The European Commission this week started providing some insight into its plans for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) – in an event in the European Parliament organised by Dutch Liberal MEP, Marietje Schaake and in a “civil society” meeting in the Commission itself.

Both meetings started very promisingly. The Commission explained that it wasn't seeking to harmonise intellectual property legislation in both jurisdictions and said that it would only include such issues where a problem was identified by stakeholders – just a narrow range of issues and only “geographic indicators” have so far been selected. So, great, only identified problems would be addressed.

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Deutsch: Griechenland: Justiz muss über Netzsperren durch ISPs entscheiden

AEPI, the Greek Society for the Protection of Intellectual Property, has filed an action in court to have several major torrent sites, among which KickAssTorrents, isoHunt, 1337x and H33T, blocked by ISPs, according to a report from Torrentfreak.

The Greek anti-piracy group AEPI has first filed a temporary injunction against several ISPs (including OTE, Wind, Vodafone, Forthnet, Hellas Online, On Telecoms and the academic GRNET) to force them to block the respective sites by IP and DNS.

In an action that has become known as “A Monster from Rome”, the Italian Public Prosecutor of Rome ordered on 15 April 2013 the blocking of 27 file-sharing related sites at the request of Sunshine Pictures, the Italian distributor of the French animated film “A Monster in Paris”.

The list which has been made public includes mainly storage and streaming sites such as Rapidgator, one of the world’s largest file-hosting sites, Uploaded, BitShare, NowVideo, NowDownload, VideoPremium, QueenShare and ClipsHouse.

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Deutsch: Schwedische Polizei will härter gegen File-Sharer vorgehen

In a recent report, Sweden’s National Police Board proposes measures meant to increase its performance in fighting copyright infringements, as a result of meetings with entertainment company rightsholders.

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Deutsch: DFRI verlangt fehlende ACTA-Dokumente von EP-Präsident Schulz

Swedish EDRi-member DFRI (Föreningen för digitala fri- och rättigheter) has asked the president of the European Parliament about a question from the Court of Justice of the European Union to the Commission that, according to a Commission spokesperson, made the Commission withdraw its referral of ACTA to the Court.

The Commission has stated that "the question asked by the Court of Justice as well as the letter of the Commission of 20 December 2012 have been served also on the European Parliament."

DFRI boa

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Deutsch: Google soll Löschanträge löschen

Google has recently refused to comply with the take down requests sent by several copyright holders asking for the taking down of their own take down requests (under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act - DMCA) which have now reached almost 20 million per month.

The reason for these requests is that by Google’s publishing the take down requests, there is actually a public index of links to alleged infringing material, thus the take down requests becoming themselves infringing material.

It is possible that these notices might be a by-product of the automate

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Deutsch: Online-Piraterie nicht schuld an rückläufigen Musikumsätzen

As continuously argued by different IT specialists, digital freedom activists and organisations during the last few years, online piracy does not affect music industry revenues, as it is shown by a new research performed by The Institute for Prospective Technological Studies which is part of European Commission’s Joint Research Centre.

After having examined the browsing habits of 16 000 Europeans, the researchers found there is actually a positive relationship between online piracy and visits to legal music s

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Deutsch: Urheberrecht in Spanien: Neuer Vorstoß für höhere Strafen

The Spanish Council of Ministers approved on 22 March 2013 the draft reform of the Intellectual Property Law, also known as Lassalle law, which is meant to punish more harshly some breaches of intellectual property rights.

According to the draft law, the websites infringing copyright on a large-scale will face fines of up to 300 000 Euro.