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.

On 27 and 28 August 2004, the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media, Mr Miklos Haraszti, organised a conference on 'freedom of the media online' in the Amsterdam city hall.

Two panels focussed on the problematic definition of harmful content and self-regulation. Yaman Akdeniz (director of the UK NGO Cyberrights), Sandy Starr (editor of the e-zine Spiked) and Matthew Berry, senior counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice all gave strong arguments against global regulation of hatespeech, as suggested by the additional protocol to the Cybercrime Convention (signed by 23 countries, amongst which 15 EU member states, and only just ratified by Slovenia on 8 September 2004).

Akdeniz concentrated on the different cultural and legal definitions of what is harmful and what is considered illegal, while Starr gave a passionate plea that free speech is not divisible. "You cannot uphold free speech as a historic achievement of the enlightenment and simultaneously call for suppression of hate speech." According to Starr, politicians are overly keen on creating 'big angst over hatespeech'. This results in a very negative argument to vote, namely to keep the extreme right-wing parties out, in stead of a positive incentive to participate. This kind of electoral black-mail happened both during the French presidential elections and during the vote for the European Parliament in 2004. Starr ended his talk with 4 recommendations, not to confuse action with words, not to confuse emotions with ideas, not to panic, and finally, not to patronise the public.

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

By verdict of 24 June 2004 the Appeals Court of Amsterdam in the Netherlands has to a large extent limited the freedom of internet users to express their opinion anonimously. The main issue in this principal case was whether internet provider Lycos was required to hand over the personal data of one of its subscribers to a third party. This third party, the Dutch lawyer and stamp trader Pessers, claimed this subscriber had treated him unlawfully. The appeal verdict largely confirms an ealier verdict by a judge at the District Court of Haarlem on 11 September 2003, against which Lycos appealed.

Mr Pessers trades in postage stamps on the auction portal eBay and was accused of fraud by a Lycos subscriber, who published Mr Pesser’s name on his website and provided an e-mail address for anyone to report fraudulent incidents they felt Mr Pessers had committed. After complaints from Mr Pessers, the site was removed and the text replaced with "Site removed to avoid legal actions!!". Subsequently Pessers demanded the personal data from the subscriber, but Lycos refused and was taken to court. After the initial verdict, Lycos did hand over the data, but only to find out the address data were false. Pessers started another procedure, to force Lycos to find other ways to retrieve the correct information, but that demand was declined on 1 April 2004. However, this case instigated a debate in the Netherlands whether internet service providers should be obliged to collect the correct information from their subscribers.

The first Prepcom of the WSIS second phase took place from 24 to 26 June 2004 in Hammamet, Tunisia. The Prepcom started with major obstruction of civil society participation even before civil society could make their first intervention in the governmental plenary session.

On the second morning of the Prepcom, the Tunisian ambassador objected in advance to an intervention by Souhayr Belhassen, vice-president of the Tunisian Human Rights League. Belhassen was scheduled to address the governmental plenary on behalf of civil society. In her statement she emphasised that human rights, not least privacy and freedom of expression, should be fully respected during the Tunis phase of WSIS and in the host countries of the Summit. The ambassador, who claimed to speak on behalf of several civil society groups, objected to some of the content in the presentation and tried to remove her as a speaker.

Is there any proven link between hate speech on the Internet and committed hate crimes ? This was the difficult question faced by a meeting organised by OSCE (Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe) on the relationship between racist, xenophobic and anti-Semitic propaganda on the Internet and hate crimes, which was held in Paris on 16-17 June 2004. The answer to this question is of high political importance since it could impact the U.S. position and legislation, which protects free speech - be it hate speech - under the First amendment.

The OSCE meeting, which was held in preparation of a further OSCE conference on the same issue to be held by the end of this year in Brussels, did not provide a definitive answer to this question. While the French representatives presented the direct relationship between hate speech and hate crime as obvious - without providing any evidence, however -, the U.S. representatives made it clear that only crime, not speech can lead to prosecution under U.S. legislation. Between these two extreme positions, most of the participants to the meeting called for in-depth research on this issue, so that the critical question raised by the OSCE could be discussed on a sound basis.

On 13 June 2004 the French Constitutional Council published a decision on the Digital economy law (Loi pour la confiance dans l'economie numerique or LEN). Among the 3 provisions challenged by the parliamentary opposition, only one has been found unconstitutional and one was slightly modified. None of the 7 further provisions challenged by EDRI-member IRIS and the French Human Rights League (LDH), has even been examined, while some of them are indeed limiting the constitutional freedom of communication, to the benefit of private interests (see EDRI-gram Number 2.11, 2 June 2004).

The provision found unconstitutional, which has thus been suppressed from the text of the law, is the one introducing different time bars for online and off-line content when exercising the right of reply or filing judicial complaints against offences identified in the press law (see EDRI-gram Number 2.9, 5 May 2004). After the Council decision, the time bar is now the same in both cases.

EDRI-member IRIS and the French Human Rights League (LDH) have sent a brief to the French Constitutional council regarding the unconstitutionality of the French transposition of the E-commerce Directive (Loi pour la confiance dans l'economie numerique or LEN). On 18 May 2004 the French socialist MPs submitted the finalised law to the Constitutional Council, following the public advice from the two organisations.

The parliamentary opposition uses three of the four provisions pointed out by IRIS and LDH: status of email (not defined as private correspondence), privatisation of justice (through notice and take down procedure) and the introduction of different periods of limitation for on-line and off-line content. In the proposed law there is no time bar for offences identified in the press law (defamation, racist speech, holocaust denial, etc.) if they result from an on-line publication, while the statute of limitations is three months if previously published in any other medium.