Original news and analysis on international IP policy
The Corporate Europe Observatory and the European Commission presented their arguments in a case over access to documents about the EU-India free trade agreement before the General Court of the European Union in Luxembourg last Friday.
“We live in an age changed and characterised by the use of information about individuals and personalised data and we need clear and differentiated rules how to handle this,” Green Member of the European Parliament Jan Philipp Albrecht, one of the lead rapporteurs for the data protection reform in Europe, said today. “General principles alone are not sufficient.”
Frank La Rue, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to freedom of opinion and expression, in a statement about last week's World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), underlined the importance of civil society in discussions about the future of the internet.
The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg ruled this week that “restriction of Internet access without a strict legal framework regulating the scope of the ban and affording the guarantee of judicial review to prevent possible abuses amounts to a violation of freedom of expression.”
Dubai, UAE - A mere resolution, not part of the future International Telecommunication Regulations (ITR), led to yet another escalation at the ongoing World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) in Dubai last night.
Dubai, UAE - The internet is not completely out of the first consolidated draft proposal for the future International Telecommunication Regulations (ITR) that was introduced late on 11 December at the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) in Dubai.
More broadband rollout and better access to networks everywhere – that’s a position shared by participants at the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), which started last week in Dubai. And this is where the consensus ends, according to a more sceptical reading on progress made in negotiations to review the future International Telecommunication Regulations (ITR).
The World Conference on International Telecommunication (WCIT) has affirmed the right to freedom of information online, the secretariat of the UN International Telecommunication Union (ITU) said in a press release on day two in Dubai, Qatar, where over 160 country delegations since yesterday are talking about the future global telecommunications rules.
UN International Telecommunication Union Secretary General Hamadoun Touré used a press conference on the eve of the much-anticipated World Conference on International Telecommunication (WCIT) which starts in Dubai next week to call on the Syrian government to investigate problems of access to the mobile network and internet in Syria and do "anything necessary to restore the access."
The international intellectual property rights system must urgently make headway toward an easier-to-use, globally agreed upon, inclusive and effective architecture, a high-level panel of IP policy leaders said on 29 November.
United States Ambassador Terry Kramer, head of the US delegation to the upcoming UN-led World Conference on International Telecommunication (WCIT) in Dubai, in a press call today warned against proposals that would invite the UN International Telecommunication Union (ITU) to get into the business of internet governance, be it routing interventions, content control issues, or changes in accounting for internet traffic. Yet reacting to an earlier call by ex-White House official Andrew McLaughlin at a New America Foundation conference to "dismantle the ITU", Kramer said: "I do not think the ITU is the problem."
Criminal sanctions for intellectual property rights infringement are to be dropped from the Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), according to a set of documents leaked by Montreal daily La Presse.