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The European Parliament (EP) adopted on 27 September 2007 a resolution that endorses the 2005 European Commission's Communication i2010: Digital Libraries supporting the digital libraries initiative that aims at making European information resources easier and more interesting to use in an online environment

The Commission's "2010 Digital Libraries Initiative" came from the heads of states and governments of France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Spain in April 2005 and covered digitised and born digital material.

The EP resolution, based on a report by French MEP Marie-Hélène Descamps entitled "i2010: towards a European digital library" emphasised the need for more books to be put online and urged the Commission to speed up the process

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The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) member states adopted during the General Assembly on 28 September 2007 the recommendations made in June 2007 by the Provisional Committee on Proposals for a WIPO Development Agenda (PCDA).

The recommendations include 45 proposals that cover six activity clusters: Technical Assistance and Capacity Building; Norm-setting, Flexibilities, Public Policy and Public Knowledge; Technology Transfer, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and Access to Knowledge; Assessments, Evaluation and Impact Studies; Institutional Matters including Mandate and Governance; and Other Issues.

The Plan of Action started in 2004 at WIPO General Assembly with a proposal

A French high school student was arrested and interrogated by the police for having posted online his translation of the first three chapters of the latest Harry Potter volume, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows", only a few days after the official launching of the English version in July 2007. He was however immediately released and no civil charges were made by the pubisher and the author.

The action was the result of a complaint made by J.K. Rowling's and Gallimard's lawyer in France meant to stop industrial counterfeits, but the complaint was targeting organised networks of translators looking for direct or indirect profit from the successful saga and not individuals. The concern was related to organized networks that achieve counterfeited works and edit them with the same cover as the originals and commercialize them, which was

Recent cases in the German Local Court of Offenburg have confirmed the reluctance of the German public prosecutors in determining the identities of P2P users that have allegedly breached the copyright law.

The German online publication Heise has revealed that in a recent case in the Offenburg court, the judge decided to reject the music industry claims to order the ISPs to reveal the subscribers that were suspected of having infringed the copyright through peer-to-peer applications. The court considered the measure as "disproportionate"and the plantiffs did not show how the alleged offenders had been involved in actions that had created a "criminally relevant damage".

The Offenburg Local Court confirms its jurisprudence set on 20 July 2007 when the public prosecutor's office was not allowed to ask the ISPs for the

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To the big disappointment of the music industry, the UK Government refused to promote at the EU level, the extension of the presently 50-year copyright term for performers.

According to the EU rules, the copyright period for song writers and their families covers their entire lives plus 70 years while performers and their producers benefit of a 50 year copyright period starting from the recording date.

UK Government considers that the majority of the performers would not benefit of the extension as most of them "have contractual relationship requiring their royalties be paid back to the record label." It also stated that such an extension would lead to the increase of costs for the industry

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In her opinion on case C-275/06 (Productores de Música de España Promusicae vs. Telefónica de España SAU) the advisor to the European Court of Justice (EJC), Advocate General Juliane Kokott, considered that, according with the EU law, the ISPs are not obliged to reveal personal data in civil litigation cases.

In this case, the Spanish music Association Promusicae asked the ISP Telefonica to hand over the names and addresses of the subscribers that allegedly distributed copyrighted songs via the p2p software Kazaa. Telefonica refused, considering that it could do that only in a criminal investigation or in matters of public security and national defence. A Spanish Court of Madrid asked the ECJ for the interpretation of the EU law

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The famous website allofmp3.com was quietly shut down at the beginning of July 2007, but the Russian websites that are selling music online at much cheaper prices are on the rise, one of them winning also a lawsuit against Visa.

Russian authorities pressured the Moscow-based company MediaServices, owner of allofmp3.com, to close its website in order to meet the requirements for the entry into the World Trade Organisation. MediaServices claimed that is was a legal business, paying royalties to a Russian collective society that distributed the collected fees to the copyright holders.

However, a new website, mp3Sparks.com, was opened by MediaServices selling online music. The company considers that the new website is legal under the

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The second draft of the Copyright Act for the Information Society, including amendments proposed by the legal committee of the Parliament, was voted on 5 July by the majority of the German Bundestag and sent to Bundersrat for review.

Although Brigitte Zypries (SPD), the Minister of Justice, expressed her satisfaction for finally completing an important act, representatives of the left party and the greens accuse the government of not taking into consideration the interests of the educators and researchers, believing that the right to private copy cannot be exerciced as long as DRM systems are in place. Furthermore, they have shown concern for the fact that the new version of the act does no longer include the clause that was considering