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The summer special session of United Nation's World Intellectual Property Organization's (WIPO) Standing Committee on Copyright and Related rights (SCCR) ended with an outcome that effectively killed the proposed treaty for protection of broadcast organisations (Broadcast Treaty). The committee called off the Diplomatic Conference that was supposed to take place in November to approve the treaty. Even if the treaty remains on the agenda of SCCR, it is unlikely that there will be any serious push to overcome the vastly different positions on key issues relating to objectives, scope and object of protection.

There were several reasons for this outcome. The treaty was unwanted by

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European Digital Rights Initiative (EDRI) has joined more than 100 individuals and organizations from around the world in signing the petition "Keep The Core Neutral" urging ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers ) to resist efforts to evaluate applications for new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) based on non-technical criteria such as ideas about morality and competing national political objectives.

The "Keep the Core Neutral" coalition is concerned that ICANN's draft policy includes evaluation criteria that go well beyond technical considerations of operational stability and security and exceeds the organization's mandate of technical coordination.

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During 11-15 June 2007, the Provisional Committee on Proposals for a WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) Development Agenda (PCDA) had meetings during which WIPO members negotiated agreements on several proposals for new activities of the UN organization.

"This is a major achievement. It's a complete overhaul of the WIPO concept, broadening it to reflect society's growing concern with ownership of technologies and knowledge, and its effects for the future, both in developed and developing countries" was the statement of a participant in the meetings.

Six clusters of proposals, labelled A to F, were under discussion during the meeting on issues such as open collaborative projects, intellectual property

ITU and UNCTAD announced the publication of the World Information Society Report 2007
http://www.itu.int/osg/spu/publications/worldinformationsociety/2007/r...

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The German non-profit organization "Netzwerk Freies Wissen" (Free Knowledge Network) heavily criticizes the goals of the conference held by the G8 states' ministers of justice starting on 23 May 2007.

The most important item on the agenda is a stronger enforcement of intellectual property. For this reason the Network, together with other organizations and private persons from many countries will present the "Civil Society declaration on the G8 summit 2007 and intellectual property rights".

"The goal of this declaration is to point out the severe problems in this area, which have grown throughout the world in the last years", says Petra Buhr, speaker for the network. "Furthermore we demand radical changes in the

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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 broadcast treaty was the only item on the agenda of the three-day special session of WIPO’s standing committee on copyright and related rights. (SCCR). At the meeting it became clear that no-one really knew how to proceed with the negotiations. The chairman Jukka Liedes (Finland) tried to solve the gridlock by distributing several “non-papers”, which included a new language for the treaty, which he aimed to be a “minimalistic” approach to the treaty. This approach did not have too much success as many of the delegates wanted to use the existing documents as the basis of further negotiations.

From the NGOs-perspective, the positive side of the meeting was that there

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From 30 October to 2 November approximately 1500 people gathered in Athens, Greece for the first global internet governance forum (IGF). The IGF is one of the outcomes of the Tunis Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in 2005, with the aim of creating a new global policy space to advance discussions related to internet governance. Since the ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) stalemate could not be resolved at the Tunis Summit, the participants agreed to establish a process to continue the debate, which is a classical way to deal with issues that are politically difficult. So the idea of the IGF was born and actually first proposed by civil society actors active in the WSIS negotiations. Civil