The international conference "e-Society.Mk" took place in Macedonia in October and November 2005, with the goal of raising awareness and sharing knowledge of decision makers about important information society issues with the general public. It was organised by Foundation Metamorphosis and supported by OSCE Mission in Skopje and the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media, in line with the recently adopted National strategy for the development of the information society.

Over thirty international and local experts interacted with an audience of around 400 participants in all events, discussing the topics of freedom of the media on the internet, e-business and cybercrime, copyrights and privacy, e-government and e-education. The audience consisted mainly of representatives of central and local government, IT experts, NGOs, journalists and university students (law, economics and IT).

IPJustice organised another panel on P2P, filesharing and digital rights on 17 November 2005, with Robin Gross as moderator.

The first speaker was the Canadian law professor Michael Geist, also editor of the excellent daily newsletter BNA's Internet Law News. He started by telling that a few months ago IFPI had sued 2.200 people in 17 countries for filesharing, but none in Canada, and proceeded to speculate why that is. He explained Canadian laws are different. There is no DMCA equivalent and Canada hasn't ratified the relevant WIPO treaties. Furthermore Canadian policymakers are increasingly recognising the need for copyright reform instead of swallowing all the content industry's claims.

Markus Beckedahl of Netzerk Neue Median (and EDRI) spoke about the situation in Germany and in particular the implementation of the European

APC, the association for progressive communication, reports on the civil society press conference on 18 November. Civil society representatives from all continents lined up on a panel to deliver a stark closing statement. The civil society statement was not finalised, but four points are addressed: internet governance, human rights, financing and development, and follow-up. The press conference essentially driven by questions of the audience, revolved around issues of development through ICTs.

Renate Bloem of the Civil Society Bureau kicked off the conference by saluting some language used in the official Tunis Commitment such as multistakeholderism. She held up that civil society has become a force to be reckoned with. "We have moved to become a partner in negotiations," she

After the French data protection authority CNIL published a strong rejection of the systematic collection of IP-addresses by the music and film industry, the French minister of Culture, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, said he would look at the current implementation of the Copyright Directive to override these privacy-hurdles. The proposal for implementation will be discussed in the Lower House for the first time on 6 December 2005.

On 18 October 2005 the CNIL organised a debate with representatives of the entertainment industry to discuss their strategy to deal with unlawful file-sharing. The collecting societies proposed to employ automatic systems to detect copyright infringement on peer to peer networks, and secondly, to force internet service providers to translate a given IP-address into an e-mail address and forward a 'pedagogical' e-mail message from the societies to their customer.

The Business Software Alliance has issued a report on the growing online music market. According to the BSA, in western Europe alone it is expected to grow more than 500% by 2008 to 559.1 million euro, from 106.4 million euro this year. The BSA states most of this content is protected by digital rights management, thus making the current levies on recordable media superfluous.

Quoting a report from the powerful German industry association Bitkom about the fact most Germans pay around 150 euro per year on levies on recordable media such as CDs and tapes, BSA calls on all national governments in the EU to phase out the levy system.

The UK, Ireland and Luxembourg do not have a levy system, but in other countries the levies are continuously rising. A previous BSA study forecasted a 500% rise in private copy levies from 2002 to 2006 in France,

According to the Swedish e-zine The Local, the Swedish Data Inspection Board now allows the Swedish anti-piracy group Antipiratbyrån and the record industry group IFPI to collect the IP addresses of file-sharers.

In an earlier ruling EDRI-gram reported about, the Swedish Data Protection Authority said APB and IFPI broke privacy laws, because they were collecting personal information without permission. Only government authorities were allowed to create registers of criminal offences. The DPA now grants the organisations an exception from the law. APB and IFPI maintain they do not keep extensive personal files, but just pass on the IP addresses to providers or to the police.

From the rulings it seems the anti-piracy group collected the IP addresses itself, with a computer program. In the Netherlands and in Ireland,

Apart from important budget/audit matters, there were three substantive issues discussed at the 2005 WIPO General Assemblies. The last few days were spent in closed "informal" sessions to hammer out agreements. All agreements were formally adopted by WIPO member states on 5 October 2005. With the report EDRI was also adopted as accredited observer to all the WIPO meetings.

1. How to proceed with discussions on a development agenda for WIPO.

A new committee, known as the Provisional Committee, will take charge of completing discussions on the outstanding proposals relating to a WIPO Development Agenda. The Committee will have two one-week sessions and will report to the General Assembly in September 2006. The deadline for submission of any new proposals shall be the first day of the first session of the Committee.

The European Commission has launched a public consultation on its program to digitise the collections of European libraries. The program on digital libraries is a response to a letter sent in April this year by six European presidents and priministers to create a virtual European library.

On 30 September the Commission adopted a Communication on the topic and published an accompanying staff working paper. In this Communication the Commission explains the link with Google's digitisation initiative. "Digitisation activities exist in all the Member States, but efforts are fragmented and progress has been relatively slow. This was underlined by the announcement of the Google initiative to digitise 15 million books from four major libraries in the US and one in Europe. If realised as planned, the Google initiative by far exceeds the efforts at national level in any of the Member States."