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On 3 April 2009, the Judge for Preliminary Investigation of the Court of Rome upheld the motion by the public prosecutor to drop charges of illegal file sharing on a peer-to-peer website against the owner of the IP address used to commit the alleged crime. Both the public prosecutor and the Court clarified in their statements of reasons that there is no proof that the person who has entered into a contract with an ISP for the provision of access to the Internet is the one who engaged in illegal file sharing using that IP address. As the prosecutor duly noted in his motion, indeed it cannot be ruled...

In a ruling issued on 14 July 2009 (case no. 4Ob41/09x), the Oberste Gerichtshof (Supreme Court - OGH) explained that an Internet access provider cannot be forced to disclose the personal data of customers who download protected works using file-sharing systems. In the case concerned, the collecting society LSG GmbH had demanded that access provider Tele2 should disclose the personal data linked to IP addresses of customers who had downloaded files illegally. Tele2 had refused to comply. LSG had based its claim on Art. 87b (3) of the Copyright Act, which obliges providers, as intermediaries, to...

In July the Communications (Retention of Data) Bill 2009 was published. Its main purpose is to give effect to Directive 2006/24/EC on the retention of data. The Bill will allow service providers to retain fixed and mobile telephone data for a period of two years and Internet (access, e-mail and telephone) data for one year. Previously the period in respect of fixed and mobile telephony was three years. Section 2 makes clear that the Bill does not apply to content, thus giving effect to Article 1.2 of the Directive. The Data Protection Commissioner is designated as the national supervisory authority...

The first Council of Europe Conference of Ministers responsible for Media and New Communication Services, entitled “A new notion of media?”, was held on 28-29 May 2009 in Reykjavik, Iceland. The last comparable interministerial conference, the 7th European Ministerial Conference on Mass Media Policy, was held in Kyiv, Ukraine, in 2005 (see IRIS 2005-7: 2). A number of texts were adopted at the Reykjavik Conference: - Political declaration; - Resolution & Action Plan - “Towards a new notion of media”; - Resolution - “Internet governance and critical Internet resources”; - Resolution - “Developments...

After months of controversy, the Act “promoting the circulation and protection of creation on the Internet” (the HADOPI Act), adopted on 13 May 2009 after long and laborious parliamentary debate, has finally been censured by the Constitutional Council, to which it had been referred by opposition MPs opposed to the text. The Act was designed basically to set up a “graduated response” to the illegal downloading of works on the Internet, and introduced a “High Authority for the circulation of works and the protection of rights on the Internet” (HADOPI), a nine-member independent administrative authority...