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Starting from a violent video game seen in Italy by Commissioner Frattini, a new hot topic has started to be heavily discussed by European Union bodies and Member States. Although the self-regulation measures are already in place for some years, a new approach is pushed by the Italian Commissioner.

As previously reported by EDRI-gram, the violent video game debate started in Italy where the Minister of Justice, Mr. Clemente Mastella, has claimed that it would be advisable to create an "authority" that would "decide on acceptable standards related to the modalities of sale" of videogames, after the game "Rule of Rose" appeared on the market. The debate was extended to the EU level by the Italian Commissioner for Justice,

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The European Parliament adopted on 12 December 2006, at its second reading, a recommendation on the protection of minors and human dignity and on the right of reply in relation to the competitiveness of the European audiovisual and online information services industry.

The right of reply in the online media has been heavily discussed also in the previous years, including a much contested 2004 Council of Europe Recommendation on the right of reply in the new media environment. In practice the recommendation has not been implemented in the member countries, but various human rights groups have expressed their serious concerns regarding its practical effects on the freedom of expression.

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According to the Italian national newspaper La Repubblica, the Italian Minister of Justice, Mr. Clemente Mastella, has recently claimed that it would be advisable to create an "authority" that would "decide on acceptable standards related to the modalities of sale" of videogames, so that it might be possible to "find those (videogames) that contain unacceptable levels of violence".

An "authority", in Italian political lingo, is a theoretically independent public body that ought to check and control certain subsets of public life. Examples include the "Autorità per le Telecomunicazioni" (Authority for Telecommunications) and the "Autorità Garante della Concorrenza e del

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Antonis Tsipropoulos, the administrator of a Greek blog aggregation website, blogme.gr, had his house raided, his hard drive seized and was himself arrested by the Greek cybercrime division, after having been served with a libel lawsuit without prior notice, because a public figure was offended by a satirical blog that was linked to by his site. The outraged response by Greek bloggers was immediate and unprecedented, reaching in the hundreds of posts within two days of the raid.

It was later revealed that the arrest and seizure had taken place 5 months prior to the revelation, but Mr. Tsipropoulos had chosen to withhold the incident. The story however received wide coverage in local

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The Belgium newspaper group Copiepress sued Google News, considering they should have asked its permission and agreed financial terms when publishing material from their Belgium newspapers. Google lost in the first instance, but also the appeal against the ruling given on 5 September 2006.

Facing a 1 million euro fine per day, Google removed the pages in question but did not answer immediately to the decision of the court asking for the publishing of the full judgment on its site for 5 days, considering that the publicity around the case had made this action "unnecessary". However, in danger of being fined 500 000 euros per day for not publishing the judgment, Google abided to the court's decision on 22 September. The decision can now

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During the workshop "The Rising Power of Search-Engines on the Internet: Impacts on Users, Media Policy, and Media Business" that took place in Berlin on 26-27 June 2006, the experts expressed the opinion that the search engines should be more regulated.

Marcel Machill, a lecturer in journalism at Germany's Leipzig and Dortmund universities stated that Google along with Yahoo and MSN were the main source of information searches for 90% of the Germans, Google alone accounting for 70%. He expressed serious concern related to the power of the search engines that would be unconceivable in the classic media. Machill as well as other experts considers Google should have the same responsibility

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With its newly adopted Communication on a 'comprehensive EU strategy to promote and safeguard the rights of the child', the Commission intends to pursue its global action on children's rights. One may however wonder whether the strategy for fighting child porn on the Internet, which mostly relies on private hotlines, is really efficient and compliant with the rule of law.

These were the main issues raised at the afternoon session of the EC Safer Internet Forum 2006, held in Luxembourg on 21 June, on 'Illegal Content: Blocking access to child sexual abuse images'. Following the invitation of the organizers, Rikke Frank Joergensen (Digital Rights Denmark) and Meryem Marzouki (Imaginons un réseau Internet solidaire, IRIS - France) represented

A Dutch gamer has become subject of US intelligence and widespread international media attention because of a self-made video-game movie. The video consists of footage of the game Battlefield 2 spiced up with different music and voiceovers. It was presented on 4 May 2006 at a meeting of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence as evidence of a militant campaign to recruit Muslim youth on the Internet.

Reuters reported on the video that was shown at the meeting and stated that it was a user-modified version of best-selling game Battlefield 2, a military simulation which features combat between U.S. forces and those of the fictitious Middle East Coalition (MEC) as well as the People's Republic of China. Reuters quoted a Pentagon official, Dan Devlin, as saying: "What we have seen is that any video