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During a special session between 19-23 February 2007, the Provisional Committee on Proposals Related to a World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Development Agenda (PCDA) approved some proposals meant to improve the development of the organization.

The proposal for a WIPO Development Agenda started in 2004 with Argentina and Brazil which has been formally supported by 13 other Friends of Development since then.

Forty proposals of a total of 111 produced during the last two years, gathered on subject matter groupings referred to as "clusters," were negotiated, resulting at the end of the session in 24 agreed proposals.

The agreed proposals include technical assistance approaches and

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The French Cour de Cassation (the highest Appeal Court in France) has taken a decision regarding a sequel of the famous French book Les Miserables, that was contested by one of the descendants of Victor Hugo. The Court has refused to ban the appearance of the sequel and has taken into consideration the right of adaptation and not just the moral right of integrity. However, the procedure is not over yet.

The case started six years ago when the great-great-grandson of Victor Hugo, Pierre Hugo, considered that two books published and marketed by Plon publisher as the sequels of the famous "Les Miserables" were breaching the moral rights of the author.

Victor Hugo's masterpiece is in the public domain, but, under the French

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In the case brought by Copiepresse, a trade group representing 17 Belgium newspapers, against Google for publishing links to newspaper articles without permission, the Brussels Tribunal upheld its previous decision and ruled that Google violated the copyright law.

Google was ordered to remove Belgian newspaper content from its search engine results. The search engine is no longer allowed to refer to articles, pictures or drawings of Copiepress members without previous agreements that are to be negociated, non-compliance being fined by 25 000 Euros per day.

The ruling also says that any other copyright holder could get in touch with Google and notify its copyright infringement. In this case Google has

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A group of Microsoft’s rivals has filed a complaint against the Seattle-based company for using its new product Vista, under release these days, to unfairly continue and even strengthen its dominant position on the market.

The group including IBM, Nokia, RealNetworks, Sun Microsystems, Adobe, Corel, Opera, Oracle, Red Hat and Linspire complained to the European Commission saying that the computer language used in the Vista software, called XAML, was "positioned to replace HTML," the standard language used to publish documents on the Internet. XAML would be dependent on Microsoft Windows thus discriminating against other systems like Linux. The group also stated that OOXML, a platform file format that governs the way in which

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The broadcast treaty was the only item on the agenda of the three-day special session of WIPO’s standing committee on copyright and related rights. (SCCR). At the meeting it became clear that no-one really knew how to proceed with the negotiations. The chairman Jukka Liedes (Finland) tried to solve the gridlock by distributing several “non-papers”, which included a new language for the treaty, which he aimed to be a “minimalistic” approach to the treaty. This approach did not have too much success as many of the delegates wanted to use the existing documents as the basis of further negotiations.

From the NGOs-perspective, the positive side of the meeting was that there

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Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights' (SCCR) Special Session is taking place right now at Geneva. The meeting (and another in June 2007) aims to fix the proposed Broadcast Treaty so that it could be ratified by the end of this year in a diplomatic conference. If no consensus is found on the content, there will be no conference and - most likely - no treaty at all.

EDRI is participating to the meetings together with other NGOs (EFF, CPTech, IP-justice etc) as an observer. The organizations have prepared together a joint statement ", which is also endorsed by a large number of technology companies and which main message is that nobody has been able to argue why a

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The French Minister of Culture, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, considered in December 2006 that there should be no prison for those downloading only a few works from the Internet. However, just a couple of weeks after this statement an Internet user was condemned by a French court to imprisonment for having downloaded movies from the Internet.

"Prison for Internet users is over" was the statement of the Minister of Culture.

Howeve, on 11 January 2007 in Nantes, an Internet user was sentenced to two months of imprisonment and payment of damages - 10 euro/film to SEV (Video Editor Union) and the national film federation.

As a clarification to the DADVSI law, a letter from the Ministry of Justice

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The Recasting of Copyright & Related Rights for the Knowledge Economy is a new study commissioned by the European Union and produced by the Institute for Information Law - University of Amsterdam. The report covers an extensive ground in the EU copyright domain taking into consideration the problems of harmonization in the copyright field, but also the new challenges and debates regarding the extension of the copyright term for sound recordings or consumer awareness and acceptance of copyright.

The report is strongly rejecting the music industry's call for the extension of the term for neighbouring rights:
"The authors of this study are not convinced by the arguments made in favour