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Deutsch: Spanisches Gericht urteilt: Links zu P2P-Inhalten nicht gesetzeswidrig

A civil court in Barcelona has recently ruled against SGAE (the Spanish collective society of authors and editors) in a case brought against Jesus Guerra who was administrating a site called elrincondejesus.com with links to P2P content.

SGAE accused Guerra of infringing copyrights by having reproduced and communicated to the public works owned by their constituency. The defendant argued that his website was a non-profit site only providing links that could be used by users only through eMule, a P2P application, to connect to other Internet users.

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Deutsch: GB-Regierung entscheidet über Internetsperren und Webblockaden

Discussions continue in the House of Lords over the controversial Digital Economy Bill especially over Internet disconnections (or account suspension, as the UK Government is calling it now) and web blocking.

The draft law would give the power to the secretary of state at the Government Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (DBIS) and not to the Parliament to decide upon the maximum period of account suspension for people found guilty of illegal file sharing.

Following the strong opposition against the disconnection of alleged illegal file sharers, the Government stated that it would apply only a

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Deutsch: Europäisches Parlament: Vorläufige Berichte zur Durchsetzung des gei...

The European Parliament (EP) is working on a position in regards with the European Commission's Green Paper on enhancing the enforcement of intellectual property rights on the internal market.

Three EP committees are involved in this process: the Legal Affairs Committee (MEP Mareille Gallo, EPP, France) in charge of this report, "Opinions" provided by the Industry, Research and Energy Committee (MEP Paul Rübig, EPP, Austria) and the Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee (MEP Zusana Roithova, EPP, Czech Republic).

MEP Rübig's report calls for EU-w

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Deutsch: Spanischer Finanzrat kritisiert neuen Gesetzesentwurf zur Durchsetzung...

In a non-binding report issued on 12 February 2010, the Spanish Fiscal Council criticised the draft law proposed by the Government known as the Sustainable Economy Law (la Ley de Economía Sostenible - LES) that foresees new Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) enforcement measures on the Internet.

The Council shows concern related to the LES draft text which places the intellectual property rights at the same level with the fundamental rights such the freedom of expression, public security, national defence, public health or non-discrimination on grounds of race, sex or r

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Deutsch: Durchgesickerter ACTA-Text bestätigt Verdacht

The text of the digital chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement was published on 21 February 2010, following news articles from IDG News Service issued a few days before.

The text of the draft digital chapter confirms that there are several problems with the draft agreement and many of the assurances given on the topic were somewhat "economical with the truth".

These "economies" were on display again during a discussion between the Commission Head of Unit responsible for the dossier, Luc Devigne and the International Trade Committee of the Parliament.

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Deutsch: Italien: The Pirate Bay wieder zensuriert

Following the reversal by the Italian Court of Cassation of the appeal won on 24 September 2008 against the decision of the Italian court of August 2008 that ordered the seizure of The Pirate Bay (TPB) in Italy, TPB was once again censored in Italy.

The Italian Supreme Court has revised the case and has found that Italian ISPs can be obliged to censor their networks and block BitTorrent search sites, even if they are not hosted in Italy or operated by Italian citizens. The Supreme Court decided that sites offering torrent files linking to copyrighted material are considered as engaged in criminal activity.

At the beginning of

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Deutsch: ACTA: Umstrittenes Urheberrechts-Abkommen im Nebel

The secrecy on the closed international agreement on Intellectual Property issues - ACTA - is making everyone suspicious on the content of the new treaty, which could contain dangerous legislation for digital civil rights.

After the end of talks on ACTA in Mexico, there was little information on the actual topics discussed and issues to be adopted.

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Deutsch: IP-Kapitel des EU-koreanischen Freihandelsabkommens ist im Wesentliche...

The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) calls upon the EU Parliament and member states to remove the intellectual property rights chapter from the EU - Korea Free Trade Agreement. According to the FFII analysis, the free trade agreement is a threat to software companies, companies that use software, and free software projects; this undermines innovation, competitiveness and legal certainty.

In October 2009, after more than two years of secret negotiations, the EU and the Republic of Korea initialled their free trade agreement.