Talks on a treaty updating broadcasting protections against signal piracy continued at the World Intellectual Property Organization, but progress at least temporarily stalled, said representatives from nongovernmental organizations Wednesday. Under a new Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR) chairman, Singapore Intellectual Property Office Chief Executive Daren Tang, it became clear the treaty text wasn't ready to move to diplomatic conference next year, they said. Key issues remain unresolved, but broadcasters hope for some forward movement, European Broadcasting Union Head-Intellectual Property Heijo Ruijsenaars told us.
Virtual reality and augmented reality generate legal questions for courts, companies and users but may not require a fundamental rethinking of existing legal doctrines, said law professors and tech lawyers in articles and interviews. AR and VR implicate a broad range of laws, including criminal and tort, and raise questions about how to enforce them in the virtual world, they said. There are no definitive answers, "but the very existence of VR and AR poses the questions in new ways" that may go to the assumptions law makes about freedom and harm in the physical and virtual world, law professors Mark Lemley and Eugene Volokh wrote in a March 17 working paper.
UK regulator Ofcom "took a courageous initiative" in requiring BT to legally separate from its retail arm, Openreach, but "its success is however not guaranteed," said Open Fiber President Franco Bassanini Monday at the Digital Regulation Forum in London. Ofcom "was among the first to understand the difficulty is to ensure nondiscriminatory treatment of new entrants using BT's network," but in the context of deployment of fiber networks, functional separation failed to stop Openreach from having privileged access to the network or to spur investment, he said. European Commission plans to reform telecom rules don't include allowing regulators to impose structural separation on incumbents but they should, Bassanini and others said.
Europe's telecom and automotive industries will start testing connected cars in five EU countries this year, said the European Automotive Telecom Alliance (EATA). The move toward connected vehicles is part of a major EU effort to roll out 5G services that link to European Commission priorities such as the digital single market, the EC said in a November statement on cooperative intelligent transport systems. Transport and the automotive industry are "perhaps the most obvious 5G uses," said EC Vice President-Digital Single Market Andrus Ansip Tuesday at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona. Spectrum availability and harmonization, privacy, data protection and security issues remain unresolved, the EC and others said.
President Donald Trump's executive order excluding foreigners from the 1974 Privacy Act apparently isn't meant to affect Privacy Shield, the trans-Atlantic data flow agreement, but that hasn't stopped Europe's data protection community from worrying, said representatives from industry and regulatory authorities. The possibility of changes to -- or an overturning of -- standard contractual clauses (SCCs) is also creating headaches. Meanwhile, the European Parliament Civil Liberties Committee (known as LIBE) will consider a motion urging the European Commission to do a "thorough and in-depth examination of all the shortcomings and weaknesses" in the agreement.
Spectrum and numbering resources are critical to the development of IoT services but don't require any special attention at this point, regulators said at a webcast workshop. Panelists Wednesday from the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC) and Europe's Radio Spectrum Policy Group (RSPG) said they're monitoring IoT developments, but have no specific concerns about spectrum availability or numbering. "Our duty is to understand" the new, innovative, international environment before making rules, said BEREC Chairman Sébastien Soriano from French telecom regulator ARCEP (Autorité de régulation des communications électroniques et des postes).
WhatsApp, Skype and their kin would have to abide by the same privacy rules as telcos under a proposal unveiled Tuesday by the European Commission. If approved by the European Parliament and Council, the measure also would simplify rules for cookies, guarantee privacy for the content and metadata derived from e-communications, create a single rule across Europe, and open up opportunities for traditional telcos to take advantage of data, the EC said. User consent to use of the data is "paramount," said Digital Single Market Vice-President Andrus Ansip at a news briefing. The e-privacy proposals got mixed stakeholder reviews.
Emerging risks of drones, including privacy concerns, are subject of updated aviation safety rules making their way through the EU institutions. As the European Commission, European Parliament and Council prepare to begin talks on the rules, a drone industry representative and data protection attorney told us privacy is an important issue in operation of unmanned aircraft, but it hasn't attracted as much attention as it has in the U.S. That could be because of Europe's good data protection laws or that drone use isn't as extensive as in the U.S., they said.
Microsoft and Google are among the top 50 companies in EU lobbying spending this year, although the tech/communications sector overall dropped from first place in 2012 to second in 2016, LobbyFacts.eu said. Google placed 40th, spending 600,000-700,000 euros (about $640,000-$750,000) in 2012, but it's now in sixth place, upping the spending it reported on the EU transparency register to near that of Microsoft (4.25 million to 4.5 million euros), far ahead of other tech and telecom companies. The two American giants are also in the top 10 lobbying organizations with the most high-level meetings with the European Commission, EU Integrity Watch said. Efforts continue to make the lobby transparency register mandatory.
Irish privacy advocates challenged Privacy Shield in the European Court of Justice. Digital Rights Ireland v. Commission was filed in the ECJ General Court (number T-670/16). DRI said it couldn't comment, but a spokesman said the group has "a lot of background in the issue and these types of cases." The lawsuit, while not unexpected, is "a little premature" given that the trans-Atlantic personal data transfer arrangement isn't even three months into operation, said Hogan Lovells (London) data protection lawyer Eduardo Ustaran.