Digital Rights Ireland will formally launch at a press conference in the Conference Room in Pearse Street Library, at 11-am on Tuesday 6 December. The group has been formed to defend civil, human and legal rights in a digital age. Digital Rights Ireland will be discussing its mission, and current developments in relation to Data Retention, IRMA legal action and other matters.

Digital Rights Ireland is chaired by UCD Law Lecturer TJ McIntyre and is comprised of academics, journalists and technologists. The group believes that citizens' digital rights are being eroded - the rights we expect in the real world are being stripped from us in the online world. Protection of these rights will involve public promotion of digital rights, and lobbying for their protection where required.

Digital Rights Ireland is a contact point for policy makers who wish to gauge the impact of their regulation in this complicated, and sometimes technical, area. In addition, the group aims to provide an informed position on issues in the digital rights field, free from any commercial or political bias. Current areas of concern for the group include data retention, rights to privacy/data protection, helping people to fight spam, and intellectual property issues. Digital Rights Ireland also aims to inform citizens of their rights, and how to exercise them. To that end, collaborators already have produced pamphlets and research material on areas such as SMS spam and the Data Protection & Freedom of Information Acts. Further pamphlets, on matters such as libel liability for online speech, will follow shortly.

Behind closed doors, representatives of the Council of Ministers of Justice (JHA Council), representatives from the Commission and the leaders in the European Parliament of the social-democrat and christian-democrat groups have agreed to introduce an unprecedented law (directive) on mandatory data retention in the EU. The groups have agreed to introduce mandatory retention for fixed and mobile telephony data and for internet log-in-log-off, for e-mail records and for Voice over IP records. There is only one last formal hurdle; the plenary vote in the European Parliament on Monday evening 12 December 2005.

But in practice this vote hardly has any meaning, given the majority adoption of the principles of extensive data retention. The agreed minimum period is 6 month, the maximum period 24 months. But member states may also decide on any longer term they find necessary, including the new 15 years proposal from the Polish government (see article 3 in this EDRI-gram). This is foreseen by the new article 11: "A Member State facing particular circumstances warranting an extension for a limited period of the maximum retention period referred to in Article 7 may take the necessary (...) measures. The Member State shall immediately notify the Commission and inform the other Member States of the measures taken by virtue of this Article and indicate the grounds for introducing them."

IPJustice organised another panel on P2P, filesharing and digital rights on 17 November 2005, with Robin Gross as moderator.

The first speaker was the Canadian law professor Michael Geist, also editor of the excellent daily newsletter BNA's Internet Law News. He started by telling that a few months ago IFPI had sued 2.200 people in 17 countries for filesharing, but none in Canada, and proceeded to speculate why that is. He explained Canadian laws are different. There is no DMCA equivalent and Canada hasn't ratified the relevant WIPO treaties. Furthermore Canadian policymakers are increasingly recognising the need for copyright reform instead of swallowing all the content industry's claims.

Markus Beckedahl of Netzerk Neue Median (and EDRI) spoke about the situation in Germany and in particular the implementation of the European

On the closing day of the Summit, Viviane Reding, European Commissioner for Information Society and Media and Catherine Trautmann, Member of the European Parliament co-hosted a Workshop on "Human Rights and the Information Society". Trautmann (Social Democrats) also was the special rapporteur on the WSIS for the European Parliament. Her report was adopted in plenary on 23 June 2005.

Speakers included: Ambeyi Ligabo, UN special rapporteur on freedom of expression, Viviane Reding, European Commissioner for Information Society and Media, Catherine Trautmann from the EU Parliament, Sidiki Kaba, president of the International League of Human Rights, Sharon Hom from Human Rights in China, and Rikke Frank Jørgensen, Danish Human Rights Institute and author of this contribution.

The purpose of the workshop was to cover a range of issues pertaining to

After the French data protection authority CNIL published a strong rejection of the systematic collection of IP-addresses by the music and film industry, the French minister of Culture, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, said he would look at the current implementation of the Copyright Directive to override these privacy-hurdles. The proposal for implementation will be discussed in the Lower House for the first time on 6 December 2005.

On 18 October 2005 the CNIL organised a debate with representatives of the entertainment industry to discuss their strategy to deal with unlawful file-sharing. The collecting societies proposed to employ automatic systems to detect copyright infringement on peer to peer networks, and secondly, to force internet service providers to translate a given IP-address into an e-mail address and forward a 'pedagogical' e-mail message from the societies to their customer.

According to the Swedish e-zine The Local, the Swedish Data Inspection Board now allows the Swedish anti-piracy group Antipiratbyrån and the record industry group IFPI to collect the IP addresses of file-sharers.

In an earlier ruling EDRI-gram reported about, the Swedish Data Protection Authority said APB and IFPI broke privacy laws, because they were collecting personal information without permission. Only government authorities were allowed to create registers of criminal offences. The DPA now grants the organisations an exception from the law. APB and IFPI maintain they do not keep extensive personal files, but just pass on the IP addresses to providers or to the police.

From the rulings it seems the anti-piracy group collected the IP addresses itself, with a computer program. In the Netherlands and in Ireland,

Only twenty minutes were needed in the Spanish court of Seville in order to acquit the Spanish game programmer who was facing up to one year in prison for making a video-game that made fun of religious practices (see EDRI-Gram 3.19). After showing repent, and stating that his intention was not really to offend anyone, the judge decided to acquit him.

The case generated considerable interest outside of Spain. Up to Japan people created mirrors to download the game.

EDRI-gram 3.19, Spanish gaming programmer faces prison sentence
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number3.19/gaming

(Contribution by David Casacuberta, EDRI-member CPSR-Spain)

Apart from important budget/audit matters, there were three substantive issues discussed at the 2005 WIPO General Assemblies. The last few days were spent in closed "informal" sessions to hammer out agreements. All agreements were formally adopted by WIPO member states on 5 October 2005. With the report EDRI was also adopted as accredited observer to all the WIPO meetings.

1. How to proceed with discussions on a development agenda for WIPO.

A new committee, known as the Provisional Committee, will take charge of completing discussions on the outstanding proposals relating to a WIPO Development Agenda. The Committee will have two one-week sessions and will report to the General Assembly in September 2006. The deadline for submission of any new proposals shall be the first day of the first session of the Committee.