Policy Observatory

The European Commission has today requested that France, Poland and Romania fully implement Directive 2011/77/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 September 2011 amending Directive 2006/116/EC on the term of protection of copyright and certain related rights. The Directive extends the term of protection for performers and sound recordings from 50 to 70 years and contains accompanying measures, e.g. the “use it or lose it” clauses which now have to be included in the contracts linking performers to their record companies. The deadline for the implementation of the Directive in national law was 1 November 2013. However, France, Poland and Romania have so far not notified implementing measures to the Commission. The Commission's request takes the form of a reasoned opinion, the second stage of the EU infringement procedures. If no measures are notified within two months, the Commission may decide to refer France, Poland and Romania to the EU Court of Justice. More information on term of protection.

The judgment of the Court of Justice of European Union (CJEU) of 13 May 2014 Google Spain SL and Google Inc. v Agencia Española de Protección de Datos (AEPD) and Mario Costeja González (C-131/12) sets a milestone for EU data protection in respect of search engines and, more generally, in the online world.
It grants the possibility to data subjects to request to search engines, under certain conditions, the delisting of links appearing in the search results based on a person’s name.

On Wednesday 26 November, the European data protection authorities assembled in the Article 29 Working Party (WP29) have adopted guidelines on the implementation of the CJEU’s judgment. These guidelines contain the common interpretation of the ruling as well as the common criteria to be used by the data
protection authorities when addressing complaints.

The Czech .CZ domain administrator CZ.NIC Association undertakes biannual surveys at the domain holders (individuals as well as companies) in which the respondents are asked whether they wish to implement IDN (Internationalized domain name) within the .CZ domain. CZ.NIC is ready from a technical point of view for the implementation of IDN; however, it has not implemented IDN in .CZ domains yet since the Internet user community in the Czech Republic (individuals as well as organizations) did not show much interest in the implementation of IDN.  If the IDN was deployed, the web addresses within the .CZ domain could contain Czech letters with diacritic.

The regular biannual survey started in 2004. The support of IDN implementation has been continually dropping from 45 % to 32 % (in 2014) in case of individuals while the support from companies has been slightly growing. However, it is still significantly poor - with less than 20 % (in 2014) in favour of IDN.

See whole article with survey results and possible impact issues here (the only Czech IDN domain in use).

Daily information on the monitoring the implementation of the Digital Agenda of Italy is available online. The implementation of the Agenda is being monitored by the Agenzia per l’Italia Digitale (AGID). Among the relevant data available at the beginning of June 2016 on various fields of application, the following can be highlighted.
SPID: on June 2016, 3 identity providers accredited; 64.470 SPID identities provided; 401 types of services made available by SPID;
Electronic payment: 13.850 public administration offices involved; total transactions up to April 2016 were 350.114
Digital civil registry: in the pilot phase, 26 Municipalities activated; 6,5 millions of citizens involved
Electronic invoice: 35 millions of invoices managed
Open Data: 10.348 datasets of public administration made accessible
Digital competence: 105 projects activated
Digital health dossier: 9 Regional governments joined the interoperability system; in 7 Regional governments the service has already been activated;

The draft law implementing the GDPR into the national legal framework was reviewed by the “Bundesrat”. The “Bundesrat” followed the some of the recommendations of the expert committees, in particular with regard to improving the rights of data subjects. Other aspects, such as provisions regarding video surveillance, have not been criticized, though.

EU data protection chiefs are worried member states won't be ready when a new wide-sweeping general data protection regulation goes live on 25 May. National laws still need to be passed to ensure data authorities can enforce the regulation EU-wide.