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EURIM REPORT
Eurim Report
EURIM REPORT EURIM — EUROPEAN INFORMATICS MARKET — THE STORY CONTINUES Stephen Digby
EURIM, the all-party, Parliamentary and Industry group is now a well-established part of the European Information and Telematics policy landscape. Stephen Digby reviews the activities of the Group last year and charts its future plans.
INTRODUCTION One of the aims of EURIM since its inception in 1994, has always been to ensure that views and concerns are rapidly and effectively communicated to the European Commission, parliamentarians and other relevant organizations, and to ensure that rapid, effective and appropriate action be taken should consensus become apparent. Thus, EURIM is now focused on achieving and demonstrating consensus on the need for action. The best indicator of EURIM’s influence is clearly the level of co-operation from senior Civil Servants and Commission Officials. Another of EURIM’s prime objectives for 1999 was to acquire a reputation for greater constructive influence in the area of Information and Telematics (I&T) policy issues in a European context. Most Corporate and Trade Association contact is routed through a G7 in a sponsoring department or the equivalent in the Commission. Most EURIM observers are G5 (UK), Head of Unit (EU) or equivalent. Simple actions can therefore be under way before the minutes are agreed. But important issues usually cross departmental boundaries and EURIM working parties are increasingly being used by officials to obtain industry views, aid interdepartmental and international liaison and secure political priority where needed. In 1999 EURIM has also been concentrating its efforts on growing co-operation with Parliamentary Select and Standing Committees, including ensuring that the views of corporate members are correctly conveyed, whether direct or via their Trade Association or Professional Body. The key deliverables of EURIM are the Reports from its many Working Parties. The work of the Working Parties is outlined below.
WORKING PARTY PROGRESS Data protection This impressively active Working Party has recently been tracking the progress of European Data Protection and Telecoms Data Protection Directives and the new UK Data Protection Act and is now looking at the issues of implementation. There seem to be an incredible amount of codes of conduct emerging but very little sign of any accepted Codes
118
of Practice for sharing government information across departmental boundaries or for transferring personal data, for example over the Internet, to nations without equivalent legislation. The Working Party is currently producing a ‘Map’ of initiatives in this area as a first step towards helping the better targeting of support and resource.
Telecommunications This Working Party, in operation since EURIM’s founding, produced an overview of the UK telecommunications market in 1994 (since updated), encompassing the full range of services supplied in this expanding and rapidly developing sector. The Working Party has continued to successfully report on telecoms liberalization and regulatory issues, including the effects of convergence, in the past year. Policy in the UK and the Commission has largely reflected the identified consensus. The current focus is now on the 1999 Review of the Telecoms Policy Directives, including the objectives of regulation and the criteria for measuring success. The potential for telecommunications regulators to raise telecoms taxation and undertake social re-engineering without parliamentary scrutiny is becoming worryingly apparent. The Working Party will be reviewing its proposed response to the latest Commission Review and plans all-member consultation meetings in London and Brussels early 2000.
Network governance The first Brief Report for this new Working Party,‘The Role of Self-Regulation in Electronic Commerce’, was agreed in May 1999 and copies were sent to all UK MEPs in September as part of the EURIM recruitment pack. Current tasks include reviewing the revised Draft Electronic Commerce Directive in the context of other exercises to apply the same law ‘online’ as it is ‘offline’. These include the Draft Directive on the Distance Selling of Personal Financial Services, reviews of the Rome, Lugano, Hague and Brussels Conventions on applicable law and proposals for international co-operation on law enforcement.
Computer Law & Security Report Vol. 16 no. 2 2000 ISSN 0267 3649/00/$20.00 © 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved
Eurim Report
Electronic commerce
Financial services
This Working Party has appeared in many different changing forms during the life of EURIM, starting out looking at Smartcards and has now evolved into its present form to look at the all important area of Electronic Commerce. The Working Party has now issued a Status Report on Communications Costs as a barrier to electronic commerce and is drafting briefs on Electronic Money and Consumer Protection. The ‘Secure Electronic Commerce’ sub-group has been running workshops with the DTI and the Home Office to find ways of resolving the differences between industry and the security agencies with regard to updating the law on the Interception of Communications. These have demonstrated a clear consensus across Corporate and Associate members which is summarized in the formal response to the Draft Bill now being sent to all members for approval as a EURIM (not just working party) position. The ‘Electronic Crime’ sub-group ran a workshop with the Law Commission and is now working on the means of improving law enforcement co-operation for both mass-market E-crime; for example transactions of £10 over the Internet, and high value E-assisted fraud, such as £100 million assault on financial dealing systems.
A sub-group of the Network Governance Working Party is addressing the draft Directive on the Distance Marketing of Personal Financial Services. The draft is a highly ambitious document raising many issues of principle and of practicality that will require fundamental legal and business changes in almost every Member State. It, therefore, needs to be looked at in the context of the liabilities of communications carriers and other intermediaries, as well as of financial regulation and of consumer protection in general.
