EC foresees digital roadblocks
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Broadband inequality and piracy to blame The European Commission has identified unequal broadband provision and piracy as major "roadblocks" to the development of Europe's online creative content industries.â¦
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Opens access to research The European Commission has set aside â¬50m this year to support the establishment of digital repositories for storing scientific data.â¦
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The Internet's rapidly evolving impact on global politics, business and everyday life will be the focus of a conference in Geneva, as decision makers seek to map out future trends and address growing concerns about online security.
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While advance statements to the press, especially in Germany, managed to build up expectations that EU Commissioner Meglena Kuneva's much anticipated program for consumer protection would include measures giving dissatisfied buyers a way to "return" downloaded tracks from iTunes and elsewhere, the actual program released this morning only makes parenthetical references to the Internet and digital music.
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A Bruxelles 'Copyright summit' decide sciopero
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Proposals for EU-wide penalties for counterfeiting face a key vote in the European parliament.
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(InfoWorld) - In a surprise move, the European Commission said Wednesday it is shelving plans to overhaul Europeâs rules on copyright fees, after intense lobbying from France and from groups representing artists and authors. The Commission, the executive body of the European Union, was planning to replace the patchwork of national rules with a Europe-wide code designed to better suit the digital age. Presently most countries impose copyright levies on a wide range of products, from photocopiers to mobile phones, and including recordable formats such as CD-Rs, blank cassettes and even paper. The size of levies varies widely from country to country. Only the U.K., Ireland, and Luxembourg do not impose any such levies. Copyright levies are supposed to compensate artists and authors who donât receive any payment when their copyrighted music, documents, or pictures are duplicated by consumers. The Commission wanted to harmonize the rules and scrap levies on most hardware. Its aim was to reduce the fees, which in some cases increase the price of goods dramatically. For example, in Spain consumers have to pay almost â¬300 ($398) in levies when they buy an 80GB MP3 player; in Austria the equivalent charge is just â¬8, according to the Copyright Levies Reform Alliance (CLRA), a coalition of businesses dedicated to harmonizing and lowering copyright fees in Europe. The Commission said it was abandoning the rule change for now. It had planned to publish a proposal before the end of this year. âMore reflection is needed on this complex issue,â spokeswoman Pia AhrenKilde Hansen told journalists. She wouldnât give a new timetable for the legal proposal. She acknowledged that the French prime minister Dominique de Villepin had written to the Commission earlier this month, urging it to drop the plan but she insisted that the Commission will decide for itself when the proposal will be launched. The Commission has been planning to harmonize copyright levies across the E.U. since 2000. Since then the case for scrapping most levies has grown stronger. Digital rights management software, which allows copyright owners to track the copying of their works, has become commonplace. The Commissionâs climb down sparked an angry reaction from the companies and industry groups pushing for a change to the system. âEuropean industry is deeply disturbed by the European Commissionâs apparent about-face on the planned reform of copyright levies,â said Mark McGann, spokesman for the CLRA in a statement issued Wednesday. âWith this decision, it is clear to industry that the Commission has abandoned any serious efforts to establish transparency, efficiency and fairness in the way these levies are set, collected and distributed,â he added, warning that without the revamp of copyright levies, several large European companies now intend to file official complaints with the Commission that will likely result in a wave of infringement procedures against certain member states. âThe reform of copyright levies would then move from the European executive to the European Court of Justice,â CLRA said in its statement.
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European antitrust regulators worry that Microsoft could dominate the burgeoning market for digital rights management software
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Analysis No delay in EC anti-trust compliance
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When it comes to digital gadgets, Europeans are not impressed by do-it-all devices that play songs and films, keep track of appointments and play video games, a new survey on Monday said.
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BARCELONA, Spain  - Mobile phone operators must  act before July 1 to avoid the European Union imposing lower  prices for texting or surfing the Web via mobile phones when  abroad, the bloc's top telecoms regulator said on Monday.
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BRUSSELS -- A group of some of the world's leading IT and telecommunications companies have warned that Europe could become a "haven for plagiarism" if the European Parliament fails to agree to allow patent protection for inventions implemented by computer.
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Countries that back digital-rights management technology are doomed to lag behind, Linden Research exec says.
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BRUSSELS, Dec 22 (IPS) - Campaigners have hailed the EU decision to postpone  the adoption of controversial new rules for patenting  computer-based inventions as a victory for âEuropean democracyâ.
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Friday's European papers tackle the problems faced by the euro, Ukraine and the reform of the UN.
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In what could be an historic first, the European Commission's new statement of objections to Microsoft for alleged non-compliance with its March 2004 antitrust ruling forwards a novel theory: not that the interoperability information the EC demanded is incomplete, but instead that the communications protocols it describes are not innovative enough for Microsoft to deserve charging royalties for its use.
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FLORENCE Interior ministers from the five largest West European countries have agreed to adopt digital fingerprinting on passports, officials here said, but a second day of talks on Monday found them still deadlocked on a plan to create migrant holding