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Deutsch: ENDitorial: Belgische Musikindustrie versucht Urheberrecht zu untergraben

We have all heard the music industry make claims about the vast amount of "piracy" going on, such as the estimation that from 2008 to 2015, the music industry was going to lose an amount equivalent to the combined national debt of Greece and Italy. The ever-impartial European Commission has been similarly apocalyptic in its analysis of the situation - describing illegal filesharing as "ubiquitous" in its report on application of the IPR Enforcement Directive.

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Deutsch: Juristischer Dienst des EP bestätigt: ACTA könnte rechtmäßig sein. Oder auch nicht.

Several weeks ago, the International Trade Committee of the European Parliament asked for an opinion from the Parliament's internal legal service regarding ACTA's legality and whether or not documents must be made public. At the end of last week, the confidential response from the Legal Service was delivered.

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Deutsch: Europäisches Parlament: Aktueller Stand bei ACTA

After long, opaque and undemocratic negotiations, the Anti-Counterfeiting Agreement (ACTA) is making its first steps into the European Parliament.

The long process of the ratification of ACTA, which will need to overcome the hurdles created by votes in all 27 EU national parliaments as well as in the European Parliament, has now started.

The first step in the process at a European level, after a rubber-stamping of the text by the Council, is that each of the European Parliament Committees that considers it has an important perspective to add

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Deutsch: ENDitorial: Partner unterzeichnen ACTA, zahlreiche Dokumente noch imme...

Last weekend, some of the EU's ACTA "partners" started the process of acceding to the Agreement (US, Canada, Singapore, Australia, South Korea, Japan and Morocco). Due to the controversial nature of the Agreement, this is happening in different legal processes and at different speeds in different countries.

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Deutsch: Französischen Internet-Usern drohen Netzsperren

The French authority in charge with fighting copyright infringement, Hadopi, presented on 29 September 2011 its first activity report covering 18 months, beginning of 2010 until June 2011.

According to the report, since the beginning of its activity, the first warning stage of the graduated response system covered 650 000 cases.

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Deutsch: Deutscher Politiker tappt in eigene 2-Strikes-Falle

Siegfried Kauder, Chairman of the Legal Committee of the German Parliament, who has recently announced a plan to introduce a two strike model for persistent allegedly illegal downloaders, was found himself to infringe copyright.

The system proposed by Kauder includes two warnings to Internet users considered to repeatedly download copyrighted works without permission after which, the respective users might lose their Internet access.

Soon after having announced its plan, Kauder was found to infringe copyright by posting on his

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Deutsch: Belgien: Zwei Provider müssen Zugang zu The Pirate Bay sperren

In the case introduced in 2010 by the Belgian Anti-Piracy Foundation (BAF) against two ISPs, Belgacom and Telenet, the Belgian Court of Appeal of Antwerp decided on 26 September 2011 the two providers had to block access of their users to the Pirate Bay.

This decision comes to overturn a previous decision given by the Antwerp Commercial Court which, in July 2010, rejected the claim made by the BAF, considering the demand as disproportionate and unnecessary.

Telenet and Belgacom are now obliged to set up D

The European Parliament has finally responded to our request for documents in relation to the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).