The Irish Presidency of Council of the European Union has published a Draft Common position on the planned Directive on the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights. On 13 January the Document was discussed in Strasbourg with interested Members of the European Parliament and with the Commission officials who had drafted the initial proposal for the Directive. The Council paper unites many of the worst proposals on this Directive so far, while carefully working around most of the good ones. It has an extremely wide scope, like the Commission proposal, and includes patents, which were deleted from the scope by the Parliament's Legal Affairs Committee.

Unlike the version adopted by the Parliament, it calls for penal sanctions to be imposed on all kinds of Intellectual Property Rights Infringements. The text proposed by the Council on this issue is similar to an amendment suggested by the Phonographic Industry Association, IFPI, and initially tabled erroneously by Austrian Green MEP Mercedes Echerer. The Committee ended up, however, adopting another amendment by Mrs. Echerer calling merely for "appropriate sanctions". While it adopted the reference to limitations in the E-Commerce and Copyright Directives, the Parliament deleted a reference to the regulations on reverse engineering for compatibility in the EU Software Directive.

The case against DVD-Jon (Jon Johansen) finally ended on 5 January 2004, when the Norwegian Economic Crime Unit (Okokrim) confirmed it would not appeal the upholding of his acquittal on copyright charges to the Supreme Court of Norway. DVD-Jon won the first trial on the 6th of January 2003. The Norwegian Okokrim appealed but Jon also won the new trial on 22 December 2003.

The case started in 1999 when the Norwegian teenager reverse-engineered DVD-technology and wrote DeCSS software, in order to build an independent DVD player for the Linux operating system (See EDRI-gram nr. 23).

Second acquittal by the Borgarting Appellate Court in English (22.12.2003)
http://efn.no/DVD-dom-20031222-en.html

The Belgian consumer group Test Aankoop (in French: Test Achats) is starting a court case against 4 leading companies in the music industry. Test Aankoop, member of the European Consumer association BEUC, is suing Sony, EMI, BMG and Universal Music at a Brussels court for using technical protection measures on their music CDs that make it impossible for consumers to make private copies.

Test Aankoop says it has received many complaints from consumers that the music CD's they have bought can not be played on computers and that it is impossible to make a private copy as allowed by the Belgian Copyright Act of 1994. The consumer group has gathered hundreds of consumer testimonials about specific music CD titles such as 'My tribute to the King' by Helmut Lotty (EMI); 'Laundry Service' by Shakira (Sony); '1 Giant Leap' by Faithless (BMG) and 'Greatest Hits' by Björk (Universal).

In an important victory for Italian consumer rights, an Italian court has rejected the seizure of Sony PlayStation game consoles that use modified chips to permit unauthorised uses of the game systems. The case is one of the first to be brought in Italy under the new European Union Copyright Directive (EUCD).

In December 2003, the Public Prosecutor of Bolzano issued a search and seizure warrant against companies that purchased modified consoles from another company previously investigated by the Public Prosecutor of Bassano del Grappa. On 13 December this warrant lead to the seizing of a PlayStation and some modified chips from a company in Rimini.

This company took the case to the (civil) court to decide whether the producer of a device or computer, such as the Sony PlayStation Console, "to which extent a machine seller can forbid the modifications allowing a use different than the ones he likes." According to this court’s decision under Italian civil law, the answer is no.

According to the European Court of Justice, music can be deposited as a trademark in Europe. This is the outcome of a test-case instigated by the Dutch trademark agency Shieldmark. The founder of the company Shieldmark formally sued his father, founder of the trademark agency Kist, in order to get a European trademark on part of Beethoven's Fur Elise. The tune is used in an advertisement with a chicken that cackles the first nine tones of the world-famous tune. The trademark is granted on the picture of a musical score with the notes e, d sharp, e, d sharp, e, b, e, c, a.

The Dutch Supreme Court wondered whether sounds could be registered because normally trademarks are only granted on things that are capable of a graphic presentation. For this reason sounds could not be registered as

The Norwegian Jon Johansen pleaded 'not guilty' during the retrial on 2 December of his acquittal for reverse-engineering DVD technology and creating DeCSS in 1999. DeCSS is computer software that Johansen and others wrote in an effort to build an independent DVD player for the Linux operating system.

In January 2003, a three-judge panel in Oslo rejected charges against Johansen for accessing his DVD movies using an independently created DVD player. The court also rejected Hollywood's claim that it has the right to control the way in which an individual views a DVD after purchase.

The charges against Johansen were brought under the Norwegian criminal code section 145.2, which outlaws bypassing technological restrictions to access data that one is not entitled to access. Johansen's prosecution is

On 27 November the Legal Affairs Committee (JURI) of the European Parliament finally voted on the Draft Directive on the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights. The vote was a total victory for the Rapporteur, French Conservative Janelly Fourtou. Every single one of her amendments passed, and so did all of the compromise amendments she had worked out with other MEPs. There is no official version of the report as amended now - it has to be prepared by the JURI Secretariat from circa 250 pages of amendments and a 19-page list on the outcome of the vote. It can, however, already be concluded that the amended version is even more unproportional than it looked in worst-case scenarios during the weeks preceding the vote - and that is not entirely the fault of Mrs Fourtou, but also of a Green MEP from Austria called Mercedes Echerer.

The European Commission has concluded a three-day hearing against Microsoft. Several competing companies made presentations to the Commission during the hearing. RealNetworks and Sun Microsystems, as well as the Computer and Communications Industry Association have accused Microsoft of abusing its dominant position in the market. The hearing, which took place on 12, 13 and 14 November, is the last step in a lengthy anti-trust probe.

The Commission has been investigating Microsoft practices since 2000, following a complaint by Sun Microsystems. Sun accused Microsoft of abusing its dominant position in the market by not releasing crucial information about the communication between computers and servers running MS Windows.