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Latest News Round-up Type Stuff

By Scott Vine

This is a round up of a few more things that have gone on whilst I was holiday:

A coalition of media and internet companies - CBS Corp, Dailymotion, Fox Entertainment Group, Microsoft Corp, MySpace, NBC Universal, Veoh Networks, Viacom and the Walt Disney Co - have issued and signed up to standards governing user-generated content. "Copyright Owners and UGC Services recognize that they share several important objectives: (1) the elimination of infringing content on UGC Services, (2) the encouragement of uploads of wholly original and authorized user-generated audio and video content, (3) the accommodation of fair use of copyrighted content on UGC Services, and (4) the protection of legitimate interests of user privacy."

The European Commission has decided to send a letter of formal notice to Germany concerning its public contracts for legal database services. According to the Commission " In 2006, the judicial authorities of 13 federal states awarded contracts for legal database services directly to juris without publishing calls for tenders. juris, a company partially owned by the Federal Republic of Germany, is the leading operator of legal databases in Germany. Under an agreement with the Federal Government, juris maintains and operates its legal information system while the Federal Government provides specific documentation such as consolidated documentation of federal legislation and judgments by the federal courts in a specially edited version for the exclusive use of juris. The Commission considers that the contracts for database services concluded by the 13 states and the agreement between the Federal Government and juris might be public contracts which should have been awarded by competitive tendering procedures with publication of European-wide calls for tenders".

Taxonomies and Thesauri: This bibliography from the UK government has been updated to help workers throughout the UK public sector as they plan implementation of taxonomies for use with subject metadata.

The Information Commissioner's Office has amended its guidance on the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 (PECR) removing references that stated that marketing messages sent using Bluetooth technology would be subject to PECR rules relating to the sending of unsolicited marketing. The Regulations only apply to messages sent over a public electronic communications network and the ICO, following discussions with the Department of Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform and others, have concluded that Bluetooth messages are not in fact sent using such a network. The ICO however urges marketers to still use the technology responsibly in their marketing strategies.

Ofcom is consulting on proposals to enable airlines to offer mobile communication services on UK-registered aircraft. I'm with CharonQC on this one.

Full post as published by Information Overload on October 23, 2007 (boomark / email).