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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On 5 September 2008, a Danish court decided that two woman that had been taken to court for illegally sharing music by Antipiratgruppen, anti-piracy affiliates, were innocent. The two women claimed they had not been the authors of the infringement, having been subject to WiFi theft.

Antipiratgruppen had sent letters to the two women who had P2P software on their computers, claiming the women had illegally downloaded copyrighted music and asking for compensations up to about 21 000 and 23 000 euro respectively. The women stated clearly that they were not the ones having done the downloading, claiming their Wi-Fi had been piggybacked by unknown persons. Being unaware of the alleged infringements, they believed they

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The European Chapters Coordinating Council of the Internet Society (ISOC-ECC) issued a press release on 5 September 2008 expressing its opposition against the "graduated response" proposed by the so-called HADOPI law presented to the French Council of Ministers in June 2008. The same arguments were also submitted to the European Commission in an Aide Memoire sent on 4 August 2008.

While the issue is under debate in the European Parliament, the Aide Memoire, signed by France, Poland, England, Germany, Wallonia, Belgium, Romania, Luxembourg, Italy, Bulgaria, Finland, Norway, Spain, Netherlands as members of ISOC-ECC, comments upon the "proposed restrictions on access to

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The European Parliament (EP) discussed on 2 September 2008 the draft directives to reform the EU framework on electronic communications (telecom package). Besides the debates on the telecom issues, the MEPs have discussed the role of the ISPs in combating Intellectual Property Rights violations and the modifications to the ePrivacy directive in order to include more provisions on consumer protection and data security.

Some of the amendments that were passed by the EP Committees were challenged by some of the speakers, beliving they could endanger the principle of the neutrality of the Internet. Rebecca Harms (Germany), David Hammerstein (Spain) and Eva-Britt Svensson (Sweden) considered that the

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In an investigation started by the Bergamo Prosecutors, an Order of the Justice for preliminary investigation of the Court of Bergamo was issued on 1 August 2008, asking for the "seizure" of the PirateBay website, hosted outside Italy, for displaying a collection of links to allegedly illegal duplicated material. The order was implemented by 10 August 2008 by forcing Italian Internet providers to block the access to that site, both to its domain, as well as to its associated IP number.

The PirateBay owners quickly reacted and changed their IP address and set up a new website called labaia.org (La Baia means The Bay in Italian). They have also promoted measures to bypass the "blacklisting": "We have already

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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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Christine Albanel, the French Minister of Culture and Communication, has gathered her European homologues for an informal meeting in Versailles on 21 and 22 July 2008 in an attempt to push the French Hadopi law model to be embraced by Europe.

Some of the main issues approached during the meeting were piracy, telecommunications reform, the European Heritage Label project and the illegal trafficking of culturally significant objects. Much of the discussions at the meeting turned around copyright and illegal file sharing over the Internet. Without being discouraged by the very large opposition to the Creation and Internet draft law (so called Hadopi law), the French Minister took again the opportunity to offer Europe the French system as its

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After the letters sent from Virgin Media to its customers on alleged file-sharing activities, British Telecom (BT), the UK's largest broadband provider, has started a similar activity.

The Register has received information from one of the BT subscribers that has received such a letter from the Customer Security Team stating: ""I have received a complaint regarding one of our customers offering copyrighted material over the internet. On investigation, I have found that your account was used to make this offer."

The letter contained evidence put forward by BPI, that was shared by BT with its customer and consisted, in this case, of the P2P programme Ares user agent, a time stamp, a file name and an IP address. The letter provided

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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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The IMCO (Internal Market Committee) and ITRE (Committee on Industry, Research and Energy) committees of the European Parliament (EP) adopted on the 7 July 2008 the Telecom package, including the amendments that were considered by some NGOs as endangering the principle of the neutrality of the Internet.

One of the MEPs supervising the Telecom package, including the amendments to the five directives that should reform the EU legal framework on electronic communications has explained that the vote on these amendments had nothing to do with copyright enforcement: "There has been a great deal of dismay in the committee at the interpretation being put on these amendments.(...) The