On Thursday 2 December, the European Parliament adopted the report from the Dutch PSE rapporteur Edith Mastenbroek on the goals and funding of the Safer Internet Plus Programme. Parliament has decided to dedicate 45 million Euro to the program, of which 20,05 million are to be spent in the first 2 years, 2005 and 2006. Since the amendments were already agreed with the Commission and the Council, the report is adopted at first reading and will enter into force on 1 January 2005.

The programme is divided into four action lines and the budget is divided along these lines:

1.  Fighting against illegal content (25-30% of the budget) by the means of hotlines. To ensure that the Programme is effective, hotlines are required in all Member States and candidate countries. Currently, hotlines exist in 13 of the 25 Member States.

On 12 November, the German Lower House (Bundestag) debated in plenary on the merits of individual filtering or state-ordered blocking of illegal and harmful content. Germany is the only country in Western Europe (besides Switzerland) were governmental blocking-orders were issued to providers to prevent internet users from accessing information deemed illegal or indecent. Over 80 internet providers in Nordrein-Westfalen were ordered early in 2002 by the district government of Dusseldorf to block access to 4 foreign websites with neo-nazi content. Meanwhile, 2 of the 4 websites have been dropped from the blocking-order, including the distasteful, but certainly not illegal website rotten.com. More recently, the anti-censorship activist Alvar Freude was brought to court by the same regional government of Dusseldorf for posting hyper-links to censored

On 15 November a Paris court (Tribunal de Grand Instance) rejected a demand from the Comité de Défense de la Cause Arménienne (CDCA) to take-down a website from the Turkish consulate in France. The Turkish consul was accused by the CDCA of denying the 1915 genocide on Armenians. Both the complaint against hosting provider Wanadoo as well as the complaint against the Turkish consul failed.

The Court found that no provision in the French law specifically considers the denial of the Armenian genocide illegal, not as part of the general penal code provisions on genocide-denial, nor as a result of the specific French law from 2001 acknowledging the existence of the genocide of the Armenians.

Regarding the complaint against the Turkish consul, the Court concluded he was protected by diplomatic immunity, following the Vienna Convention of

On 15 November 2004 a Paris court (Tribunal de Grand Instance) is scheduled to decide about a request from an Armenian group to take-down part of the website of the Turkish consulate in France. The Armenian group, the Comité de défense de la cause arménienne, CDCA, accuses the Turkish consul of spreading 'denial propaganda', denying the 1915 Armenian genocide in the Ottoman empire.

The CDCA bases its complaint on a resolution adopted by the European Parliament in 1987, and on a law adopted in France in 2001 specifically condemning the denial of the Armenian genocide. According to the CDCA the judge should also punish the hosting provider, Wanadoo, for not controlling the content of websites of their customers and not responding adequately to the complaint.

On 21 June 2004 France implemented the European e-Commerce directive that regulates the liability of providers for the content of their customers. The French LEN (Loi pour la confiance dans l'économie numérique) was criticised severely by human rights groups and even tested by the Constitutional Council for endangering freedom of expression, amongst others, by introducing a notice and take down procedure that turns providers into private judges (article 6).

On 11 October, the Civil Liberties Committee of the European parliament (LIBE) organised a hearing on the Safer Internet Plus programme, covering 50 million euro for the years 2005-2008. Learning from past discussions in the European Parliament on the effectivity of this funding, the Commission wrote a pre-evaluation of the action plan. Rapporteur Edith Mastenbroek (Dutch Labour party) wholeheartedly agreed with the commission in putting the main focus on end-user empowerment, as opposed to central filtering. She suggested one major alteration in the suggested spending; in stead of spending 16 to 23% on the development of filter software and software for hotlines, she suggested to move that budget to the action line of raising public awareness (already taking 43 to 50% of the funding). The Commission should only fund research into the performance and the transparency of filter software.

7 out of 10 internet providers in the Netherlands remove a text by the famous Dutch author Multatuli (who died in 1887), without even looking at the webpage, or verifying the identity of the plaintiff. These are the results of an experiment conducted this summer by the Dutch EDRI-member Bits of Freedom about complaint procedures at ISPs.

Bits of Freedom picked 10 internet providers for the test, 3 free and 3 paid (dial-up) access providers, 3 hosting providers dedicated to business customers and 1 cable internet provider. A text was uploaded from Multatuli (pseudonym of Eduard Douwes Dekker), dating from 1871. The text is about democracy, and begins with the story of the sheep. The sheep chase away a tyrant, only to find themselves in need of specialists to represent them, and they end up inviting the tyrant back, disguised as 'Specialist'. The text clearly states in the opening line that the work dates from 1871, and was reprinted in 1981. At the bottom of the text there is a line stating 'this works belongs to the public domain'. Since copyright expires 70 years after the death of the author, all works by Multatuli are in the public domain since 1957.

The Italian hostingprovider Austici does not have to remove a satirical website it hosts with a parody on the website of the Italian railroad company Trenitalia. On 14 September 2004 the court of Milan rejected a request from Trenitalia to remove the 'offending content' and impose a fine on the provider. The court decided that the parody fell under the protection of the constitutional right on freedom of expression granted in Article 21, and decided Trenitalia had to reimburse the legal costs of 5.100 euro.

Trenitalia could opt for a (much longer and more expensive) civil case against Autistici, but given the clear motivation from the court on the right to create satire, it seems unlikely such an appeal will yield any results.

The case started half July with a letter from Trenitalia to autistici.org announcing the court case. Trenitalia demanded the provider should immediately remove the site, publish an advertisement in 2 national newspapers about the removal of the site and do not use any metatags referring to trenitalia. On top of that, the railroad lawyers demanded refunding of moral and actual damages to the company.

The UK telephone and internetprovider BT is blocking the access for its customers to an unknown number of websites since 21 June 2004, allegedly containing images of child pornography. So far, BT has not disclosed any information about the banned sites and the precise technical way in which the filtering is deployed, raising serious questions about large scale private censorship on the internet.

The software BT has developed to filter out the unwanted websites is called Cleanfeed, and was developed in collaboration with the Internet Watch Foundation. Both the association of UK internetproviders and the European umbrella organisation of internetproviders (Euro ISPA) have demanded more information about the exact nature of the blocking. The Internet Watch Foundation does not provide any information on its website