On 25 November the European Parliament voted, by 383 votes to 271, in favour of a resolution to refer the EU-Canada agreement on Passenger Name Records (PNR) to the European Court of Justice (CJEU). The CJEU will now decide on the compliance of the agreement with EU law, in particular the Charter of Fundamental Rights. As explained in previous EDRi-gram articles, PNR data has become an attractive and invasive source for governments to obtain personal data.
EU copyright rules are maladapted to the increase of cross-border cultural exchange facilitated by the Internet, an upcoming European Parliament own-initiative report evaluating 2001’s copyright directive finds. The draft released today by Julia Reda, MEP for the German Pirate Party, lays out an ambitious reform agenda for the overhaul of EU copyright announced in the Commission’s 2015 work programme.
Because of the 25-year copyright protection, several companies in the UK sell replicas of classic European furniture which cannot be sold in other EU member states due to copyright. Examples include Danish classics, such as the famous Egg chair, designed by Arne Jacobsen, who died in 1971.
These replicas are also sold to Danish consumers, among other things, through UK webshops. The Danish furniture industry has successfully pursued a number of legal options in Denmark against the UK sellers in order to stop this activity. A recent Danish court decision from 12 November 2014 concerns the UK company Voga Ltd. which operates a webshop, voga.com.
Facebook tracks the web browsing of everyone who visits a page on its site even if the user does not have an account or has explicitly opted out of tracking in the EU, extensive research commissioned by the Belgian data protection agency has revealed.
Facebook has warned that overlapping national probes into its privacy policy could severely endanger the European Union’s economy if such a fragmented strategy is continued and applied to other businesses.
Data protection authorities from Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany in February formed a task force to deal with Facebook’s new privacy policy, introduced late January. They suspect that the new policy violates EU privacy laws. French, Spanish and Italian authorities later joined the group.
The European Parliament on Tuesday voted to adopt mandatory installation of an EU emergency call system called eCall in new cars from 31 March 2018. When a car with eCall is involved in a crash, the system automatically makes contact with the nearest emergency centre.
Policy Observatory