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On 14 December 2006 a Coalition for Open Standards was established by a large group of IT companies and organizations in Poland with a view to promote open technological standards.

The coalition aims at taking measures to ensure freedom of choice for IT solutions for Polish citizens as well as businesses and administration bodies by enforcing open standards for information storage and exchange.

The use of open standards has numerous advantages among which the possibility to freely exchange information, the freedom of choosing the IT tool suppliers, an increased flexibility and interoperability in implementing IT solutions, an increased competitiveness and quality of systems on the Polish market.

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Google has decided to settle with SOFAM and SCAM, two of the Belgian newspapers groups having sued the company for using excerpts from their articles in the Google News Belgium service.

SOFAM, a group representing the rights of photographers and SCAM, a group representing journalists, had joined Copiepresse which had decided to take legal action against Google in February, arguing that Google should have signed agreements with the Belgium newspapers for using snippets of and links to newspaper stories.

After the hearing in August 2006, a ruling obliged Goggle to remove the links to the Belgium newspapers sites from its Google News service threatening the company with a 1 million euro fine in case of

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At the end of September 2006, after a reorganisation of the postal codes system (CAP), the Italian Post (Poste Italiane), now a private company, as well as the Italian Ministry of Communications have changed the way in which one could access the postal code online , limiting it to just one entry at a time, without the possibility to access the entire database. A multiple query could be made only by buying proprietary software sold by Poste Italiane.

According to the Italian laws, postal codes, together with telephone numbers, laws and normative acts are public data, but also in the public domain, and therefore should be publicly available without restrictions.

Further more, the postal codes, as public information, are collected

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A few interesting decisions regarding the copyright infringement by fileshares have been taken in the last weeks by courts from different states in Europe. Usage of p2p programms has been considered totally different in decisions in Finland, Sweden and Spain.

At the end of October 2006, a judge from Turku, Finland convicted 22 people for copyright infringement deciding on a fine of more than 420 000 euros in damages, in favour of several plaintiffs including music, game and film producers. The plaintiffs had claimed 3.5 millions euro as damages.

The group of sentenced people had a peer-to-peer file sharing network with about 10 000 users, called Finreactor, and the judge ruled that the network

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A Danish court ruled against the Danish ISP Tele2 and ordered to block all access to the site Allofmp3.com. According to the ruling, the ISP is willingly infringing copyright if its customers use AllofMP3 to download music.

IFPI Denmark sued the ISP, Tele2, in July 2006. It asked the judge to force the ISP to block access to AllofMP3.com. A few days ago, the judge ruled in favor of the IFPI, but Tele2 will appeal this decision.

The verdict hasn't been taken well by ISPs from all over the world. It is a milestone in the IFPI's efforts. According to the IFPI it will be referenced in future cases, not only against Danish ISPs, but ones in other EU countries too.

The verdict could have very strong implications for the future. It clearly

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After the decision against Google obtained on 5 September 2006, the Belgium newspaper group Copiepresse has planned new actions against MSN and Yahoo, alleging that they are infringing its copyright by showing excerpts of articles and images from newspapers on their Belgian portals without paying.

Copiepresse sent a cease & desist letter to the msn.be website, asking them not to post excerpts from the articles under their copyright. Major Belgium newspapers, such as Le Libre and Le Soir, are part of Copiepresse and they are offering articles in French and German. Copiepresse considers that the search engines are unfairly taking advantage of the content created by its members and are gaining financially from selling advertisement

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At the end of September 2006, a new initiative, called kunstfreiheit.ch (freedom of art) was launched in Switzerland. It is basically an open letter to the Swiss Minister of Justice and the Swiss parliamentarians calling attention to the fact that the reform/expansion of copyright, which is currently being debated, is not in the interest of artists. After 40 prominent Swiss artists, curators and professors have signed it in advance, now the open letter is available to the public for further support from Internet users.

Switzerland is one of the last European countries to revise its copyright law following the 1996 WIPO treaties.

The main aim of the open letter is to make public the differing interests

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Andreas Bawer was accused in 2005 of sharing a film, called Hip Hip Hora, breaching the Swedish Penal Code. He was found guilty in the Swedish Court of First Instance, (Västmanlands Tingrätt) in December 2005. However, in a recent decision on 2 October 2006 of the Swedish Appeal Court (Svea Hovrätt) he was acquitted, the court identifying several faults in the digital evidences presented.

Bawer, having allegedly shared film files, could, in accordance with the Swedish penal code, be sentenced for criminal liability on condition it was proven beyond reasonable doubt that the IP address used for file sharing was assigned to the computer Bawer owned or used, and that the court could not rule out others had used the said computer at the time