SABAM (Société Belge des Auteurs, Compositeurs et Editeurs), the Belgian collecting society for music royalties, is in the spotlight again. A few months after the Scarlet/SABAM case, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has released a new decision on the legality of filtering systems on the Internet, this time with regard to filtering of content stored on web services.

Today, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruled that a social network “cannot be obliged to install a general filtering system, covering all its users, in order to prevent the unlawful use of musical and audio-visual work”.

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Deutsch: Das FAVA Gesetz – ein neuer Versuch zur Beschneidung der Bürgerrech...

There is a wide (and mainly unjustified) hype, in Italy, about a draft law proposed by a Mr. Fava, an MP belonging to the right wing party "Northern League".

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Deutsch: US-Razzien gegen Domains und IP-Adressen gehen weiter

US authorities have resumed their "Operation in Our Sites" in order to attempt to fight counterfeit and piracy-related websites. During this second annual "Cyber Monday" crackdown, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has shut down 150 websites from all over the world.

The recent introduction of draft bills, such as the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) now aims at providing a legal basis for domain names and IP address seizures.

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Deutsch: Google: Deutlich mehr Löschanfragen von Regierungen
Macedonian: Сè поголем број владини барања за отстранување содржини од Google

A Transparency Report issued by Google shows an increasing level of government requests of private data and content takedown, during the period January - June 2011.

It is the first time that Google reveals not only information on the number of requests by governments, law enforc

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Deutsch: Französisches Verfassungsgericht schränkt Haftung von Bloggern ein

The French Constitutional Court decided on 16 September 2011 that the website administrators (such as editors of blogs or online forums) should not automatically be held criminally responsible for online comments posted on their sites.

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Deutsch: US-Hotline verzeichnet große Erfolge bei der Löschung von Missbrauch...

In the course of the past year the US National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) made huge improvements in its handling of both domestic and international reports of web-based child abuse material.

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Deutsch: Facebook löscht Profile von Aktivisten

Facebook has just deleted about 50 UK activist groups' profiles and users' accounts without any notification to the owners of the accounts.

While the reasons are not very clear, a possible explanation being that the respective groups have technically breached their terms and conditions by using a "profile" rather than a "page", there are suspicions that Facebook might have acted after a law enforcement complaint and the purge could be linked to the wider crackdown on protest by authorities in Britain. In any case, Facebook's action is questionable especially as the platform performed the

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Deutsch: Französische Verordnung legt fest, was Hosting-Provider auf Vorrat sp...

The French Government published on 1 March 2011 the decree establishing the data that must be retained, at the transmission or modification of online content, by the hosting companies, including video sharing and blog hosting services.

The decree related to the conservation of the data "allowing for the identification of any person having contributed to the creation of online content" has been expected since the promulgation of the law on the confidence in the numerical economy (LCEN - implementing the E-commerce Directive) on