Some countries in Europe, like France, are looking at ways of extending their copyright protection laws to streamed media, in addition to existing laws against unlicensed downloads. Other countries, it seems, are going in quite the other direction, as a recent decision in the Netherlands shows.

One more development in the legal fight between Samsung and Apple: a court in Australia has granted a March date for a case being brought by Samsung against Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) for patent infringement, with Samsung’s aim being to get the iPhone 4S banned from sale, unless the two sides…

Executives from Facebook, Twitter and BlackBerry maker Research in Motion (NSDQ: RIMM) have warned a committee of MPs that switching off social networks in times of civil unrest would be an “absolutely horrible idea”.

A sign of Twitter’s growing power, and increasing need to interface with government to get its message across: the company has hired a new head of public policy, Colin Crowell.

It was a speech delivered last autumn by Prime Minister David Cameron, setting out his vision for a “Silicon Roundabout” in Shoreditch, east London, that first gave ammunition to the conspiracy theorists.

UK media regulator Ofcom has been asked by culture secretary Jeremy Hunt to review one part of anti-piracy law in the country’s Digital Economy Act “to assess whether (it) could work”. That part is a clause which would allow courts, at rightsholders’ behest, to level injunctions forcing ISPs to block…

Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and Twitter have launched a service to allow people in Egypt to send Twitter messages by leaving a voicemail on a specific number after the last internet service provider in the country saw its access cut off late on Monday.

The Federal Trade Commission’s recent report on privacy offered a pretty damning indictment of the ad industry’s efforts to give consumers a say in how and whether data about them is collected. The report said, in essence, that while there are ways for consumers to opt-out of behaviorally targeted advertising,…

While some of Google’s online advertising practices are becoming less controversial in the U.S. as they get more entrenched, they’re still raising hackles in Europe.

The UK’s congested wireless networks may soon be getting an extra traffic lane: today, Ofcom took one further step along the route to putting services into the country’s “white spaces”, or parts of unused radio spectrum between television channels. A similar plan is gradually progressing through the U.S. regulatory system…

The EU Parliament has controversially dropped plans to force ISPs and content owners across the continent to seek a court ruling before disconnecting suspected online piracy offenders. As EurActiv.com reports, the parliament has finally voted to abandon the contentious amendment 138 of the proposed telecom reform package, which would have…

The race is on to digitise Europe’s out-of-print books and EC media commissioner Viviane Reding says Europe can beat Google (NSDQ: GOOG) in digitising the continent’s works if it acts fast. Reding is the driving force behind Europeana, the EU’s official online library which launched last year, and she said…

Is the iPod bad for your health?  The worst problems come from prolonged periods of high-volume music - on all the time, seemingly everywhere.  That has been an on-again, off-again focus for the European Union, though regulations are now getting closer.  On Monday, EU Consumer Affairs Commissioner Meglena Kuneva told…

Two weeks after Digital Britain’s wide-ranging pledges, a Westminster Media Forum debate on Thursday morning frizzled with nervous consensus—Lord Carter gave a good road map for the digital economy, but a future Conservative government could block the way. BT’s industry policy and regulation director Emma Gilthorpe wondered whether the 50p…

Lord Carter of Barnes has unleashed his Digital Britain paper on the world, but the media exec formerly known as Stephen is standing down as communication, technology and broadcasting minister this summer. That got us thinking: what should the policymeister do next? Here are some suggestions...

While we thought the launch of Financial Times facsimile edition in India would not happen till the legal tangles over its title is resolved, the paper has received government clearance for the title ‘Financial Times Facsimile’ and may launch sooner than expected. The Registrar of Newspapers in India (RNI), in…