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Commissioner Charlie McCreevy's announcement in February 2008 that he proposes to nearly double the term of copyright protection for sound recordings from 50 to 95 years came as a shock to UK digital rights campaigners. Back in 2006, here in the UK, the case against copyright term extension was robustly made - by campaigners such as my organisation, the Open Rights Group, and more importantly, by economists from one of the UK's leading universities. It led to a firm commitment from our Government that they would never seek to extend copyright term retrospectively.

There is no case for copyright term extension. Term extension would reduce, yet again, the size of the public domain, harming public

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On 3 January 2008, the European Commission (EC) launched a public consultation for the preparation of a recommendation on Creative Content Online to be adopted by the European Parliament and Council that calls for a common legal environment for online content, proposing multi-territory licences.

In the opinion of the European Commission, EU policies should support the rapid implementation of "new services and related business models for the creation and circulation of European content and knowledge online."

As a result of the public consultation on "Content Online in the Single Market" launched by the EC in July 2006, there were several calls for the encouragement of the cooperation between industry, right holders and

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During a conference on creative rights and cultural diversity organised by EUobserver on 6 December 2007, José Manuel Barroso, the President of the European Commission, stated the European Commission (EC) was not yet ready to take any short-term decision related to the management of the online music market.

Despite new calls at the conference to review the voluntary guidelines on the collective management of online music rights issued in 2005 by the EC and supported by collective rights managers (CRMs), Barroso said the EC needed some time to find the right solutions based on a balanced, sustainable consensus of all the involved stakeholders.

The guidelines are not legally binding for the EU states and, according to

The representatives of the European Commission (EC) had a closed meeting last week with Apple and other four major record companies, regarding the different pricing schemes used in different countries in Europe.

The meeting should have lasted for two days, but two record companies EMI Group and Warner Music Group decided they didn't need to show up in the oral hearings, considering the EC had been "persuaded that they are not responsible for how Apple prices songs". Therefore the meeting lasted just one day with Apple's iTunes global president Eddy Cue and general counsel Donald Rosenberg that joined Universal Music and Sony BMG.

According to a Reuters source, an Apple representative said during the meeting that "there was nothing in its contract with Universal obliging it to operate national stores or to set a higher price in countries such as

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Denis Kvasov, head of Mediaservices, owner of music website Allofmp3.com was acquitted by a Moscow court after having been brought to trial by entertainment companies EMI Group Plc, NBC Universal and Time Warner Inc. for copyright offences.

On 15 August 2007, district judge Yekaterina Sharapova ruled that Denis Kvasov had not infringed the Russian law. "The prosecution did not succeed in presenting persuasive evidence of his involvement in infringing copyright law," said the judge. She considered the arguments of the plaintiffs as unconvincing and contradictory. Also, no evidence was produced to prove the purchase and storage of counterfeit phonograms or the conversion of the

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On 10 July 2007, the EU Commission received a letter from a large group including some of Europe's biggest media groups and telecom companies urging for the rejection of an offer made by EU national royalty-collecting societies to settle an anti-trust case.

The Commission started examining a model contract for public performance rights between the collecting societies members of CISAC (the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers) as a result of a complaint made in 2003 by digital music distribution platform Music Choice Europe.

The complaint concerned the fact that the authors were obliged to transfer their rights only to their own national collecting society and that the

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Public consultation on the Regulation regarding public access to European Parliament, Council and Commission documents (Regulation 1049/2001).
http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/07/511&...
http://ec.europa.eu/transparency/revision/index_en.htm

For Dutch readers - Petition for more flexible contracts for members of the rights collecting society which allow them to choose the conditions under which to release their own music and use CC licenses.
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/bumawakeup/

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On 18 April 2007, a copyright handling model for digitalised works was agreed by EU High Level Expert Group on Digital Libraries including major stakeholders such as the Federation of European Publishers, the British Library, the German national library and Google.

The High Level Expert Group, founded in 2006 by Viviane Reding, the Commissioner for Information Society and Media, advises the Commission on issues regarding digitisation, online accessibility and digital preservation of cultural material. This action is part of the European Digital Library initiative adopted by the European Commission in June 2005 in order to preserve European cultural and scientific heritage making them available

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In the case brought by Copiepresse, a trade group representing 17 Belgium newspapers, against Google for publishing links to newspaper articles without permission, the Brussels Tribunal upheld its previous decision and ruled that Google violated the copyright law.

Google was ordered to remove Belgian newspaper content from its search engine results. The search engine is no longer allowed to refer to articles, pictures or drawings of Copiepress members without previous agreements that are to be negociated, non-compliance being fined by 25 000 Euros per day.

The ruling also says that any other copyright holder could get in touch with Google and notify its copyright infringement. In this case Google has

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By Legislative Decree no.140 of 16 March 2006, with more than one month before the deadline, Italy implemented Directive 2004/48/EC on the enforcement of intellectual property rights (IPRED) by amending law no.633/1941, which has already been the subject of so many modifications since its inception that several parties are calling for its complete re-drafting.

The most notable modifications to the Italian copyright law include the presumption of ownership of the neighbouring rights, as it was already the case for author's rights; the possibility for collective and "representative" organizations to independently promote judicial actions in order to defend their members' rights; the possibility to ask judges to