Consultation processes The EURIM Guide to EU Decision Making after the Treaty of Amsterdam (1998) was a revision of the previous one, also written by Bryan Cassidy. This year a Briefing was agreed on the changes needed to EU and UK consultation processes to improve the inputs from those most affected by proposed initiatives. The next task on the agenda is to promote the recommendations and to ensure earlier and better publicity for proposals so that both suppliers and users submit their views in a timely and effective way. This is expected to be progressed in co-operation with the possible NCC initiative to produce a map of issues and players to help plan user consultations and responses.
Intellectual property rights This Working Party replaced the one looking at the Database Directive. Its initial aim was to produce a guide putting the issues into context and focusing on the need for policing IP rights on a worldwide and not simply a European framework. The current objective is to focus on the EU Directive on principles and matters agreed within the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Other current issues include Internet naming, European Patents and the need to harmonize the use of terms, definitions and interpretations across Directives which deal differently with overlapping Intellectual Property Right issues, such as software, database or copyright. The Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) has announced an Anti-Piracy Forum to bring together industry and enforcement groups and a legislative consultation exercise. Internet related piracy is identified as one of the problem areas. In this New Year, the Intellectual Property Rights Working Party will discuss its response to this development.
Public procurement The Working Party’s stated objective in this area is to campaign to ensure that any revision to the Directives will genuinely lead to more effective and open public sector procurement. After responding to the Commission Green Paper on reform in 1997, their current tasks are to expedite the action subsequently announced in principle by the Commission and to achieve value for money within the existing rules. This will require improving the availability of guidance and training which place the need for public accountability of taxpayers’ money into the context of the mix of disciplines and the flexibility necessary for the successful implementation and management of IS projects and services.
Fair dealing This new Working Party will be addressing the need for codes of practice and cost-effective ways of handling changes that weren’t envisaged when the contract was agreed. The need for this was identified during the course of work on the contractual issues related to Y2K. Over 40% of large UK users feel that they have been badly treated by suppliers over the past year. The importance of this is becoming ever more apparent, and the Working Party aims to be ready to review a draft Brief and Action Plan in February 2000.
Education and training Sir Leon Brittan has identified life-long learning as one of the most important challenges of the information age as we move rapidly into the 21st Century. Life-long distance learning will become all the more important in future years, as it’s been recently predicted that people who reach adulthood who are born after the year 2010 will have a life expectancy of 120. This will necessitate many of those people having up to three careers and continuing education becoming a fact of life well beyond the present age of retirement for many of us today. This Working Party reported in 1997 on the political actions necessary to re-skill the UK and EU workforces and make a reality of life-long learning at affordable costs. It is now working to secure action on the recommendations. The Working Party has held workshops on the Millennium Skills Centres, the need for better co-ordination across HMG and Commission programmes and the Teacher Training Agency’s IT training programme. A sub-group is looking at E-commerce skills. The aim is practical progress towards overcoming the fragmentation and inflexibility of funding which prevents so many UK providers from sustaining world-class delivery other than to the privileged few.
119
Eurim Report
The Working Party is also concerned that the organization and funding of the National Grid for Learning and the University for Industry are becoming as fragmented as those initiatives that they replaced. This is an issue that will be focused on very strongly by the Working Party in the coming year.
Electronic commerce directive The Commission workshop on applicable law indicated a stand-off between those wanting adjudication in the country of the consumer and those in that of the supplier. Given the problem of identifying either, particularly if those doing business wish to avoid tax or regulation, we are currently organizing a workshop ourselves to explore some of the alternative ways forward.
Year 2000 and EMU This particular Working Party was given the task of identifying the political actions necessary for the handling of the consequences of the conjunction of EMU and the Year 2000 Date Problem and to enable those responsible to share concerns with UK and Commission officials in private before agreeing material for public use.
Other EURIM activities Workshops have also been held on the impact of changes to the regulation of financial services, critical infrastructure
issues and approaches to risk reduction. The current focus is the likely scale and impact of stockpiling. A separate Working Party on the actions needed to reduce the effort of transition to the Euro and to enable UK organizations to derive full benefit, whether or whenever the UK actually ever joins is planned for launch early in 2000. Hopefully we will be in the position this time next year to report on the success of this Working Party and keep up our already excellent record of close and effective co-operation at the heart of European policy and law making.
CONCLUSION As always, the strength of EURIM and at the core of its success is the wide involvement, at all levels, of companies, reflecting their own and their industry’s concerns. Membership to EURIM allows high-level access to the key legislative decisionmakers and, through contribution to Working Parties, reflects an unparalleled opportunity to have input at an early stage. For further information on EURIM and how to join please contact Emma Fryer at 17/17 Hanson Street, London W1P 7LN, [email protected] or Philip Virgo at EURIM Secretary General, 15 Chestnut Road, London SE27 9EZ, [email protected]. Stephen Digby, Report Correspondent Stephen Digby, is a partner and Head of Davenport Lyons Intellectual Property Group, as well as EURIM’s Company Secretary.
