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Deutsch: Hadopi 2 vom französischen Senat sehr schnell angenommen

On 8 July 2009, in a very rapid session, the French Senate adopted the new three strikes draft law, so called Hadopi 2.

The only difference between the first version of the law and Hadopi 2 is that the sanctions to be applied to alleged illegal downloaders will be decided by the court and not by Hadopi authority. However, things are not improved as the entire process is speeded up by a simplified procedure that does not leave room for the presumption of innocence.

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Deutsch: Norwegen wird File-Sharer nicht verfolgen

The Norwegian data protection authority has decided that ISPs had to delete all IP address-related data just 3 weeks after collection, a decision that will make difficult to chase file-sharers.

The regulator started with two ISPs, Tele2 and Lyse Tele but the decision, subject by the Personal Data Act, will apply to all ISPs in Norway. As Norway is not a member of the European Union, it is not bound to comply to the European data retention directive which says that this type of data must be held for at least 6 months.

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Deutsch: Gericht zwingt Rapidshare, über 5000 Tracks zu filtern

The file-sharing site Rapidshare.de has recently lost another case to the German copyright society GEMA, being ordered by the Regional Court in Hamburg to "proactively filter" more than 5000 tracks from GEMA's catalogue.

In January 2008, another regional court in Düsseldorf had already found that RapidShare was responsible for what its users uploaded to the service. Hence, RapidShare implemented a screening process and maintained hashes of files that were pulled down for infringement but GEMA was not contented with this and went back to court.

GEMA created a software that can search web forums and extract links to

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Deutsch: Windows 7 wird ohne IE eingeführt, die Kommission zeigt sich nicht zu...

Although until recently Microsoft was claiming that Internet Explorer (IE) browser was an integrant part of Windows operating system, on 11 June 2009 the company stated it would launch its new version of operating system for the European market, Windows 7, without Internet Explorer. The decision comes as a result of a Statement of Objections sent to Microsoft in January 2009 by the European Commission regarding competition concerns related to the bundling of the browser to the operating system.

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Deutsch: EU wird Googles Buchprojekt prüfen

Macedonian: ЕУ ќе го преиспита проектот Google Books

The German delegation submitted at the European Council meeting held in Brussels on 28 and 29 May 2009, an information note asking EU to take action against Google's online library project, Google Books, a project targeting the scanning of entire book collections of major libraries.

"This move has an impact on cultural and media policy that we need to put on a European level," said Culture Minister Bernd Neumann.

There is already a dispute between Google and US authors and publ

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Deutsch: WIPO: Antrag auf ein Abkommen für Sehbehinderte

The WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR) met from 25 to 29 May in Geneva. This time, the main points on the agenda were the survey on limitations and exceptions and the visually impaired treaty proposal introduced by Brazil Ecuador and Paraguay (BEP proposal).

As usual, the committee also briefly dealt with the situation pertaining broadcaster's rights and audiovisual protection but since the national positions are not moving, no real progress was made.

The most interesting part of the meeting was the discussion about the BEP proposal.

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Deutsch: Französische Regierung drängt auf Umsetzung des HADOPI-Gesetzes

No sooner has the three strikes law been adopted that the French government issued CCAPs (special administrative specifications) and CCTPs (special technical specifications) which were sent by the Ministry of Culture to the candidate enterprises to put into function the information system of HADOPI.

The call for tenders was sent since the beginning of the year even before the Hadopi law was adopted, the notification date having been set for 5 June 2009 with a deadline on 1 July 2009 for a first prototype of the graduate response system.

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Deutsch: Das WIPO-Komitee für Entwicklung und Geistiges Eigentum: das dritte T...

The central issues in the third meeting of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Committee on Development and Intellectual Property (CDIP) seemed to be the creation of centralized databases to collect traditional cultural expressions, traditional knowledge, genetic material and public domain material - and to close the digital divide between (post-)industrialized nations and economies in transition, developing countries (DCs) and the least developed countries (LDCs).

Because Public Domain (PD) is decidedly different in different countries, it was proposed that a study on what does PD