Original news and analysis on international IP policy
By Monika Ermert for Intellectual Property Watch A series of five recent hearings in the Justice Committee of the German Parliament have revealed deep rifts over the second part of Germany’s copyright law reform. This so-called “second basket” deals with…
By Monika Ermert for Intellectual Property Watch In the second week of December, the European Parliament will hear the first reading of the “modernised” Television Without Frontiers Directive (TVWF) that will stretch into the world of online content – hence…
By Monika Ermert for Intellectual Property Watch BERLIN – A debate is ongoing between “open source” (OS) software developers and devotees to Creative Commons licenses over the right way to promote free culture. Creative Commons licenses, under which some rights…
By Monika Ermert for Intellectual Property Watch The United States government does not want to retain “all [its] historic roles” in the technical oversight of the Internet domain name system (DNS), a senior Bush administration official said this week. But…
By Monika Ermert for Intellectual Property Watch Procedural questions could kill a proposed European Union directive aimed at fighting theft of products, patents and copyrights, after the Dutch Parliament raised jurisdictional objections last week. At issue is the planned EU…
By Monika Ermert for Intellectual Property Watch Should everybody who registers an Internet domain name be forced to publish his private address, email address and phone number on the Internet? A storm broke out over the question of the so-called…
By Monika Ermert for Intellectual Property Watch A German scientist who would like to read an online book owned by another department of his university soon may have to travel to the department and read it on site instead if…
By Monika Ermert for Intellectual Property Watch CANNES – Napster went down, Grokster went down, yet as both digital music services drew millions of people to their sites, industry is eager to make them stay there as law-abiding music download-services.…
By Monika Ermert for Intellectual Property Watch The cry for internationalized Internet domain names (IDNs) gets louder at every meeting related to Internet management, standardisation or politics. But questions of technology that once slowed the spread of Internet names into…
By Monika Ermert for Intellectual Property Watch The Digital Video Broadcasting Project (DVB), a Geneva-based body working on international digital television standards, is seeking to reach agreement by mid-2006 on standards for the management of digital content in the broadcasting…
By Monika Ermert for Intellectual Property Watch The issue of intellectual property did not make the headlines during the concluding session of the five-year-long UN World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis. And some critics are concerned it…