Dear Members of the European Parliament,

We welcome the various statements by the EU to incorporate citizen's interests within the policy-making process for the Internet and we would like to draw your attention to some serious concerns we have in respect to the Telecoms Package, which is about to enter the Second Reading stage in the European Parliament.

Our concerns relate to those amendments to the Telecoms Package which affect the Internet and Internet users.

(Dieser Artikel ist auch in deutscher Sprache verfügbar)

Civil liberties groups La Quadrature du Net, European Digital Rights (EDRi), AK Vorrat, and Netzpolitik.org are urging the European Parliament to heed advice given by the European Data Protection Supervisor Peter Hustinx and scrap plans dubbed "voluntary data retention".

"A proposal currently discussed in the European Parliament as part of the 'telecom package' would allow providers to collect a potentially unlimited amount of sensitive, confidential communications data including our telephone and e-mail contacts, the geographic position of our mobile phones and the websites we visit on the Internet", warns Patrick Breyer of German privacy watchdog AK Vorrat.

The European Parliament is being asked to nearly double the term of copyright afforded to sound recordings. Industry lobbyists suggest that extending copyright term will help increase the welfare of performers and session musicians. But the Term Extension Directive, which will be voted on by the Legal Affairs Committee in a few weeks’ time, will do no such thing. Instead it will hand millions of euros over to the world’s four major record labels, money that will come direct from the pockets of European consumers. The majority (80%) of recording artists will receive between €0.50 - €26 a year.

Act Now to Protect Freedom of Expression Online:
- Sign up in support to this EDRI statement (NGOs and groups from non CoE member States also welcome)

On October 10, 2007, EDRI issued a statement to express its serious concerns over a new Council of Europe Recommendation on 'promoting freedom of expression and information in the new information and communications
environment'.

As other related instruments are currently in preparation by the CoE, EDRI calls for NGOs and groups from all over the world to sign up in support of EDRI statement and take further action to help avoid the risk of more damages to freedom of expression and information in the online world.

Read EDRI Statement and Act Now to Protect Freedom of Expression Online:
- EDRI Statement: 'New Council of Europe Recommendation fails to uphold online
freedom of expression' (PDF). Also available in the following languages: Čeština, Deutsch, Español, Français, Italiano, Македонски

The campaign for support for EDRI-gram has been very successful. After an urgency call for pledges in the last 2005 issue of EDRI-gram, kind donators have pledged a little over 2.000 euro in support. On top of that, the Open Society Institute (Soros) kindly offered a donation of 1.500 euro. Combined with the 4.000 euro scraped together by EDRI itself, EDRI is pleased to announce the survival of EDRI-gram in 2006. The new editor, Bogdan Manolea from EDRI-member APTI in Romania, has agreed to produce 24 editions in 2006.

After 5 years of fighting against plans for mandatary data retention, EDRI is deeply disappointed that a majority in the European Parliament has adopted a law decreeing very broad and long retention of telephony and internet traffic data, with access granted for all sorts of undefined crimes. Please visit the special Campaign WIKI for all details and relevant documents.

The EDRI and XS4ALL petition against data retention is closed and has been offered to Jean Marie Cavada, the chairman of the Europarliament committee on civil liberties and Alexander Alvaro, the Europarl rapporteur on data retention.

The petition has attracted over 58.000 signatures, of which over 21.000 from the Netherlands (where the campaign was launched), almost 7.000 from Germany and almost 6.000 from Finland.

All previous EDRI-gram articles about data retention http://www.edri.org/issues/privacy/dataretention