
Intellectual Property Enforcement
The French Government acts like a bulldog with its three strikes law
Nicolas Sarkozy and the French Government want to go on with the new three strikes draft law (called also Hadopi 2) which was presented to the Council of Ministers on 24 June 2009.
The emergency procedure has been initiated and therefore the two chambers will have only one reading for the text.
Swedish court: IP addresses are personal data
The Swedish Supreme Administrative Court ruled on 18 June that the IP addresses are personal data in a case regarding APB (the Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau, Antipiratbyrån), a lobby group representing copyright owners.
However, from the comments following the judgement, it became clear that this ruling will not stop the implementation of the Swedish IPRED Directive or the way the copyright holder representatives record and keep IP addresses in order to identify alleged file-shares.
Norway will not chase file-sharers
The Norwegian data protection authority has decided that ISPs had to delete all IP address-related data just 3 weeks after collection, a decision that will make difficult to chase file-sharers.
The regulator started with two ISPs, Tele2 and Lyse Tele but the decision, subject by the Personal Data Act, will apply to all ISPs in Norway. As Norway is not a member of the European Union, it is not bound to comply to the European data retention directive which says that this type of data must be held for at least 6 months. In Norway, now, data retention can go from a few days to five months.
The Norwegian telecom regulator has also recently ruled that the identity of file-sharers can be disclosed to copyright holders only by court order.
Judge unbiased, no retrial for The Pirate Bay
On 25 June 2009, Sweden's Court of Appeal ruled that judge Norström in The Pirate Bay (TPB) case was not biased as the lawyers representing TPB founders had claimed. Therefore there will be no retrial for TPB in Stockholm District Court.
The TPB lawyers had accused Norström of being in a conflict of interests as he was a member of several organizations funded by the recording industry organization IFPI. The Court of Appeal acknowledged that the judge was a member of organisations acting in the interests of rights holders, but emphasized that copyright holders benefited of constitutional protection under the Swedish law. "We have reached the conclusion that we do not agree with the conflict of interest claim," said appeals court judge Anders Eka to news agency TT.
Rapidshare forced by the court to filter more than 5000 tracks
The file-sharing site Rapidshare.de has recently lost another case to the German copyright society GEMA, being ordered by the Regional Court in Hamburg to "proactively filter" more than 5000 tracks from GEMA's catalogue.
In January 2008, another regional court in Düsseldorf had already found that RapidShare was responsible for what its users uploaded to the service. Hence, RapidShare implemented a screening process and maintained hashes of files that were pulled down for infringement but GEMA was not contented with this and went back to court.
GEMA created a software that can search web forums and extract links to content that seem to infringe GEMA's copyrights but Rapidshare complained that the software did not work.
The telecoms ministers rejected the telecom package as adopted by the EP
This article is also available in:
Deutsch: Die Telekomminister lehnen das Telekompaket in der vom EP angenommenen...
The European Commission continues to pressure the Council and the new European Parliament to rapidly adopt the telecoms package without a proper scrutiny of the law or any consideration of the implications of Amendment 138.
At the Luxembourg meeting on 11 June 2009, the telecoms ministers decided to reject the telecom package in the form adopted by the European Parliament in the second reading on 6 May 2009, thus proposing a new round of negotiations.
The ministers consider the Parliament has breached the earlier compromise reached with the Council on the telecoms package as a whole, obviousl
The French Constitutional Council censures the 3 strikes law
This article is also available in:
Deutsch: Der Französische Verfassungsrat zensiert das 3 Treffer-Gesetz
As a result of the appeal of the Socialist Party, the French Constitutional Council decided on 10 June 2009 that 3 strikes (known also as Hadopi) draft law was infringing the Constitution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen from 1789 and rejected the most important parts of the text.
French Government hurries to put HADOPI law into application
This article is also available in:
Deutsch: Französische Regierung drängt auf Umsetzung des HADOPI-Gesetzes
No sooner has the three strikes law been adopted that the French government issued CCAPs (special administrative specifications) and CCTPs (special technical specifications) which were sent by the Ministry of Culture to the candidate enterprises to put into function the information system of HADOPI.
The call for tenders was sent since the beginning of the year even before the Hadopi law was adopted, the notification date having been set for 5 June 2009 with a deadline on 1 July 2009 for a first prototype of the graduate response system.
