How does the work of WIPO - the World Intellectual Property Organisation - affect the daily lives of the world's six billion plus consumers? Is WIPO's mission and work inherently exclusive, benefiting only the richer countries and consumers and harming the poor? Does WIPO need a new mission to embrace new information technologies and to benefit poor countries and consumers? These were some of the questions asked at an international workshop organised by the TransAtlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD) in Geneva on 13 and 14 September 2004. The workshop consisted of nine panels, each with five or six speakers, each dealing with a separate aspect. The speakers came from a wide range of backgrounds, there were many lawyers and academic researchers, with others drawn from areas of medicine, arts and civil society, including consumer organisations. There were also government officials from the US and EU countries, while developing country delegates to WIPO were invited as guests (none wished to be panellists). Very creditably, WIPO itself recognised the validity of the issues discussed and top WIPO officials took part in the workshops and sat on several panels.

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.

Reporters Without Borders have published their annual overview of government surveillance and censorship of the internet. The report exposes the crackdown on cyber-dissidents in routinely authoritarian regimes, such as China, but also pays a lot of attention to surveillance in traditionally democratic countries. "The report should not be seen as a kind of ranking of regimes by their repression of the internet, but more as an appeal for vigilance in countries where, as in democracies, it's still possible to expose abuses and flaws. And also an appeal for solidarity with those who are flagrantly deprived of freedom, such as the 70 or so cyber-dissidents currently in prison around the world".

Internet under surveillance 2004 (June 2004)
http://www.rsf.org/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=433

Under rules established by ICANN, any entity that registers a domain name has to provide contact information that can be queried through the WHOIS service - by any data user and for any legitimate purpose. Data users remain anonymous, and there is no enforcement of the few limitations imposed on using the data.

This policy is currently up for review. Three separate task forces are dealing with access modes to WHOIS data, with a review of data elements, and with data accuracy enforcement. Preliminary reports from these Task Forces are open for public comment, until 5 July 2004.

On access and data elements, representatives from ICANN's Non-Commercial Users Constituency (NCUC, representing non-commercial domain name holders) and At-Large Advisory Committee (ALAC, advocating the interests of individual Internet users) have worked to replace unaccountable and anonymous access to sensitive data by a model that is designed to balance data users' and data subjects' interests. Core design goals here are to enable accountability of data users, and to make sure that WHOIS does not become a tool exclusively available to intellectual property-holders and other corporate interests.

One of the highlights of the Free Bitflows conference in Vienna, Austria on 3 and 4 June 2004 was a lecture by Brewster Kahle about the Internet Archive. This digital archive aims at no less than offering universal access to all human knowledge, by collecting digital copies of all old and new public domain books, music, films, software and web-sites. A copy is in San Francisco (US) and a partial copy is in Alexandria (Egypt).

Around 300 BC the classic library of Alexandria contained about 75 percent of all documents that were ever made. Today, the internet archive wishes to secure and disclose a similar percentage of all creative works ever made, but with improved protection against destruction. The final goal of the archive is to have a full copy in 5 or 6 countries and jurisdictions, to be able to survive any war or censorship.

On 26 and 27 March 2004 a conference was held on safe internet in Warsaw, Poland. The conference was organised by the Council of Europe in collaboration with Safeborders, a consortium funded by the European Commission. Focussed on children, the event was meant to 'step up efforts to create a pan-European safer Internet network.' Some 150 participants met in workshops, with many delegates from East Europe and republics of the former Soviet Union.

In his keynote speech, Hanno Hartig from the Council of Europe stressed the need to make a difference between illegal and harmful content and respect the cultural and legal differences between countries. He underlined the difficulty of anonymity online, both as a danger and an essential tool to protect the privacy of children. He also warned that encouraging self-regulation should not force ISPs to curb the freedom of expression. Unfortunately, these nuances were sometimes lost during the workshops and plenary sessions, with speakers denying any difference between for example child pornography and websites about drug use.

During the OECD workshop on spam, held in Brussels on 2 and 3 February, the consumer unions of Europe and the USA (united in the Trans Atlantic Consumer Dialogue) presented the results of a survey amongst 21.102 consumers on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. 96 percent of the people said that either they hated spam or that it annoyed them. 82% of the respondents said that governments should only allow commercial e-mails to be sent if the recipient has agreed in advance to receive them (opt-in).

In spite of this apparent massive wish for opt-in, representatives from the US Federal Trade Commission defended the new opt-out legislation in the United States. This invoked polite criticism from Commissioner Liikanen and less politely worded responses from representatives from ISPs and consumer associations.

Early in November independent experts from all regions of the world met in Geneva to discuss about the fundamental human rights in the information society. The meeting was supported by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), the European Commission, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Government of Mali, Chair of the Human Security Network. The experts produced a paper that was distributed during one of the last preparatory conferences (PrepCom 3A) for the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), that started on 12 November in Geneva. The paper calls on governments to protect all human rights related to the information society; ranging from freedom of expression and information to privacy to intellectual property rights, and from bridging