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The European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) has shown serious concerns in his opinion on the Commission's new Council Framework Decision proposal regarding the protection of personal data processed in the framework of police and judicial co-operation in criminal matters.

Although appreciative of the German presidency's efforts, Peter Hustinx advised the Council against adopting the proposal considering it failed to provide appropriate data protection. EDPS believes that a Framework Decision on the protection of personal data in the third pillar is essential in the development of an area of freedom, security and justice and that "the growing importance of the police and judicial cooperation in criminal

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The Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED2), with the changes made by a report produced by Nicola Zingaretti (PES), was voted by the European Parliament in its first reading today with a vote a 374 in favour, 278 against and 17 abstentions.

Unfortunately, the suggestions from an alliance of libraries, consumers and innovators, including the 8 000 signatories of the petition at copycrime.eu were not considered by the Parliament, although the vote was much tighter than anticipated.

The scope of the directive still includes trade names, database and design rights, along with the copyright and trademarks. Liabilities for software and service providers are possible by criminalising also the inciting of an

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As some of our readers already know, the biggest digital civil rights NGO from the United States has opened this year a new office in Brussels to work with EU policy issues. EFF's new European Affairs Coordinator, Erik Josefsson, was previously the president of the Swedish chapter of Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII.se) and has worked in cooperation with EDRI on various digital rights issues.

EDRI welcomes EFF Europe in the European digital rights arena and looks forward for a fruitful collaboration on the important subjects for European policy that are debated. We thought it could be useful for our readers to find more info from the main source about what EFF Europe looks into in the

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The Commission received these days also a totally new draft of the Framework Decision on data protection in police and judicial cooperation. The proposal was sent by Germany as the EU Council President and reffers to data protection in the security sector.

The draft, made public by Statewatch, includes the establishment of an overriding regulatory authority for all the database systems for criminal prosecution, coordinated by the EU Council and is mainly aimed at ensuring the legal sharing of data between criminal prosecutors.

Germany has however included in the proposal a clause that would implement the sharing of police data with non-member states even if the framework

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The European Commission presented its new proposal for the radio frequency identification (RFID) tags strategy for Europe after one year of consultations. The strategy will be drafted in cooperation with a Stakeholder Group to be created and Article 29 Working Party.

An EU study had been initiated after a 6-months period of consultations that had shown concerns related to the use of RFID tags especially regarding public awareness and fears that the system would affect privacy. The study advised on the necessity to assure the public that the tags would not turn into a large-range surveillance system and that people would have control on the information included in the tags.

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After the first reading in the European Parliament of the new proposed Television without Frontiers directive, the European Commission has made the new consolidated text public on 9 March 2007 .

The initial proposal was criticized by Internet media specialists and some significant changes were adopted by the European Parliament in December 2006 during the first reading. The changes are now incorporated in the consolidated text presented by the Commission. They include the initial proposal that those non-TV audiovisual services, comprising so-called non-linear or on-demand services, will be made subject to some basic content regulation.

The Commission wants to push the draft directive hoping that it will be

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Instead of scouts cookies, evildoers sell copied Britney Spears CDs and counterfeit medicines manufactured using child labour, and that must be stopped, in particular since legit Britney Spears CDs cause enough harm as it is and everyone is tired of Viagra spam. The Criminalisation Directive, also known as IPRED2 or the directive on "criminal measures aimed at ensuring the enforcement of intellectual property rights", is officially geared at combating these organised criminals and terrorists by hitting them where it hurts: fund raising.

The Commission proposed to concretise this aim by going after secondary telephone directory providers, farmers with fields cross- pollinated by genetically modified crops, and MP3 player

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A group of Microsoft’s rivals has filed a complaint against the Seattle-based company for using its new product Vista, under release these days, to unfairly continue and even strengthen its dominant position on the market.

The group including IBM, Nokia, RealNetworks, Sun Microsystems, Adobe, Corel, Opera, Oracle, Red Hat and Linspire complained to the European Commission saying that the computer language used in the Vista software, called XAML, was "positioned to replace HTML," the standard language used to publish documents on the Internet. XAML would be dependent on Microsoft Windows thus discriminating against other systems like Linux. The group also stated that OOXML, a platform file format that governs the way in which