european commission

Today the European Commission published the responses to a public consultation on Europe’s anti-piracy directive IPRED.

As expected, there is a huge divide between the copyright holders on the one hand, and Internet providers, academics and citizens on the other.

The latter fiercely oppose the draconian measures that IPRED introduces, claiming it threatens basic human rights while stifling innovation.

Computerworld: "Here's a wonderful cautionary tale: Systran created a specially adapted version of its Systran-Unix machine translation software for the [European] Commission, calling it EC-Systran Unix between 1997 and 2002."

The European Commission on Wednesday announced several key decisions, one of which involves fining six LCD makers for being involved in a price-fixing cartel between October 2001 and February 2006.

FSFE.org: "The Business Software Alliance (BSA) is pressuring the European Commission to remove the last vestiges of support for Open Standards from the latest version of the EU's interoperability recommendations, the European Interoperability Framework."

Not much in the way of details, but a week after EU negotiators briefed the EU Parliament on ACTA, the head EU negotiator, Luc Devigne, is apparently out of that role.

There's some speculation that perhaps (hopefully?) this means that the European Commission is finally losing its enthusiasm for ACTA, due to the growing opposition around the globe.

Computerworld UK: "Judging by the latest leak [.pdf] obtained by the French site PC Inpact, those forces have prevailed: what seems to be the final version of the Digital Agenda for Europe is an utter travesty of the original intent."

It's probably not a "phishing attack": Microsoft Windows users in Europe are now starting to get a screen that offers them a choice of web browsers, as a result of an anti-trust settlement with the European Commission.

The European Commission today ended its antitrust suit against Microsoft, accepting Redmond's agreement to allow users the choice of making any browser their default Web interface.

All About Microsoft: "The “source” reports are true: Microsoft is going to be participating in this week’s hearing held by the European Commission regarding Oracle’s proposal to take over Sun."

OStatic: "This time, Eben Moglen has weighed in with an analysis of the objections related to the GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2).

Moglen disagrees with the commission, and says that the GPLv2 is sufficient to protect the MySQL community apart from Oracle."