The music industry has launched a new wave of lawsuits against individual P2P users in Europe. For the first time individual users were targeted in Finland, Ireland, Iceland and the Netherlands. These countries join Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy and the UK, where litigation started last year.

During a press conference in the Netherlands on 12 April 2005, in the presence of IFPI CEO John Kennedy, the local representative of the entertainment industry Brein announced it would start 32 court cases against individual alleged infringers. In order to obtain the identifying data of the users behind IP-addresses from which music was unlawfully uploaded, Brein will sue five Dutch internet providers (Planet Internet, Het Net, @Home, Wanadoo and Tiscali). These 5 providers had agreed earlier

On 6 and 7 April 2005 a committee of the Council of Europe debated on the merits of a new recommendation on human rights and Internet. On behalf of European Digital Rights Meryem Marzouki from the French digital rights organisation IRIS attended, in fact as the only NGO present. This second meeting of the Multidisciplinary Ad-hoc Committee of Experts on the Information Society (CAHSI) ended with a statement that will be presented to the CoE Committee of ministers, probably to be adopted by the CoE Summit of heads of states in mid May 2005.

The meeting was foremost an intergovernmental meeting, with EDRI in an observer role. Besides government representatives (of which the UK, the Netherlands and Norway were the most active), the secretariat of the group and the Culture and Media divisions of the CoE were present, as well as a

The Finnish Electronic Frontier Foundation is raising alarm about a proposed last-minute change in the new Finnish copyright law that would grant the entertainment industry the right to obtain identifying information about alleged infringers from service providers. The legislative committee of the Finnish parliament produced a statement on 17 April 2005 in which they agreed to change this wish from the right holders into law. On top of that, the committee also proposes that providers should disconnect customers if "the economic damage caused by the actions of the user becomes notable".

Similar to the voluntary agreement closed by the French providers with the entertainment industry, a copyright holder in Finland should be able to get a court order to force an ISP to disconnect a client and divulge his

On 18 April WIPO hosted a seminar in Geneva on copyright and ISP liability. Dominated by representatives of the entertainment industry and international government officials, the highly politicised seminar ended with the conclusion that more legislation was indeed necessary. The main issue however remained unsolved; whether this legislation should provide stronger protection for the fundamental rights and freedoms of all internet users, or whether this legislation should further facilitate the entertainment industry in hunting down individual internet users.

The opening keynote speeches by Lilian Edwards and Charlotte Waelde from the AHRB Research Centre in Intellectual Property and Technology of the University of Edinburgh provided the audience with an excellent overview of all the issues related to provider liability for content provided or

The Dutch association of criminal defence lawyers (NVSA) has lost a court case (preliminary proceedings) demanding an immediate stop to the practice of wiretapping their confidential telephone conversations with clients. On 15 March 2005 the administrative Court of the Hague ruled that these conversations do not per definition fall under the professional secrecy. There is a specific decree in the Netherlands that allows for the wiretapping of lawyers. First a full report of the wiretap on a suspect is made and read by the specific prosecutor responsible for the case. If the prosecutor concludes that the report contains confidential conversations with a lawyer, he can decide to have those parts deleted en removed from the file.

The lawyers association, supported by a destructive report by the Dutch

Publication by the Development and Statistics Directorate of the English Home Office of the results of the first major research into the application of CCTV in the UK. The general conclusion about the effects on criminality is that camera surveillance is a powerful instrument, but it must be acknowledged camera's are used in widely different contexts. It looks like a simple fix, but is much more complicated in reality.

"All the systems had the broad objective of reducing crime. Out of the 13 systems evaluated six showed a relatively substantial reduction in crime in the target area compared with the control area, but only two showed a statistically significant reduction relative to the control, and in one of these cases the change could be explained by the presence of confounding variables. Crime increased in seven areas but this could not be attributed to CCTV. The findings in these seven areas were inconclusive as a range of variables could account for the changes in crime levels, including fluctuations in crime rates caused by seasonal, divisional and national trends and additional initiatives."

On 4 February 2005 the appeal court of Paris has extended the general obligations for data retention to companies. According to the verdict, like internet providers all companies are obliged to store traffic data originating from their employees, to allow identification of e-mails with illegal contents sent from company machines. The verdict is ominous since France does not have a specific law decreeing data retention.

The court decision follows proceedings from the company World Press Online (WPO) against the bank BNP Paribas. Two commercial partners from WPO received an litigious e-mail about the company at the end of 2003, sent from a Yahoo e-mail address. WPO tracked the IP-address back to a branch from the bank in France and demanded to know which employee had used the specific computer. BNP didn't reply at first. WPO instigated a case and BNP was ordered on 12 October 2004 by the commercial court of Paris to hand over the requested information. BNP appealed, but lost again and was forced to hand-over data about their employees.

The Dutch ministry of defence is planning to build a large facility to intercept civilian and military satellite communications. The Echelon-like site at Burum, in the north of the Netherlands, will have 15 dishes and listen to telephone, fax and internet telecommunications. The large streams of intercepted information will be examined by a new intelligence service, the National Sigint Organisation (NSO). This organisation will become the third secret service in the Netherlands next to the already existing military and the civilian intelligence service.

The Dutch government wants to drastically expand it signals intelligence capabilities. Until now satellite snooping is done through a two dish facility at Zoutkamp. The ministry of Defence first tried to expand the existing location but was blocked in court by people living nearby. The court ruled that provisions in the municipal land-use plan would conflict with such a large military installation. The ministry also couldn't counter safety concerns. The new site at Burum is actually a commercial satellite ground station operated by Xantic, in which Dutch telecommunication company KPN has a 65% share.