EU seeks e-trade without borders
632936
The European Commission unveils plans to make people feel safer buying things online from other countries.
469574
The European Union urged member states  on Tuesday to sign up to schemes to launch work on a new  European heavy transport helicopter and next-generation  satellite observation system from late 2008.
545892
The European Commission is to start monitoring China, Ukraine and Russia to see if they are making genuine efforts to stop counterfeit goods.
37255
The EU could seek free trade agreements with leading Asian economies as part of a radically revised trade policy.
339059
The European Commission will make  proposals by mid-2008 aimed at creating a single European  market in the burgeoning sector of online music, films and  games, it said on Thursday.
181444
A new strategy for funding technology research in the European Union calls for the E.U. to pool its vast resources with those from private industry and individual member states in a public-private partnership.
550600
Easier cross-border business for SMEs The European Commission wants to create a form of company across Europe to make cross-border business easier to conduct for small firms.â¦
292129
Trade, apart from peace and prosperity, is always held up as the great EU success story. If only the EU could get its act together in other areas, such as foreign affairs, it would be a global power, the argument runs.
83905
Despite some progress, trade between the 25 European Union nations needs to become easier and simpler to jump-start the EU's flagging economy, the EU's internal market chief said Thursday.
441803
EU interior ministers began talks on  Tuesday on how to deal with illegal migrants stranded at sea  amid what Malta called a &quot;free for all&quot; among member states  about who should take them in.
534023
European Union leaders pressed other trading powers on Friday to move to wrap up more than five years of global trade talks, making clear the EU would also pursue the option of bilateral deals with Asian partners.
711966
Officials call on international community to open crossing points for trade.
340164
The European Union wants greater access to the Chinese market, especially in the auto and textile industries, a ranking official with the European Commission said.
514313
(InfoWorld) - European Commissioner Charlie McCreevy set out his plan for a single approach to patents across the European Union on Thursday, ahead of an Oct. 12 vote on the matter in the European Parliament, winning plaudits from some erstwhile opponents. Previous attempts to introduce European legislation on patents, or to extend existing legislation to encompass software, haveÂ met stiff opposition. McCreevy spelled out his two-track approach in a speech to the Parliament in Strasbourg, France, on Thursday. His ultimate goal is a single patent system across the E.U., but he is also pushing for improvements to the existing patent regime, governed by the European Patent Office (EPO) in Munich. The EPO sees two problems with the existing regime: the lack of a single jurisdiction for patents in Europe, and the prohibitive costs involved in translating the patents into all European languages. Its answer to the jurisdiction question is the European Patent Litigation Agreement (EPLA), which many opponents of patents for software-related inventions abhor. The EPLA would create one patent court for patent disputes in all countries that are members of the EPO, which include all 25 E.U. member states except Malta. In his speech on Thursday, McCreevy appeared to take some of the EPLA opponents' concerns to heart. "I recognize there are legitimate doubts and concerns" about the EPLA, he told members of the Parliament. Florian Mueller, coordinator of a lobby group opposed to software patents, welcomed the Commissioner's approach. Mueller's group helpedÂ defeat a proposed European directiveÂ last year that could have enabled patenting of software. "During that long debate about the software patent directive, our concerns were always ridiculed by the Commission, making us out to be paranoid. Times seem to have changed," he said in a blog posting Friday. "McCreevy conceded that the proposed European Patent Litigation Agreement leaves a lot to be desired in its present form," he added. Mueller, along with many other critics of Europe's patent regime from the open-source and free software communities, and members of the European Parliament from four mainstream political parties, believe that the plans for an EPLA will simply duplicate the approach to patenting championed by the EPO. This regime has granted numerous software-related patents and is considered to be much more lax in the way it hands out patent monopolies than the national patent offices in individual European countries. Opponents of the EPO object to the fact that the EPO would select judges from within its own ranks to preside over disputes, as they believe this will spread what they call the lax attitude to software patents to all EPO countries. At a hearing in July hosted by the European Commission, EPO president Alain Pompidou called for the swift ratification of the EPLA, which remains a draft agreement. "The draft European Patent Litigation Agreement must be submitted to an intergovernmental conference as soon as possible," Pompidou said then. While McCreevy appeared to favor taking divergent views into account, he did stress the need for the EPLA in his speech. Mueller took issue with that in his blog, pointing out that patent disputes rarely involve more than one country at a time. National patent courts are, therefore, sufficient to deal with the vast bulk of cases, he said. "I don't mean to say that it's a perfect state of affairs if a company may have to enforce one and the same patent in more than one country at a time. But the current practice of sue-in-one-settle-in-all works quite well. About two-thirds of all E.U. patent infringement litigation takes place in Germany [about 900 cases per year], and in many of those cases the parties settle the dispute for the remaining European countries after a ruling or settlement in the first country in which they fight it out in court. That's pragmatic," he said. The European Parliament will vote on whether to support McCreevy's approach to patents on Oct. 12.
460777
European Union governments should work together in deciding rules for using biotech foods, rather than forge their own policies and risk inviting legal action against the 27-member bloc, the EU trade chief said Thursday.
179324
BRUSSELS : Europeans accustomed to sneering at China as a producer of cheap shoddy goods must realise the world&#39;s most populous country is taking a great leap forward in the technology stakes, according to a new report that urges the EU to innovate or
573432
(InfoWorld) - The European Commission has warned its member states to beef up their efforts to cut spam, spyware and malicious software, after research showed that up to 85 percent of all e-mail received in the European Union is unsolicited.The findings come four years after the EU adopted anti-spam legislation in the form of the e-privacy directive. "It is time to turn the repeated political concern about spam into concrete actions to fight spam," Viviane Reding, the commissioner for Information Society and Media, said in a statement on Monday.If there is no improvement by this time next year, Reding will consider introducing new legislative measures to fight the scourge, she said.She pointed to the Netherlands as an example of how the current legal regime can be used to cut spam. Hollandâs spam-busting unit, known by the initials OPTA, has just five full-time staff and â¬570,000 (US$747,000) worth of equipment, and has succeeded in cutting spam by 85 percent. âI'd like to see other countries achieving similar results through more efficient enforcement,â Reding said.Finland was also singled out for praise. A filtering system there has cut the amount of spam to 30 percent of all e-mail, from 80 percent two years ago, the Commission said.âWe encourage other countries in the Union to develop similar filtering means,â said Martin Selmayr, Redingâs spokesman, at a press conference Monday.The Commission is urging other countries âto lay down clear lines of responsibility to use the tools available under E.U. law effectively." Better cooperation with enforcement authorities from other countries, including countries outside the Union, is essential to defeat the spammers, the Commission said.The U.S. remains the single biggest source of spam, accounting for 22 percent of all spam received in the EU, the Commission said. China is the second largest source, accounting for 13 percent. France and South Korea rank joint third at 6 percent.The U.S. and the EU have agreed to tackle spam through joint enforcement initiatives, the Commission said.Last year, Ferris Research estimated spam to cost â¬39 billion worldwide, while fellow researcher Computer Economics calculated malicious software to cost â¬11 billion worldwide.The Commission's latest communication on spam is available here in several languages.