The European Parliament's LIBE Committee (Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs) organised an interesting opening session of the new parliamentary year on 21 September. For the occasion, the parliamentarians were joined by colleagues from a number of national parliaments. They had invited two speakers representing the opposite poles of EU Justice and Home Affairs policy. First, Gijs de Vries, who was nominated the EU's anti-terrorism co-ordinator in March after the Madrid bombings, followed by Peter Schaar, the chairman of the Article 29 Working Party, which brings together national Data Protection Commissioners from all 25 EU Member States.

Mr. de Vries, who was accorded considerably more speaking time than Mr. Schaar by the LIBE Chairman, French Liberal Jean-Louis Bourlange, spoke on EU counter terrorism policy in very general terms, emphasising his role to support national authorities, not to patronise them. MEPs concerns were mostly on the transposition of measures decided in the EU as part of the policy to combat terrorism in the Union's member states.

The European Commission has decided today, 25 August 2004, to examine in depth the joint acquisition by Microsoft and TimeWarner of ContentGuard. This company, formerly owned by Xerox, is a world market leader in so-called Digital Rights Management technology. It has developed the Extensible Rights Markup Language (XrML). Microsoft has eyed the company for a long time and made considerable investments before announcing last April to couple up with Media Company TimeWarner in order to buy the remainder of the company. In July, Microsoft and TimeWarner filed a request for clearance of the deal with the EU's merger control authorities. After a relatively brief review, the Commission has now decided to examine the planned acquisition in depth. "Under Microsoft's and Time Warner's joint ownership", the Commission declares in a press release issued today, "ContentGuard may have both the incentives and the ability to use its IPR portfolio to put Microsoft's rivals in the DRM solutions market at a competitive disadvantage." The merger controllers, still headed by the Italian Mario Monti, recall former competition cases involving browsers and media players. But they also take other EU objectives with a direct influence on competition issues into account: "This joint acquisition could also slow down the development of open interoperability standards. As such, this would allow the DRM solutions market to 'tip' towards the current leading provider, Microsoft." The Commission must reach a final conclusion within four months from now on, i.e. until 25 January 2005. Most of the investigation will then be headed by the Dutch Commissioner Neelie Kroes, who has a reputation of being more Microsoft-friendly than her predecessor Mr. Monti.

The deadline is nearing for two important consultation rounds from the European Commission, on mandatory data retention and on copyright.

European Digital Rights is working hard on a thorough answer on the EU plans for mandatory retention of all internet and telephony traffic data. The document will be made publicly available on the EDRI website, and EDRI will participate in the public hearing following the consultation on 21 September 2004. But more input, both from the industry and civil society, is urgently needed in order to have any impact on the decision making process. EDRI calls on all readers of this newsletter to send in responses on the consultation and protest against the proposal to store extensive sensitive data about all EU citizens. At the request of Privacy International, the UK lawfirm Covington & Burlington has prepared an extensive legal argument against general data retention, for violating fundamental human rights. Please feel free to use any arguments from this document in your answer, with reference to the original document.

Playing the old Viking game of fox and geese, that seems to have been the guiding principle for EU Member States and Commission President José Manuel Durão Barroso when they put together the group of people who will head the Brussels executive branch for the next five years. In some cases, the future Commissioners embody the exact opposite of what liberal-minded Europeans would consider a qualification.

Rocco Buttiglione, the new Commissioner presiding the Justice, Freedom and Security Directorate General - under the present Commissioner just called 'Justice and Home Affairs' - has a record of defending the impunity of his head of state, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who openly opposed the European arrest warrant for fear of some day becoming subject to such a warrant himself. While still Berlusconi's EU Affairs Minister, Buttiglione spoke out in favour of taking digital fingerprints of all immigrants, as a first step to scanning all Italian residents. Buttiglione was a low-profile backbencher when he was Member of the European Parliament from 1999 to 2004. He did not take on a single report and teached Philosophy instead. He is known as a conservative Catholic who is close to the right-wing 'Communione e liberazione' movement and takes pride in his close links to Pope John Paul II.

According to an article in the UK newspaper The Observer, computer and software manufacturers in Europe are to be forced to introduce new security measures to make it impossible for their products to be used to copy banknotes.

The move, to be drafted into European Union legislation before the end of the year, is presented as a necessary measure against people counterfeiting notes with the help of household equipment like laser printers, home scanners and graphics software.

Anti-counterfeiting software developed by the Central Bank Counterfeit Deterrence Group, an organisation of 27 leading world banks including the European Central Bank, has been distributed free of charge to computer and software manufacturers since the beginning of the year. At present use of the software is voluntary though several companies have incorporated it into their products.

Since the beginning of July, the European Parliament had two weeks to group up fractions and build coalitions. A new pro-EU Centrist and Liberal group has emerged, which will be the third strongest in the European Parliament after the Conservatives and Social Democrats. Due to all the political power game, there was not much time left to discuss digital rights-related issues, even though important decisions were made about the working agenda of the EU institutions for the next months.

The most interesting development was the widespread tendency with national parliaments to make their governments step back from the decision taken on 18 May, adopting the Council Common Position on the patentability of so-called computer-implemented inventions, more accurately known as the the Software Patent Directive. Technically, amendments are still possible to the position taken at that time, because the decision has not yet been translated into all 20 official languages of the EU.

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The Legal Affairs Committee of the European Parliament (JURI) decided today to take the European Commission as well as the Council to court over the final agreement to transfer PNR data to the US without adequate guarantees for data protection.

The committee, which met today (16 June 2004) for an extraordinary meeting during the Parliament's present recession, voted to call upon the Luxembourg Court to defer the Commission's so-called adequacy finding. This finding claims that the data will find the same level of protection in the U.S. as in the EU. The committee also voted to take the international agreement to court that was signed by the EU Council with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on 28 May 2004 (see EDRi-gram 2.11). Today's vote was taken with a two-thirds majority concerning the adequacy finding and 19 to 14 votes concerning the international agreement. This is an even clearer majority than in former votes on the same issue.