A roundtable on online retailing with the interested private companies, including online music providers, and consumers organisations took place at the European Commission in Brussels on 17 September 2008 with competition commissioner Neelie Kroes and internal market commissioner Charlie McCreevy.

Ms Kroes expressed her concern regarding the barriers in buying music online: "Why is it possible to buy a CD from an online retailer and have it shipped to anywhere in Europe, but it is not possible to buy the same music, by the same artist, as an electronic download with similar ease? (...) Why do pan-European services find it so difficult to get a pan-European license? Why do new, innovative services find licensing to be such a hurdle?"

The commissioner believes there are many reasons for this situation,

The case of Sharemula.com, the eDonkey website publishing links allowing users to download movies, music and software has been recently dismissed by the Provincial Court of Madrid which ruled that the website was operating legally.

The case had been brought to court by the Federación Antipiratería (Anti-piracy Federation) in 2006 when 15 people were arrested in Spain in relation with the operation of the site. The Spanish Brigade of Technological Investigations had claimed that the site was illegal and asked for its closure.

A year ago, a Madrid court dismissed the case deciding that the site and its administrators had not infringed any law as the site included no illegal content. It had only links to P2P downloads which had no commercial purposes either.

The entertainment industry, including Columbia, Disney Company Iberia,

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The telecoms package seminar on the 27 August 2008 in the European Parliament arranged by Swedish MEP Christofer Fjellner had a remarkably large audience. Over 100 persons came to listen to the five speakers from both industry and civil society.

Over all, the speakers called for better understanding of the so called "copyright amendments" to the package that allegedly have been introduced to the detriment of the 'completion of the internal market' for the telecoms industry. Netzpolitik.org was also streaming the event.

After the introduction by MEP Fjellner, Monica Horten from Westminster University made clear the new technology "Deep Packet Inspection" potentially could be used to censor the Internet in Europe just as it

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New voices from the major copyright experts in the European universities and research centers question the current EU proposals of extension of the copyright term for the performing artists and sound recordings.

As previously covered in the past EDRi-gram, the first letter was addressed to EU Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and sent on 18 July 2008 by the leading European centres for intellectual property research that explained that the new measures "will damage European creative endeavour and innovation beyond repair."

Professor Bernt Hugenholtz, Director of the Institute for Information Law (IViR) that was commissioned by the EC to draft two major studies on the EU

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UK consultation on legislative options to address illicit P2P file-sharing
http://www.berr.gov.uk/consultations/page47141.html

Other opinions
http://www.openrightsgroup.org/2008/07/24/government-to-consult-on-leg...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/25/three_strikes_dead_hurrah

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On 16 July 2008, disregarding the well substantiated findings and opinions of the Amsterdam Institute for Information Law, the Cambridge Study for the UK Government and the Bournemouth University statement signed by 50 leading academics in June 2008, the European Commission (EC) adopted an initiative proposing the extension of the copyright term for the recorded performances as well as records.

Actually, two initiatives were adopted by the European Commission related to copyright, proposing the extension of the copyright term for the recorded performances and phonograms and the harmonisation of the copyright term to cover co-written works as well. The EC also adopted a Green Paper on Copyright in the Knowledge Economy.

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The Belgium newspaper Association Copiepresse has initiated a legal complaint against the European Commission (EC) arguing that it infringes its copyright through the NewsBrief and NewsExplorer aggregation services.

Copiepresse became famous for its copyright suit against Google and other search engines claiming copyright infringement over the aggregation services done by the search engines. The association has initiated a new action in the Belgian Court of Seizures considering that the European Commission is counterfeiting its member's news articles by using small part of them in order to prepare a news collation marketed as NewsBrief and NewsExplorer.

The Belgium Court rejected the Copiepresse claim, confirming the EC opinion

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With France taking over the presidency of the European Union on 1 July 2008, the French Minister of Culture, Christine Albanel, wants to get a consensus in the fight against p2p downloading by translating the French model to the entire Europe.

Christine Albane presented on 19 June to the French Council of Ministers her proposal for the controversial Internet and Creation law, initiated first by Denis Olivennes, former CEO of Fnac, designed to fight online piracy, mainly through the implementation of the so-called "three-strikes" scheme. A newly-created independent authority, entitled HADOPI (Haute Autorité pour la diffusion des oeuvres et la protection des droits sur Internet), is to be

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As a continuation of the actions started in March 2008, and despite opinions that ISPs should not act as an Internet police, the major British record labels represented by British Phonographic Industry (BPI) and Virgin Media, UK's largest provider of home broadband, have joint forces in a campaign meant to fight illegal music downloads.

Virgin Media has started warning Internet users illegally downloading music that they may be prosecuted, by sending letters to thousands of households where such activities have taken place.

This appears to be the first step in the attempt of BPI to get ISPs to implement a "three strikes and out" rule, meaning warning and ultimately disconnecting the estimated 6.5 million customers whose accounts are used

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The Helsinki Court of Appeal overturned the initial decision taken by the Helsinki District Court ruling that Content Scrambling System (CSS) used in DVD movies is "ineffective".

The decision of the Court of Appeal was taken a year after the first ruling concluded that "CSS protection can no longer be held 'effective' as defined in law."

The defendant's counsel Mikko Välimäki explains on his blog that the Appeal Court said that circumventing an access control would have been lawful. But the court considered that the defendants circumvented a full copy protection system (CSS), not just an access control, which is actually wrong.

Also Välimäki points out that the court considered that "it is ok to