The Swedish anti-piracy group Antipiratbyrån made the news with yet another embarrassing incident. The Swedish data protection authority has forbidden the organisation to collect the IP-addresses of internet users engaging in file sharing. In an incident reported earlier in EDRI-gram, the group convinced the police to raid the offices of Bahnhof, the oldest and largest Swedish ISP, and confiscate 4 servers with unlawfully uploaded content. But Bahnhof in turn successfully accused the anti-piracy group of uploading the illegal material themselves.

The group used special software to record the IP-addresses of file swappers, the file name and the server through which the connection was made, and tried to link them to individuals by sending over 2.000 complaints a day to internet service providers. Thousands of Swedish internet users complained to the DPA about this practice. They found the DPA on their side. The group had no right as a private enterprise to collect the information in the first place, the DPA ruled.

EDRI-member ISOC Bulgaria has sent an angry letter in May 2005 to the US Trade Representative about grave errors in their recent Special 301 Report.

The Bulgarian organisation defends the Bulgarian government for its attempts to solve the problems with the illegal usage of software, music and films. In the 5-page letter, also sent to the US Ambassador to Bulgaria, the Bulgarian Ambassador to the USA and to the Bulgarian minister of culture, ISOC-Bulgaria protests against the use of fake data in the report. Allegedly these data were provided by the Business Software Alliance through their Bulgarian representative.

The letter comes as part of the continuous efforts of the Bulgarian Internet Society to ensure that all software companies are treated equally and fairly by the government, in stead of special, complimentary relations. The most recent result of these efforts is a statement by the Bulgarian Minister of State Administration. In May 2005 he announced that he will not renew the contract between the government and Microsoft. This contract was closed in 2002, but has been heavily criticised since, both nationally and internationally.

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 see to parties that are involved in the multiplication or distribution of pirated physical items. Moreover, the argument of complicity in the act doesn't apply either, the court states, because the ISP has no active role or obligation to monitor all traffic preventively. Finally, the music industry also fails in its appeal to general liability provisions for providers in the Tele Services Act (TDG). The obligation to remove and block information once its illegality or unlawfulness has been established does not imply an obligation to divulge information.

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 St. Petersburg conference and the special involvement of UNESCO Paris head quarters with a session on cultural diversity.

Opening speech by Françoise Rivière

This session was the 4th of a series of thematic meetings held in 2005 in the Information for All programme. In February Paris head quarters hosted a conference on freedom of expression (see EDRI-gram 3.3), early in May the capital of Mali (Bamako) hosted a conference on multi linguism in cyberspace and on 10 May Paris head quarters debated about the use of ICT for capacity building. The Bamako conference produced as main result a clear recognition that the debate about the level of IT development must be changed and in stead of just counting internet usage equal attention should be given to lesser used languages, education and literacy programs. The third meeting in Paris was dedicated to effective use of new methods for learning, focussing on groups such as refugees, the visually impaired, rural areas and the urban poor.

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 12 April 2005, in the presence of IFPI CEO John Kennedy, the local representative of the entertainment industry Brein announced it would start 32 court cases against individual alleged infringers. In order to obtain the identifying data of the users behind IP-addresses from which music was unlawfully uploaded, Brein will sue five Dutch internet providers (Planet Internet, Het Net, @Home, Wanadoo and Tiscali). These 5 providers had agreed earlier

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 to change this wish from the right holders into law. On top of that, the committee also proposes that providers should disconnect customers if "the economic damage caused by the actions of the user becomes notable".

Similar to the voluntary agreement closed by the French providers with the entertainment industry, a copyright holder in Finland should be able to get a court order to force an ISP to disconnect a client and divulge his

On 18 April WIPO hosted a seminar in Geneva on copyright and ISP liability. Dominated by representatives of the entertainment industry and international government officials, the highly politicised seminar ended with the conclusion that more legislation was indeed necessary. The main issue however remained unsolved; whether this legislation should provide stronger protection for the fundamental rights and freedoms of all internet users, or whether this legislation should further facilitate the entertainment industry in hunting down individual internet users.

The opening keynote speeches by Lilian Edwards and Charlotte Waelde from the AHRB Research Centre in Intellectual Property and Technology of the University of Edinburgh provided the audience with an excellent overview of all the issues related to provider liability for content provided or

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 copyright infringement, but bluntly seems to ban all content on free hosting servers.

ISPs in Bulgaria are not forbidden to offer free hosting though, but can only provide free servers larger than 100 MB to identified customers. "More than 100 MB of webspace should be given only to customers with a signed user contract, accompanied with a copy of their ID card or relevant valid document for identification."

The order was issued by colonel Boyko Donchev Nikolov, chief of the