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As the Internet is used as the medium for a certain number of potentially illegal and detrimental sites and can also be used to distribute activities of a criminal nature, the European Commission adopted, on 26 November 1997, a proposal for an action plan on promoting safe use of the Internet. The proposal came in the form of a communication to the European Parliament, the Council, the Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions. The plan covers both illegal and detrimental content, which it examines both with regard to their approach and to the ways and means of controlling...

This June, the Spanish Government presented a new Bill on Telecommunications. The Bill is due to substitute the 1987 Ley de Ordenación de las Telecomunicaciones (LOT), in order to comply with the requirements of EC Telecommunications law. The Bill only deals with telecommunications (liberalisation and free competition in telecommunications market; interconnection of networks; numbering policy; telecommunications public service; privacy of data in telecommunications networks; sanctions; telecommunication authorities...). The Bill expressely establishes that radio and TV broadcasting are excluded...

The ministerial Bills to transpose the EC Database Directive into Austrian law (see IRIS 1997-6: 9) have been reworked and combined into a single text; this has now been passed by the Council of Ministers and tabled in Parliament on 2 October 1997 as the 1997 Government Bill amending the Copyright Act. Not only is the new version of the new sui generis protection included among the related protective rights under the Copyright Act (instead of a specific legislative regulation in the form of a separate Act on database law) dogmatically more satisfactory - it also offers the clarity of the legal...

In April 1997, a new Freedom of Information Act was passed in Ireland, following several years of campaigning by various individuals and organisations, including the Let in the Light group, headed mainly by print and audio-visual journalists and academics. The new Act signals a first and major step towards changing the culture of secrecy within government and the public service to one of openness. Its aim is to provide effective, low-cost access to government-held information to media and public alike. Some of the more salient provisions of the Act include the appointment of an Information Commissioner....

The principle that the media should be able to protect the anonymity of its sources of information is accepted as an important principle in the English courts justified by the test of public interest. However, although great weight is given to European Court of Human Rights cases with facts similar to the facts before the domestic court, a "relevant but not conclusive factor" which might outweigh the general principle is the "wish of a betrayed employer to identify the disloyal employee so as to exclude him from future employment."