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A meeting on 27 November 2007 of a high level group on digital libraries and officials of the European Commission formalised the agreement between European libraries, archives and museums in a common effort to create a European digital library that would give access to a common European cultural and scientific heritage.

The EU European Digital Libraries initiative is part of "i2010: European Information Society 2010" initiative launched in June 2006 with the purpose to "foster growth and jobs in the information society and media industries", followed, in August 2006, by the adoption of the Recommendation on digitisation and digital preservation urging "EU Member States to set up

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On 20 November 2007, the Members of the European Parliament (EP) approved a report that asks for the revision of the World Trade Organization Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) in order to allow the compulsory licensing of patented environmental technologies.

The European Parliament considers developing countries should be able to have free access to the technologies developed to target the environmental issues such as climate change. This action comes also as a result of the environmental activists' criticism of the EU Global Paper stating the intention to ask for a high level of Intellecutual Property (IP) standards on European markets. According to environmental activists, such a policy

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The 8th meeting of the Council of Europe (CoE) group of specialists on Human Rights in the Information Society (MC-S-IS) was held in Strasbourg on 29-30 October 2007. It was mainly dedicated to discussing draft documents on technical measures and their impact on human rights and particularly freedom of expression. Two areas were more specifically addressed: content regulation and intellectual property.

In its position of independent NGO observer to the CoE MC-S-IS, EDRI voices its concerns when needed, including loudly by running campaigns, like the recent one against a new Recommendation failing to uphold online freedom of expression (Rec(2007)11). In this campaign, EDRI statement was endorsed by

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The Pirate Bay, the famous torrent Swedish website, may affect BitTorrent programme by developing a new software standard for Internet downloads.

According to Peter Sunde, Pirate Bay's co-founder, the site might have a new, more open alternative of file-sharing software at the beginning of next year. In his opinion, BitTorrent might develop in the future some features discouraging the trade of some "pirated materials" which might affect very many users of the site. There are also fears that BitTorrent may gain total control over P2P traffic which led to the creation of a working group that will build an open protocol that could be further developed by anyone without being controlled by anybody. The working group has also in view the

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The local edition of Moscow-based independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta from Samara was closed down on 8 November 2007 by the Russian authorities and its editor Sergei Kurt-Adzhiyev was criminally indicted under the accusation of having violated copyright provisions of the Russian Penal Code, by using counterfeit software. Violations carry up to six years in prison.

The problems started on 11 May 2007 right before the so called March of Dissent, led by Kasparov's Other Russia opposition coalition, as the paper was one of the few media company having planned to cover the march. Several officers from the Samara Main Internal Affairs Directorate came to the newspaper offices and seized all of its computers under the accusation of

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Today's digital networks offer extraordinary new opportunities for sharing and building upon our global, public pool of knowledge. Shedding light on the scientific, educational, economical, ethical and political importance of the digital public domain has, therefore, become crucial for the future of our knowledge-based societies.

This is the rationale behind a freshly launched project: COMMUNIA, the European Thematic Network on the Public Domain in the Digital Age.

Funded by the European Commission under the eContent+ programme and coordinated by the Politecnico di Torino's NEXA Research Center for Internet and Society, the three-year long project held its kick-off meeting in Turin, Italy, on 28 September 2007.

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The case against Sharemula.com, a website publishing P2P download links through which users can acquire movies, music and software, has been recently dismissed by a Spanish magistrate.

The case was opened in October 2006, when the Brigade of Technological Investigations retained 15 people responsible with Sharemula.com, asking the closing down of the site for alleged copyright infringement. At that time, the Spanish media made a big fuss of the case, the 15 retained people having been considered as belonging to a large international clandestine pirating network. The case was considered a big success by Federación Antipiratería in Spain (Anti-pirating Federation).

A year later, a Madrid court decided that the site and its administrators

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A set of principles desired to create an online environment for the development of User Generated Content (UGC) services and the protection of copyright owner rights has recently been set out by several media and Internet companies such as CBS, Dailymotion, Fox Entertainment Group, MySpace, NBC, Veoh Networks, Viacom, at the initiative of Walt Disney and Microsoft. Other major companies such as Google or other rights owner (Sony, TimeWarner, Paramount) did not sign the document.

UGC Services refer to services such as MySpace, Soapbox on MSN Video, Dailymotion and Veoh.com, but exclude technologies such as browsers, email, or search services.

The principles are a set of guidelines which has objectives such as the