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The video-sharing website Youtube, was blocked on 7 March 2007 by a court order in Turkey, after some videos insulting Turkey's founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk had been uploaded on its servers. The ban was lifted two days later, when the videos were removed from the website.

Some of the videos, considered offending by the court, presented Ataturk and the Turkish people as homosexuals. In others, insults were proffered to the Turkish flag and Ataturk's portrait.

The court ordered the Turkish ISPs to block the video-sharing website, based on Article 301 from the Turkish Penal Code, known as the main obstacle to freedom of speech. Article 301 considers insulting Ataturk as

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The Belarusian Council of Ministers adopted on 10 February 2007 a new act on the Regulations on Functioning of the Computer Clubs and Internet Cafes that will impose new censorship rules on all the persons that use the public Internet access points.

According to the new regulations, Internet cafe owners or their authorized agents must keep an electronic registry of the domain names of the sites accessed by users. The electronic log should contain at least a 12-month history of all connections. State Security agents, police or state control inspectors are authorized to review the log in the cases listed by the legislation.

In cases of suspicion of infringement of this law, the Internet cafe

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French Internet regulation history seems to repeat itself, as shows a recently unveiled administrative decree project, which aims at creating a "National Commission for the deontology of on-line public communication services".

The Commission would be in charge of elaborating "deontological recommendations" towards professional on- line communication services, including fixed and mobile telecom operators, ISPs, publishing and distributing services. The Commission would also be in charge of attributing "quality labels" to these services.

However, these recommendations would also indirectly apply to the users of these services, through subscribing contractual clauses, especially since a "quality label" may be withdrawn by the

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The European Parliament has voted in its second reading on the Rome II Regulation to reintroduce the rules regarding the defamation by media or publications via the Internet and other electronic networks. The Rome II regulation is establishing the rules on the applicable law to non-contractual obligations. . The member states and media organizations wanted a simple formula to be introduced and not to apply the general principle - the applicable law to be that of the country in which the defamed person lives. That would practically mean that every media company would have to know the privacy and defamation laws of every European country.

At the first reading in July 2005, MEPs had approved a compromise amendment

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Helsinki district court released 31 January 2007 Electronic Frontier Finland (EFFI) from charges on illegal fund raising on the Internet. The board members faced criminal charges and it was further demanded that EFFI transfers all illegal donations totalling over 4000 euros to the state.

The prosecutor, supported by a statement from the Ministry of Interior Affairs, claimed that EFFI's unregistered donation-page as part of their homepages was against the law on the regulation of donation campaigns. The law requires that all campaigns are registered and must report to local police. Many other countries do not have this kind of laws at all.

Mikko Välimäki from law firm Turre Legal, who defended EFFI in the

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Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights' (SCCR) Special Session is taking place right now at Geneva. The meeting (and another in June 2007) aims to fix the proposed Broadcast Treaty so that it could be ratified by the end of this year in a diplomatic conference. If no consensus is found on the content, there will be no conference and - most likely - no treaty at all.

EDRI is participating to the meetings together with other NGOs (EFF, CPTech, IP-justice etc) as an observer. The organizations have prepared together a joint statement ", which is also endorsed by a large number of technology companies and which main message is that nobody has been able to argue why a

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At the beginning of 2007 a ministerial decree was signed by Communications Minister Paolo Gentiloni that obliges Internet Service Providers to block child pornography sites within 6 hours from being announced to do so.

The body that has the responsibility to notify the ISPs on the sites that must be blocked will be "Centro nazionale per il contrasto della pedopornografia" (The National Centre against Child Pornography), coordinated by the Post Police under the supervision of the Ministry of Communications. The Centre has to create and update a list of sites considered as containing child pornography and keep informed those responsible by notifying the ISPs.

The notifying procedure will be established within the Ministry of

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The discussions on the new Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMS) are continuing unabated within the European Union's institutions. With regards to Internet media, the Council of the European Union and the European Parliament are moving in the same direction. The question is how far.

The new Directive proposed by the Commission in December 2005 (COM(2005)646) was meant to modernize the Television without Frontiers Directive (TVWF), which was last updated in 1997. Besides proposed liberalized rules for classic television regarding advertisement or product placement that have been widely discussed, the new Directive also introduces regulation for so called 'non-linear audiovisual media services', including on the Internet -