This month in the news.
- Germany wants to introduce legislation that would require Google and other news aggregator sites to pay publishing houses a fee when they take snippets of articles for reproduction on their site. The draft law is being been criticized by its opponents as “a dark day for the Internet in Germany”.
- Say goodbye to incandescent light bulbs – from 1 September 2012 it is illegal to import or produce traditional light bulbs in the EU.
- The European Commission is to publish a cloud computing strategy this autumn, as less than a quarter of European computer users use cloud services, which are among the fastest-growing segments in the global technology market.
- The European Commission calls for wireless technologies to share the use of the radio spectrum in order to enable greater mobile network capacity and cheaper wireless broadband.
- 2012 Norton Cybercrime Report: in the last year cybercrime resulted in $110 billion in direct financial loss worldwide.
- Europe has almost exhausted its stock of old-style internet addresses.
- June through August was the warmest period for global land temperature ever recorded.
- The European Commission should define what is meant by “illegal content” in order enable content ‘hosts’ to better understand what responsibilities they have to remove or disable access to such material, an EU privacy watchdog has said.
- Problems with goods or with delivery by shopping online? The European Small Claims Procedure is one of the solutions available to resolve cross-border disputes in cases involving €2,000 or less.
