In an Internet Content Rating Association (ICRA) event held in Brussels on 14 June, Viviane Reding, EU Commissioner for Information Society and Media, expressed again her position to support the EC proposal to revise the Television Without Frontiers (TVWF) Directive.

"There will be no regulation of the Internet," Mrs. Reding told ZDNet UK stating that the extension of the Directive is supposed to provide basic rules to protect minors online, and to prevent incitement to hatred and over-repeated advertising.

The Commissioner also said that the proposed provisions are only basic tier rules and self-regulation can be supported better by a legal framework. The Government would intervene only when self-regulation does not work.

While the Commissioner considers the Directive will be beneficial to the

The issue of the private copy remuneration system is becoming a subject of debate for interest groups from all over the world. L'AEPO-ARTIS grouping 27 associations of artists of Europe, the International Federation of Musicians and the International Federation of Actors took a stand in the support of the present private copy levy system.

According to the artists associations, the present private copy system "significantly supports the cultural domain" as "a flexible system combining freedom for consumers and legitimate revenues for the copyright owners" being "vital for interpreters in the exploitation of their interpretation". Replacing the fees on private copy, which brought income to the artists, with DRM, which allows copying only within a system approved by its producer, is profitable only for the industry selling DRM systems and not to

Nothing in the national law and international obligations prevents states from permitting file-sharing as long as they subject it to a levy. This is the conclusion of a legal feasibility study under the supervision of Prof. André Lucas, the most renowned copyright scholar in France.

The study on the feasibility of compensation for peer-to-peer file-sharing, first released in French in June 2005, has been translated into English for wider accessibility. The translation has been conducted at the initiative of the German advocacy group privatkopie.net with the support of BEUC, the European Consumers's Organisation, and Stiftung Bridge.

The analysis concludes that downloading is covered by the private copying exception, provided that the existing system of remuneration is adapted.

As a continuation of the "saga" of the French draft law on copyright and related rights of the information society (DASDVSI), the French Senate voted this month the law which continues to be severely criticised by the consumer associations as well as software companies.

The Senators have adopted the law with 164 votes for and 128 against. The "for" votes came from UMP (Union pour un Mouvement Populaire) and from the radical part of RDSE (Rassemblement Democratique et Social Europeen). The PS (French Socialist Party), the Verts (Greens) and the PCF (French Communist Party) voted against it.

The law supported by the Senate has also changed the article 7, that was adopted by the Deputies and required the DRM vendors and commercial platforms to open their technology to competitors in order to make it

Spanish courts have upheld three times already the validity of music free licenses. In the three cases, the Sociedad General de Autores (SGAE), Spanish music copyright collecting society, sued some open public premises on alleged rights to the music listened therein.

In all the three cases, the defences demonstrated that the music played was downloaded from the Internet and was under free licenses. The Spanish system presumes that SGAE holds the right to represent all authors, unless the contrary is proven.

The defendants in the three cases proved that the music downloaded from Internet and burnt into CDs was carefully chosen as free licensed music.

In the first resolution, dated on the 2 February 2006, the term "Copy left" appears for first time in a Spanish resolution. The SGAE

The European Commission has revived a proposal to criminalise infringement of all intellectual property rights "on a commercial scale" after a European Court of Justice ruling that the Commission may include criminal offences in their Directives.

The proposal would also criminalise the "attempting, aiding or abetting and inciting" of infringement, and introduce multi-year jail sentences, confiscation of equipment and fines of hundreds of thousands of euros. This goes much further than the EU's obligations under the World Trade Organisation's Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). Right holders could participate in police investigations into infringement.

While the Commission focuses in its press release on counterfeiting by organised criminal gangs, the legislation would have a much wider

At the beginning of May 2006 the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR/14) met in Geneva with the aim to decide on recommendations to the WIPO General Assemblies 2006 in September on a draft WIPO Treaty on the Protection of Broadcasting Organisations.

The proposals for a treaty giving new intellectual property rights for broadcasting and webcasting organizations were discussed over five very tense days. One of the critical points debated was whether or how to include transmissions of broadcast over the Internet, known as webcasting. The United States supported the inclusion of webcasting as an annex to the treaty. The European Union favoured the inclusion of simulcasting (simultaneous transmissions of broadcasts over the Internet).

A growing number of non-profit groups like CPTech, Electronic Frontier

Representatives of the German music industry asked for new powers in order to obtain, without court order, personal information about alleged file-sharers from Internet Service Providers.

In a recent event held in Munich by the Institute of Copyright and Media Law, representatives of the rights holder associations claimed that this change would improve the fight against piracy, through easier civil-law suits against the alleged copyright infringers. This new obligation should be imposed through the new changes in the copyright law for the implementation of the IPR enforcement directive.

Director of the German Chapter of IFPI, Peter Zombik, explained, "The EU Directive does not require a court order for the disclosure of such information." He also called for an earlier implementation of the data