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A recent decision by the Paris Tribunal has condemned 3 different French websites for linking to another website containing gossip information on the French actor Olivier Martinez.

The actor has decided to sue 3 websites (Fuzz.fr, Vivre-en-normandie.com and CroixRousse.net) for linking to external websites that presented the respective information.

Fuzz.fr is a Digg-like website, where the website users can vote which news comes on first. However, the court decided that the owner of the website has an editorial responsibility, even if it's a digg-like service, and forced him to pay 1000 euros as damages for infringing the actor's privacy and 1500 euros as legal fees.

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EMI, Sony, Warner and Universal have sued Ireland's largest ISP, Eircom, demanding that it install filters to prevent users from illegally sharing or downloading music. The action was admitted by Mr. Justice Peter Kelly to the Commercial Court, meaning that it will be heard on an expedited basis.

Eircom has said that it is not on notice of specific illegal activity that infringed the rights of the companies and has no legal obligation to monitor traffic on its network. Previously the music companies had sought to have Eircom voluntarily install software such as that produced by Audible Magic, which will "fingerprint" music files, but Eircom refused indicating that it could not run that software on its servers.

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As of 1 January 2007 a law took effect in Finland allowing the Police to maintain a secret blacklist of child porn sites and distribute it to ISPs so that these may block access to those sites. Use of the lists is ostensibly voluntary to ISPs, but there have been rather strong hints of making it mandatory if not adopted otherwise. After a slow start, Police actually started distributing the list late last year and several ISPs have began using them.

In February 2008, the police added the site lapsiporno.info to the blacklist. Despite the name (Lapsiporno means "child porn" in Finnish), the website contains no child or any other kind of porn, but criticism of censorship and a partial collection of addresses from the officially secret

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French Internal Affairs Minister, Michèle Alliot-Marie, announced on 14 February 2008 new measures to fight against cybercrime, including extending the websites blacklist and pushing for computer online investigations, without the permission of the country of the hosting company.

The Minister visited the Cybercrime Brigade that is located in Nanntere and announced a new "best practices chart" with the operators in order to block websites. According to the statements, the Norwegian model was taken into consideration, meaning the creation of a list with websites not only with child pornography information, but also the ones with information on making explosives or chemical weapons, terrorist propaganda and racial hate speech.

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Following a complaint by IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry), a Danish bailiff court issued on 4 February 2008 an injunction ordering Tele2, one of the major ISPs in Denmark, to block the access to the PirateBay domains.

IFPI asked the court for this injunction because most of the materials referred on PirateBay are copyrighted and the exchange of these materials between PirateBay users is illegal. IFPI considered that Tele2 was not directly liable for the illegal copying, but was contributing to it, by making temporary copies of torrent files.

Tele2 has been complying with the injunction so far by DNS filtering (same method as used in the child pornography filters and AllOfMp3), but is

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An order issued by a Turkish court on 17 January 2008 blocked once again the access to Google's YouTube Web site on account of allegedly insulting clips referring to the country's founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

The ban lasted for 6 days and as no statements have been made by Turk Telekom which has implemented the ban or by YouTube representatives, it is not yet known whether the ban was lifted because the clips under question were removed.

The situation seems to be a repeated pattern as YouTube was first banned in March 2007 for similar allegations until the video considered disrespectful were removed by the site. A second time, in September, a Turkish court from

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A public workshop held in Ukraine on 12 December 2007 was aimed to discuss the issues regarding the regulation of the new online media. The workshop was organised by Internews Ukraine together with the Council of Europe and the National Commission on Freedom of Speech and Development of the Information Sphere under the President of Ukraine.

Besides the Ukrainian participants - from online and offline media - from Kiev and other important cities in Ukraine, the Council of Europe invited two experts - Thomas Schneider, Chairman of the Council of Europe Group of Specialists on Human Rights in the Information Society and Bogdan Manolea from EDRi as observer in the same Group mentioned above.

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The 8th meeting of the Council of Europe (CoE) group of specialists on Human Rights in the Information Society (MC-S-IS) was held in Strasbourg on 29-30 October 2007. It was mainly dedicated to discussing draft documents on technical measures and their impact on human rights and particularly freedom of expression. Two areas were more specifically addressed: content regulation and intellectual property.

In its position of independent NGO observer to the CoE MC-S-IS, EDRI voices its concerns when needed, including loudly by running campaigns, like the recent one against a new Recommendation failing to uphold online freedom of expression (Rec(2007)11). In this campaign, EDRI statement was endorsed by