News and Research articles on European CommissionAs negotiations progress over the EU-US free-trade agreement TTIP, it is natural that somebody will propose addressing privacy differences through trade. But several features of free trade agreements make negotiating data protection in the trade regime a very bad idea for the EU.
Copyright reform in the EU has been elusive for years. Now a new Commissioner coming from a quite different field of expertise has the mandate to cut the Gordian knot. Yet, experts like Monica Horten doubt that this will ever happen. This is why.
This paper examines how various stakeholders in the 2014 EC consultation on copyright attempted to shape the definition of user-generated content and what this means for the reform of copyright in Europe.
A new Danish study calls into question a cornerstone of the data protection regime in Europe: user consent. This article discusses the findings in light of the concept of 'privacy as a human right'.
Will the Canada-EU Trade Agreement (CETA) fail just like the notorious Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement? Despite many positive aspects, the trade deal might fail to get a majority approval in the European Parliament because of the much debated Investor State Dispute Settlement provisions.
Europe's regional internet governance meeting takes place between April's highly debated NetMundial in Brasil and the September's Internet Governance Forum in Turkey. Will the German organisers be able to make the link?
It was a fail. At the 27th WIPO meeting in Geneva the European Commission and Council representatives did not agree on advancing work on copyright exemptions for libraries and archives.
On April 8, the European Court of Justice made a clear decision invalidating the EU data retention directive. Legal scholar Sebastian Leuschner hits the floor running with an op-ed on what this landmark decision means for national data retention laws.
How can the European Union react to the revelations of mass collection of personal data by domestic or third country spying agencies? Researcher Carlo Piltz discusses the hot topic and proposes a way ahead.
The European Commission just ran a consultation on the future of copyright in Europe. The response was an avalanche of opinions. In this open editorial, Sebastian Haunss imagines what's next.
Drawing on the example of the US surveillance operation PRISM and its impact on European citizens’ right to privacy, the author discusses what an authoritative human rights-based response could look like.
The European Union is today seen as a ‘digital laggard’ which relies on divergent national regulation and whose digital policies lack coherence. This review looks back at internet policy making and makes a few prescriptions.
The European Commission today released a position statement on how it hopes to approach internet governance in the coming months. Internet governance specialist Bertrand de la Chapelle reacts to the statement in this op-ed.
The legal and moral obligations of private online operators collecting and processing large amounts of data are unclear. Researcher Primavera de Filippi explains why.
The EU Data Retention Directive - which requests the retention of communication data of EU Citizens - is “as a whole incompatible” with the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, determines Europe's top lawyer. What happens now?
The new European public sector information directive, released in June 2013, makes “marginal cost” the default charge for government data. How to implement this principle? A consultation is ongoing. This article focusses on the calculation criteria for marginal costs.
After a first on Slovenia, here is our second in our series on internet policy innovation in small European countries. Finns are moving fast and experimenting with crowdsourced legislation.
A new expert group on cloud computing is to ensure trust in the internet cloud. In the meantime, users can already find privacy-enhanced cloud offers.
The European Civil Liberties Committee LIBE is pushing the EU data protection regulation draft forward. Yet, many compromises are made along the way, leaving Europeans wondering who will be the good, the bad and the ugly in the data protection saga.
There is user-generated content in many shapes – from musicians setting up their own labels, funded and supported by users to remixes of the latest political campaign slogans. What is still pending, is a genuine European copyright reform which would address this type of content.