A Berlin court has ruled on 22 February 2005 that a meta search engine has exactly the same legal responsibilities as a regular search engine to prevent users from accessing illegal content. A meta search engine doesn't have any databases of itself that could contain possibly illegal content, but should be able to filter the results from other search engines anyhow, according to the Berlin ruling.

The case results from a complaint by a female television host, who tried to prevent the search engine from producing links to possible nude pictures of her. In fact, the links refer to erotic sites that falsely use the names of many media-personalities in combination with the word 'naked'. The search engine declined it was possible to prevent these results from appearing.

The ruling didn't enter into effect immediately. The operator of the meta

Rapporteur Marielle De Sarnez (French, Liberal) of the European Parliament Committee on Culture and Education has released her opinion on the proposal of the European Commission to create a new Recommendation on the Protection of Minors and Human Dignity. The report deals with two issues; more liability for ISPs and the introduction of a legal right to reply.

According to De Sarnez "(...)businesses cannot escape their responsibilities under the pretext that parental control is needed to be exercised and governments have a duty to introduce rules that will protect the weakest members of society." That's why 'the liability of access providers needs to be established.' All access providers must create an effective and easy-to-use filter system for children. "Efficient filter technologies exist for the Internet and mobile phones. They are expensive

E-zine Heise reports that the Administrative Court of Cologne on 31 March 2005 has once more approved of an order to force ISPs to block 2 neo-nazi websites hosted in the US. The order was issued by the district government of Nordrhein-Westfalen in 2002 and aimed at 80 different providers in the region. The providers already saw 7 legal attempts fail to lift the order. Only 1 attempt, on 31 October 2002 at the administrative court of Minden, was successful, in allowing suspension of execution of the order pending full proceedings. A well-known critic of the blocking order, Alvar Freude, also lost his case on 7 October 2004, and was fined the equivalent amount of money of 120 days prison sentence. Freude appealed.

The blocking order is justified, according to the Cologne court and other

According to a report in the German e-zine Heise all the major search engines in Germany have voluntarily agreed to filter out harmful content for their German audience. Google, Lycos Europe, MSN Germany, AOL Germany, Yahoo, T-Online and t-info have founded a self-regulatory organisation that will voluntarily block a list of URLs considered to be harmful for the youth. The list is provided by a governmental media classification organisation, 'Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien (BPJM)'. The new organisation is a subdivision of a larger self-regulatory initiative of multimedia service providers, the FSM, founded in 1997.

The search engines will continuously check the central blacklist of indexed URLs to prevent Germans from seeing any of the banned websites. There will be a complaint mechanism to address possible gaps in the filtering by the search engines, but no provisions have been made for users to complain about wrongful blacklisting. A spokesperson from the new organisation told Heise the majority of filtered sites was hosted outside of Germany. It has not yet been decided what kind of message users will get when they try to find a blacklisted website.

The Netherlands National Commission for Unesco has published Recommendations on human rights and Internet, following a conference held on 4 and 5 February 2005. The recommendation focusses on privacy, the right of freedom of expression and the right to communicate, including access to the vast cultural, educational and scientific heritage of mankind.

On privacy, the recommendation calls on States to "Acknowledge that privacy is an indispensable prerequisite to the right of freedom of expression and the right to communicate. Online as well as off-line, readers, listeners and viewers have a right to the same high level of privacy and anonymity. If online access to information is tracked and tied to detailed personal profiles, self-censorship is imminent and - more important still - the public debate and the rule of law are eroded."

In preparation for the second phase of WSIS, in November 2005 in Tunis, Unesco has organised two conferences on the Internet and human rights.

On 3 and 4 February Unesco organised a special meeting on online freedom of expression inside of the Paris headquarters. Attended by over 300 delegates from countries all over the world, the conference addressed the applicability of media-law, the limits to freedom of expression, the right of reply, the right to access government information and models of self-regulation.

The director-general of Unesco, Mr. Koichiro Matsuura, kindly opened the conference with a strong speech in which he reminded everybody of the need to uphold the right to full freedom of expression, even in times of fear of terrorism. He stressed that this right does not distinguish between good or bad information, but is about the free flow of ideas, including for example racist speech, which should be debated in the open.

The large US provider Verizon (3 million DSL customers and 1 million dial-up customers) is systematically blocking e-mail from Europe, as well as from China and New Zealand. On 22 December 2004 Verizon has installed new central spam-filters that refuse e-mail from many large European providers. Attempts from European ISPs to have their mail-servers white-listed have only been partially successful. Internet users that don't use the mail-servers from their ISP, because they run their own mail-servers, don't stand a chance at all to communicate with Verizon customers. Verizon media relations manager Ells Edwards told Wired that he didn't know when the ISP would lift its blockade. And true to the Verizon telephony roots he added: "If it's really important you might want to make a phone call."

Members of the European Parliament have voted in favour of the EU's constitution today (12 January 2005), with a 500 to 137 majority (40 abstentions), setting the EU on a path toward more integration and a little bit more democracy. In the afternoon, the Constitution was celebrated with concerts, balloons and a festive debate involving Parliament President Josep Borrell and author Jeremy Rifkin. While the general tendency of the Constitution, as compared to present practice, is widely welcomed, critics say democratic standards in the Constitution are still far from being satisfactory and there is an inherent risk that the Constitution will freeze this situation for a long time. The vote is seen as being a blow to Constitution opponents in such countries as the UK and France, where the prognosed "no" vote in EU Constitution referenda is