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The Sweden Government is to pass these days a controversial law that might give the entertainment industry some tools to track down those that illegally share copyrighted material on the Internet.

The law, which is based on the European Union's Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED), has been under debate for more than a year and claims to be essential by the Swedish industry which complains that, presently, Sweden lacks the necessary legislation to support them: " Swedish laws are considered something of a joke and our politicians are viewed as arrogant for not taking this seriously.

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A political agreement on the telecom package was reached by the EU Council on 27 November 2008. Even though the final text does not support the 3 strikes measures proposed by the French Presidency, it has also deleted some important amendments adopted by the European Parliament in order to safeguard the citizen's fundamental rights.

Austria and Denmark have spoken up for keeping the Amendment 138 during the Council meeting. Bulgaria, Hungary and Poland joined them in an attempt to provide safeguards for users in the event of any attempts to sanction them or restrict their access to content on the Internet.

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At the beginning of November 2008, a French court ruled that the US companies that created p2p software can be sued in France according to French laws.

The ruling refers to a case brought to court by the French music producers association - SPPF (Societe de producteurs de phonogrammes francaises) in June 2007, against open source software hub SourceForge with its hosted project Shareaza and two other p2p software Vuze and Morpheus, to which Limewire was added at the end of 2007.

On the basis of evidence provided by the French company Advestigo, the SPPF accused the four plaintiffs of copyright infringement, for files having being exchanged illegally via the Internet b

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Despite all opposition and debates, on 30 October 2008, a crushing majority of the French Senate voted in favour of the anti-piracy law, the so called Hadopi law, introducing the graduate response against illegal content downloading.

The law enabling the introduction of three-strikes measure against file-sharers and Internet users comes now in contradiction with the European Parliament's opinion which called on the European Commission and all member states to "avoid adopting measures conflicting with civil liberties and human rights and with the principles of proportionality, effectiveness, and dissuasiveness, such as the interruption of Internet access."

Regarding th

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Some of the amendments passed by the European Parliament (EP) on the Telecom package are still worrying the civil rights groups, both on data retention and IP issues. Also, the fact that some amendments of the EP do not appear in the new document of the European Council working party on Telecommunications and the Information Society creates more confusion.

According to information from Patrick Breyer from the German Working Group on Data Retention, amendment 181 passed by the European Parliament regarding directive 2002/58/EC could be read to legalise "voluntary" blanket data retention practices as currently practised in the US.

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The Bergamo Criminal Court overrules the seizure, but establishes a case law that is a violation of civil rights.

On 16 August 2008 ALCEI reported to the Italian Data Protection Authority the violations of law contained in the pre-emptive seizure order issued by the Justice for preliminary investigation of the Bergamo Tribunal.

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A Hamburg court in Germany has ruled that the free file-hosting service RapidShare.de is not doing enough to combat piracy, so they should check content for copyright infringement before it is made available on the Internet .

The decision was given in the legal conflict between RapidShare and GEMA, a German copyright collective organisation, that has been going fro some years. RapidShare already has a system in place to check against the uploading of already deleted material.

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Barroso, President of the European Commission has refused French President Sarkozy's request to withdraw Amendment 138 included in the Telecoms Package recently voted by the European Parliament.

Amendment 138 which basically reinstates the legal issue of the freedom to communicate of Internet users, reaffirming that only threats to public security can justify the restriction to the free circulation of information on the Internet without a court decision, was voted with a large majority by the MEPs, fact which largely displeased EU French presidency who has continuously pushed and pressed for the application of the three strike approach introduced by its "Création et Int