France's three-strikes anti-piracy law is one of the strictest in the world. It employs private companies to scan file-sharing networks for copyright infringement and sends warnings to pirates if they're caught red-handed. The law, enforced by a French authority called Hadopi, was instated 17 months ago to the applause of music copyright holders and their representatives.
The EU Civil Liberties Committee has backed a draft law that would update existing EU legislation on cyber attacks which would see any cyber attack on any IT system treated as a criminal offense punishable by at least two years in prison.
A couple of weeks ago, Techdirt wrote about a surprising initiative by the Netherlands to introduce new flexibilities into its copyright law. Given that leadership from the Dutch government, it's probably no surprise that a few days later, the Dutch Parliament also showed itself in the political vanguard by voting not to ratify ACTA for the time being.
Hackers have broken into the online banking accounts of eight Danske Bank customers and stolen approximately 700,000 kroner.
The attacks were confirmed yesterday in a press release from Nets, the company behind the NemID digital signature for online banking.
In late January, the European Commission published a proposal "on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data."
Logitech International SA, the world’s biggest maker of computer mice, dropped the most in nine months in Zurich trading after cutting full-year forecasts for the third time, citing the weaker euro and declining sales.
Logitech shares fell 12 percent to 6.58 Swiss francs. The company reduced its sales forecast for the fiscal year ending March 31 to about $2.3 billion, with operating income predicted at about $60 million. Logitech, which also produces gaming hardware, in September cut its forecast for full-year operating profit to about $90 million on sales of about $2.4 billion.
The European Parliament's website fell under a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDOS) on Thursday in what the organization classified as retaliation for the shutdown of the Megaupload file-sharing site and an anti-counterfeiting trade agreement.
The Parliament issued a statement saying it had acted to reduce the impact of the attacks, but the site was still down as of mid-afternoon Thursday.
European Union Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding has proposed a sweeping reform of the EU's data protection rules, claiming that the proposed rules will both cost less for governments and corporations to administer and simultaneously strengthen online privacy rights.
