On Monday 3 November, in intermediary proceedings against not-for-profit provider RAS in a Paris court, two telemarketing companies demanded the immediate take-down of the website of the radical trade union SUD PTT. The lawsuit was brought against the ISP and the trade union by the companies Ceritex and Mediatel. According to their complaint, some remarks published on the website about the management of the 2 companies are untrue and grave insults.

The government of Ukraine is trying to take-over the national .ua top-level domain. Via a new act on the administration of the .ua domain, adopted on 22 July 2003, the new enterprise Ukrainian Network Information Centre was established and made responsible.

Reporters Sans Frontieres, a non-governmental organisation fighting for freedom of the press, was banned from further participation in the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). According to a letter from the Executive Director of the Summit, RSF was excluded for 'administrative reasons'. The exclusion is in fact a direct result of a protest RSF staged in March, when Libya was appointed as chair of the UN Human Rights Commission. After that protest, the UN banned RSF from all meetings for a year.

Earlier, the organisation Human Rights in China was excluded from WSIS for similarly suspect administrative reasons as well. The WSIS Human Rights Caucus is very upset about these exclusions.

On 2 September the Danish network on the World Summit on the Information Society hosted a conference on Freedom of Expression in the Information Society. The conference addressed global tendencies of regulation of freedom of expression, the new Council of Europe Declaration on Freedom of Communication on the Internet, intellectual property rights, (traditional) media, access to information and the role of libraries. A number of concerns was raised, both in relation to the WSIS process as such, and in relation to the topics discussed.

8 years after Scientology started legal procedures against Dutch author Karin Spaink, internet provider XS4ALL and 20 other defendants, the Appellate Court of The Hague rejected all claims and ruled that freedom of expression should prevail upon copyrights.

According to the ruling "The (...) texts show that, in their doctrine and their organisation, Scientology et al. do not hesitate to overthrow democratic values. From the texts it also follows that one of the objects of the non-disclosure of the contents of OT II and OT III ...

The German Federal Supreme Court ruled on 17 July that deep links from a news search engine to articles on a publishers web site do not violate German copyright or competition law.

The plaintiff, a media group that publishes several newspapers and magazines, including 'Handelsblatt' and 'DM', sued the search engine provider www.paperboy.de for forbearance. After initial success at the trial level ('Landesgericht'), the case was dismissed on appeal ('Berufungsgericht') which in turn was approved by the Federal Supreme Court.

The supreme court stated that deep links do not violate copyright laws because the copyright owner has already made the the articles publicly accessible.

While the E-commerce directive (2000/58/EC) is not yet transposed, in France the liability of intermediaries is decided via jurisprudence. In April the owner of the discussion-website percussions.org was convicted to pay half of the legal costs made by the company Eurodim, because a visitor of the website posted a negative message about the head of the company. In the posting, he accused the manager of selling his African percussion instruments for way too much money and generally being better in marketing than teaching. The message appeared in September 2002. The CEO responded in April 2003, 6 months later, with a liability notice.

Last Tuesday, a Dutch court ordered 21 foreign gambling websites to ban Dutch visitors. The sites are located in 10 different countries, from a well-known gambling paradise like Antigua to companies based in Canada and Australia.

The case was instigated by the national Dutch lottery (Lotto). This 100% state-owned company became very confident after winning a case in February against the international gambling firm Ladbrokes. Ladbrokes appealed. This appeal will serve on 28 July.

According to the preliminary verdict, the 21 gambling sites violate the Dutch Gambling Act because they are not licensed to offer online gambling in the Netherlands. Since Dutch people can directly access the sites, they are considered to operate within the Netherlands.