The Open University in the UK has released an interesting course on Law, the Internet and Society: technology and the future of ideas. The course is published under one of the very first creative commons licenses in the UK. The license was officially launched on 16 March 2005, after 16 months of legal scrutiny. Registration for the course is necessary.

Open University course
http://technology.open.ac.uk/t182

On 22 April 2005, a Paris appeal court has outlawed the use of a copy protection mechanism on a DVD. The case was launched by the French consumer union UFC-Que Choisir early in 2004, on behalf of a customer who had unsuccessfully tried to copy a DVD of David Lynch's film Mulholland Drive. She tried to copy the DVD to regular video for her mother, who didn't have any computer or DVD-player.

In April 2004 the court in first instance rejected the demand, but in appeal the court has declared it forbidden to apply copy-prevention because it violates the right to make a private copy. On top of that, the court criticised the lack of an explicit warning on the cover. There was a very small sign with the letters CP, which is supposed to mean 'copy prohibited'. The producers and the distributor must now pay the customer 250 euro to compensate for the inconvenience and the union 1.500 euro to cover basic legal costs.

After signing an international petition urging the WIPO to open its doors to non-governmental organisations for the important debates on developing an alternative development agenda, European Digital Rights was awarded last-minute ad hoc accreditation on 11 April 2005. The German DRM-expert Volker Grassmuck was able to make a statement on behalf of EDRI during a special Inter-sessional Inter-governmental Meeting (IIM) from 11-15 April 2005.

Grassmuck concentrated on the conflict between the circumvention protection of DRM and copyright exceptions. Article 11 of the WIPO Copyright Treaty obligates Members to "provide adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies against the circumvention of effective technological measures." Many WIPO Members, including most European countries have therefore introduced anti-circumvention provisions into

The music industry has launched a new wave of lawsuits against individual P2P users in Europe. For the first time individual users were targeted in Finland, Ireland, Iceland and the Netherlands. These countries join Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy and the UK, where litigation started last year.

During a press conference in the Netherlands on 12 April 2005, in the presence of IFPI CEO John Kennedy, the local representative of the entertainment industry Brein announced it would start 32 court cases against individual alleged infringers. In order to obtain the identifying data of the users behind IP-addresses from which music was unlawfully uploaded, Brein will sue five Dutch internet providers (Planet Internet, Het Net, @Home, Wanadoo and Tiscali). These 5 providers had agreed earlier

On 6 and 7 April 2005 a committee of the Council of Europe debated on the merits of a new recommendation on human rights and Internet. On behalf of European Digital Rights Meryem Marzouki from the French digital rights organisation IRIS attended, in fact as the only NGO present. This second meeting of the Multidisciplinary Ad-hoc Committee of Experts on the Information Society (CAHSI) ended with a statement that will be presented to the CoE Committee of ministers, probably to be adopted by the CoE Summit of heads of states in mid May 2005.

The meeting was foremost an intergovernmental meeting, with EDRI in an observer role. Besides government representatives (of which the UK, the Netherlands and Norway were the most active), the secretariat of the group and the Culture and Media divisions of the CoE were present, as well as a

The Finnish Electronic Frontier Foundation is raising alarm about a proposed last-minute change in the new Finnish copyright law that would grant the entertainment industry the right to obtain identifying information about alleged infringers from service providers. The legislative committee of the Finnish parliament produced a statement on 17 April 2005 in which they agreed to change this wish from the right holders into law. On top of that, the committee also proposes that providers should disconnect customers if "the economic damage caused by the actions of the user becomes notable".

Similar to the voluntary agreement closed by the French providers with the entertainment industry, a copyright holder in Finland should be able to get a court order to force an ISP to disconnect a client and divulge his

On 24 March 2005 the Bulgarian Ministry of the Interior issued a radical order to Bulgaria's largest internet providers. Within 7 days the ISPs "must remove all free hosting servers which offer works, audio records, entertaining or business software, images, pictures, books, graphical logos, etc." and notify the department. Remarkably, the order isn't limited to copyright infringement, but bluntly seems to ban all content on free hosting servers.

ISPs in Bulgaria are not forbidden to offer free hosting though, but can only provide free servers larger than 100 MB to identified customers. "More than 100 MB of webspace should be given only to customers with a signed user contract, accompanied with a copy of their ID card or relevant valid document for identification."

The order was issued by colonel Boyko Donchev Nikolov, chief of the

In Sweden, for the first time an individual internet user is prosecuted for file-sharing. A young man from Västerås has shared the film 'Hip Hip Hora' via the Internet and is theoretically facing a maximum of 2 years prison sentence. But the public prosecutor doesn't have a lot of confidence in the case. “As these cases do not involve criminals, but instead quite ordinary people who share their files, any prison sentence would certainly be suspended,” Uppsala prosecutor Katrin Rudström told the newspaper Aftonbladet. Most likely, the case will result in a fine. In that case, the Swedish right-holders will have a hard time starting mass court cases against Swedish file-sharers, because they cannot demand identifying information in case of offences that can be settled with financial penalties.