The European Commission recently published wide proposals to reform copyright law. One particular concern is that the proposals appear to reduce the existing legal protections for sites that host third party content.

I've just submitted a response to the Intellectual Property Office on their proposed amendments to the education exemptions to UK copyright law. These aim to extend the same permissions for distance learning as currently apply to the premises of an educational establishment.

Nominet have published an interesting analysis of the legal issues around any possible process for suspending domains associated with criminal activity. This raises the rather worrying issue that the legal position is not clear if a registry is informed of unlawful conduct somewhere in their domain and decides that the evidence is not strong enough to justify them acting.

My talk at Networkshop looked at some of the changes going on in the law, especially in the measures that those who operate parts of the Internet are expected or required to take to help deal with unlawful activities on line.

I'm pleased to report that the Internet Society has published a discussion paper looking at different methods being proposed around the world to respond to the use of the Internet to breach Intellectual Property Rights. For each of the approaches - graduated response and suspension of access,  traffic shaping, blocking, content identification and filtering, and DNS manipulation - the paper looks at the implications for the Internet, Internet technologies, access and use.