences presented.

Bawer, having allegedly shared film files, could, in accordance with the Swedish penal code, be sentenced for criminal liability on condition it was proven beyond reasonable doubt that the IP address used for file sharing was assigned to the computer Bawer owned or used, and that the court could not rule out others had used the said computer at the time