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Deutsch: Häufig gestellte Fragen zur Vorlage des ACTA-Abkommens beim Europäis...

Following the recent decision of the European Commission to refer the draft Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) to the European Court of Justice, Access and EDRi have prepared this short FAQ to explain this process.

SABAM (Société Belge des Auteurs, Compositeurs et Editeurs), the Belgian collecting society for music royalties, is in the spotlight again. A few months after the Scarlet/SABAM case, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has released a new decision on the legality of filtering systems on the Internet, this time with regard to filtering of content stored on web services.

Today, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruled that a social network “cannot be obliged to install a general filtering system, covering all its users, in order to prevent the unlawful use of musical and audio-visual work”.

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Deutsch: Hadopi setzt letzten Schritt zur Sperre von Internetzugängen

French authority Hadopi announced on 13 February 2012 that its Commission for the Protection of Rights had sent the first complaints to court against Internet users for illegal downloading of files as the last stage in its three-strike system.

Since November 2010, more than 800 000 French Internet users have received e-mail alerts that they were suspected of illegal downloading of copyrighted material.

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Deutsch: Roadmap der Kommission für die Überprüfung der Urheberrechtsrichtli...

The European Commission recently published a "roadmap" to the review of the Directive on Intellectual Property Enforcement (2004/48/EC). As it is becoming traditional, the Commission neatly mixes up all kinds of infringements, from dangerous fake medicines to illegal downloads and seeks a "one size fits all" solution.

1. This is only about large-scale infringements
a. Criminal sanctions

There is no minimum-level of infringement that could be criminalised by ACTA. It requires parties to, at least, criminalise infringements which are for direct economic advantage, direct commercial advantage, indirect economic advantage, indirect commercial advantage or “aiding and abetting” such an offence.

In the absence of a definition of any these five activities, the European Commission has no way of knowing whether only large-scale infringements will be covered.

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Deutsch: ENDitorial: Urheberrechte vs Gemeinfreiheit als Kulturhindernis?

"The book, as a book, belongs to the author, but as thought it belongs -- the word is not too big -- to the human species. Any intelligent being has a right to it.

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Deutsch: Internetzensur: Einflussnahme der USA auf Spanien macht sich bezahlt

The US has continued to pressure Spain since 2008 to adopt measures against users allegedly illegally downloading copyrighted music and movies from file-sharing networks.

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Deutsch: ENDitorial: Urheberrechts-Kombinatorik

Although the creation of the single market has been the primary focus of the European Union for decades, it often seems that for every step forward it takes two back. In that respect it's often rather interesting to look at the mathematics as they play out in the different directives that come out of Brussels.

The EU Copyright Directive outlines 21 different optional exceptions or limitations to the right of reproduction of copyrighted works.