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On 6 March 2008, the German authorities raided 51 exhibitor stands at CeBit, the German information technology fair, in a search for goods suspected of infringing patents.

The Hanover police stated that the reason for this action in which about 180 officials from the police, customs and prosecutor offices took part, was "criminal complaints by the holders of patent rights in the run-up to CeBit," that have increased during years.

The officials took away a number of electronic goods and documents including cell-phones, flat-screen monitors, navigation devices, and digital picture frames. Out of the 51 raided booths, 24 were from China, 15 were from Taiwan or Hong Kong, nine were from Germany, and the rest from Poland, the

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On 25 February 2008, following pressure from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) and a petition initiated by the 12 biggest record companies of Israel, the Haifa District Court ordered the country's three largest ISPs to block access to HttpShare.com, a BitTorrent and http hyperlink-only website.

Gideo Ginat, Haifa District Court Judge, stated: "I order the respondents, that is Israeli internet service providers, to systematically block access to the illicit site, HttpShare, so that surfers cannot enter this site and utilize it in order to impede upon the claimants' copy rights." The decision did not indicate any deadline for the application of the decision

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EMI, Sony, Warner and Universal have sued Ireland's largest ISP, Eircom, demanding that it install filters to prevent users from illegally sharing or downloading music. The action was admitted by Mr. Justice Peter Kelly to the Commercial Court, meaning that it will be heard on an expedited basis.

Eircom has said that it is not on notice of specific illegal activity that infringed the rights of the companies and has no legal obligation to monitor traffic on its network. Previously the music companies had sought to have Eircom voluntarily install software such as that produced by Audible Magic, which will "fingerprint" music files, but Eircom refused indicating that it could not run that software on its servers.

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The UK Government intends to introduce legislation that will force ISPs to disconnect theirs customers that illegally download music or films.

Andy Burnham, the culture secretary, told the Financial Times "the government has no burning desire to legislate", but he announced a change of tone from the Government. A document called "Creative Britain: New Talents for the New Economy" commits the government to a consultation on anti-piracy legislation this Spring. The legislation could be implemented by April 2009.

The draft consultation which suggests that ISPs would be required to take action against illegal filesharers is aimed at dealing with the estimated 6 million UK Internet users that illegally download files every year.

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Nicola Zingaretti, Socialist Member of the European Parliament (MEP) asked the EU member states to speed up the plan to criminalise copyright infringement that was first proposed in 2005 and agreed upon in 2007. The implementation of the EU Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED2) creating new rules on copyright protection would require the Member States to pass laws that would penalise the infringement of intellectual property rights.

At the beginning of February, Nicola Zingaretti, who was in charge of the adoption of the new rules and a supporter of IPRED2, sent a letter to the European Council asking member states to take "urgent action" to address the

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Following a complaint by IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry), a Danish bailiff court issued on 4 February 2008 an injunction ordering Tele2, one of the major ISPs in Denmark, to block the access to the PirateBay domains.

IFPI asked the court for this injunction because most of the materials referred on PirateBay are copyrighted and the exchange of these materials between PirateBay users is illegal. IFPI considered that Tele2 was not directly liable for the illegal copying, but was contributing to it, by making temporary copies of torrent files.

Tele2 has been complying with the injunction so far by DNS filtering (same method as used in the child pornography filters and AllOfMp3), but is

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The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has decided on 29 January 2008 in the case of Productores de Música de España Promusicae vs. Telefónica de España considering that the European law "does not require member states to lay down an obligation to disclose personal data in the context of civil proceedings". However, the decision allows the national courts to do that if the national interpretation requires so: "As to those directives, their provisions are relatively general, since they have to be applied to a large number of different situations which may arise in any of the Member States."

The decision came in the case where the Spanish music Association Promusicae asked the ISP Telefonica to hand over the names and addresses of the

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On 8 January 2008, at the launching of the government consultation on new copyright exceptions, Lord Triesman, the UK minister for intellectual property, threatened the ISPs with the introduction of new legislation to force them to block illegal filesharing in case they cannot find a voluntary agreement together with the music and film industries by the end of summer.

Referring to the Government's attitude towards illegal filesharing, Triesman said "We're not prepared to see the kinds of damage that will be done to the creative economy," and regarding the ISPs he added in an interview for The Register "There is no objective reason why they (rights holders and ISPs) cannot arrive at an agreement. Whether they have the will to do so is