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Deutsch: Neue Netzsperren in immer mehr EU-Ländern

More and more cases were won in court by rightsholders against file-sharing platforms in the past weeks, but the blocking habits of the ISPs are starting to show their limits.

The UK High Court ruled on 20 February 2012 that the operators of The Pirate Bay (TPB) and its users are both guilty of infringing the copyright of rights holders in a case brought by major recording companies including Sony, EMI and Warner. Mr Justice Arnold said that the operators had the ability to prevent illegal file-sharing but did not do so.

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Deutsch: Häufig gestellte Fragen zur Vorlage des ACTA-Abkommens beim Europäis...

Following the recent decision of the European Commission to refer the draft Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) to the European Court of Justice, Access and EDRi have prepared this short FAQ to explain this process.

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”.

1. This is only about large-scale infringements
a. Criminal sanctions

There is no minimum-level of infringement that could be criminalised by ACTA. It requires parties to, at least, criminalise infringements which are for direct economic advantage, direct commercial advantage, indirect economic advantage, indirect commercial advantage or “aiding and abetting” such an offence.

In the absence of a definition of any these five activities, the European Commission has no way of knowing whether only large-scale infringements will be covered.

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Deutsch: Twitter führt länderspezifische Zensur ein

Twitter announced on 21 January 2012, on its official blog, its intention to introduce geolocation censorship, meaning that certain tweets will be censored in some countries based on different criteria according to the respective countries' legal framework.

Although a year ago Twitter, in its post "The Tweets must flow", declared in favour of free expression and proved to be a very useful instrument in the revolutions of the Arab world, supporting the coordination of the mass protests Egypt and by-passing the government censorship in Syria, it has now decided to change its po

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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: Weißrussland übt starke Internetzensur aus

--- Article corrected on 23.01.2012----

6 January 2012 saw the application of the Belarusian law imposing even more restrictions on online free expression in a country that is already viewed as a dictatorship.

Thus, a new law is enacting the sanctions applied for the violation of the decree issued in February 2010 by President Alyaksandr Lukashenko (and entered into force in July 2010).

What better way to raise awareness on private policing on the Internet than to organise a workshop in the European Parliament and let the stakeholders answer the question: "Self-regulation: Should online companies police the internet?" On 7 December 2011 MEP Marietje Schaake organized, with support from EDRi, an event on this issue.