Policy Observatory
Today the Constitutional Court of the Slovak Republic proclaimed the mass surveillance of citizens as unconstitutional. The decision was rendered within proceedings initiated by 30 members of the Parliament on behalf of the European Information Society Institute (EISi), a Slovakia based think-tank.
A US federal appeals court ruled on Thursday that the NSA spying program that collects data about millions of Americans' phone calls is illegal. The court's ruling is adding pressure on lawmakers to decide quickly whether to end or replace the program, which was intended to help fight terrorism.
The Stockholm District Court decided to order the seizure of two key domains owned by The Pirate Bay, however it is unlikely that the site's operation will disappear completely. The motivation for the seizure is that The Pirate Bay is an illegal operation, thus its domains are tools used by the site to infringe copyright.
While two of the domains (ThePirateBay.se - the site’s main domain and PirateBay.se - a lesser used alternative) will be will be put out of action, the District Court dismissed the prosecution’s case against Punkt.se, the organization responsible for Sweden’s top level .SE domain.
This morning the District court of The Hague decided annulled the data retention law.
The data-retention law requires telecom providers to save communication and location data from everyone in the Netherlands for as long as a year. The law, and the judges agreed, heavily impacts our freedom.
Information also available here.
Following the ECJ court decision and several reactions from the US (mentioned in the 301 report), there have been a series of legislative changes in Spain regarding managing links. The Sinde-Wert Committee was created to clarify whether links infringe intellectual property rights. Contrary to the national civil and criminal courts decisions so far, the Committee reached the conclusion that it does represent an infringement.
The Dutch first instant patent court found that a Dutch company had made patent infringement because of the English product brochure is available on the its English website, so that the company is in violation of a preliminary injunction on offering the product for use in an infringing process.