BOOK REVIEW Software Law Software Copyright Law, 4th Edition, by David Bainbridge, 1999, soft-cover, Butterworths, 389 pp., £29.99, ISBN 0 406 92184 9. As the title of this book suggests, this text is about the law governing copyright in computer software. Its origins lie in the author’s longstanding interest in software copyright law ever since he was involved in the development of computer programs and databases. Since that time, software copyright law had no longer remained the province of a handful of technically minded lawyers.Today:“Computer software is all-embracing. Everything is software now.The law protecting it and constraining its use is of importance to us all. No lawyer can afford to ignore software copyright law, either in terms of providing advice or services to clients or in terms of being a user of computer software.”The aim of this book, therefore, is to describe and provide insight into the practicalities of the subject. Its aim is to provide practical information rather an academic analysis of the subject.The author notes that many of the examples used are modelled on real-life situations and he hopes that the book will therefore prove useful to lawyers and computer professionals alike.The latest text has updated material on the protection of databases and copyright in the context of electronic publishing.This includes multimedia and the Internet. It also contains in the appendices the full set of European directives on the legal protection of computer programs and of databases.There are also some annotated extracts from the 1988 Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act and the Copyright and Rights in Databases Regulations 1997.There is a ‘navigator’s guide’ to the 1988 Act. Available from Butterworths, Halsbury House, 35 Chancery Lane, London, WC2A 1EL, Tel: +44 (0)171 400 2500.
120
EURIM REPORT EURIM — EUROPEAN INFORMATICS MARKET — THE STORY CONTINUES Stephen Digby
EURIM, the all-party, Parliamentary and Industry group is now a well-established part of the European Information and Telematics policy landscape. Stephen Digby reviews the activities of the Group last year and charts its future plans.
INTRODUCTION One of the aims of EURIM since its inception in 1994, has always been to ensure that views and concerns are rapidly and effectively communicated to the European Commission, parliamentarians and other relevant organizations, and to ensure that rapid, effective and appropriate action be taken should consensus become apparent. Thus, EURIM is now focused on achieving and demonstrating consensus on the need for action. The best indicator of EURIM’s influence is clearly the level of co-operation from senior Civil Servants and Commission Officials. Another of EURIM’s prime objectives for 1999 was to acquire a reputation for greater constructive influence in the area of Information and Telematics (I&T) policy issues in a European context. Most Corporate and Trade Association contact is routed through a G7 in a sponsoring department or the equivalent in the Commission. Most EURIM observers are G5 (UK), Head of Unit (EU) or equivalent. Simple actions can therefore be under way before the minutes are agreed. But important issues usually cross departmental boundaries and EURIM working parties are increasingly being used by officials to obtain industry views, aid interdepartmental and international liaison and secure political priority where needed. In 1999 EURIM has also been concentrating its efforts on growing co-operation with Parliamentary Select and Standing Committees, including ensuring that the views of corporate members are correctly conveyed, whether direct or via their Trade Association or Professional Body. The key deliverables of EURIM are the Reports from its many Working Parties. The work of the Working Parties is outlined below.
WORKING PARTY PROGRESS Data protection This impressively active Working Party has recently been tracking the progress of European Data Protection and Telecoms Data Protection Directives and the new UK Data Protection Act and is now looking at the issues of implementation. There seem to be an incredible amount of codes of conduct emerging but very little sign of any accepted Codes
118
of Practice for sharing government information across departmental boundaries or for transferring personal data, for example over the Internet, to nations without equivalent legislation. The Working Party is currently producing a ‘Map’ of initiatives in this area as a first step towards helping the better targeting of support and resource.
Telecommunications This Working Party, in operation since EURIM’s founding, produced an overview of the UK telecommunications market in 1994 (since updated), encompassing the full range of services supplied in this expanding and rapidly developing sector. The Working Party has continued to successfully report on telecoms liberalization and regulatory issues, including the effects of convergence, in the past year. Policy in the UK and the Commission has largely reflected the identified consensus. The current focus is now on the 1999 Review of the Telecoms Policy Directives, including the objectives of regulation and the criteria for measuring success. The potential for telecommunications regulators to raise telecoms taxation and undertake social re-engineering without parliamentary scrutiny is becoming worryingly apparent. The Working Party will be reviewing its proposed response to the latest Commission Review and plans all-member consultation meetings in London and Brussels early 2000.
Network governance The first Brief Report for this new Working Party,‘The Role of Self-Regulation in Electronic Commerce’, was agreed in May 1999 and copies were sent to all UK MEPs in September as part of the EURIM recruitment pack. Current tasks include reviewing the revised Draft Electronic Commerce Directive in the context of other exercises to apply the same law ‘online’ as it is ‘offline’. These include the Draft Directive on the Distance Selling of Personal Financial Services, reviews of the Rome, Lugano, Hague and Brussels Conventions on applicable law and proposals for international co-operation on law enforcement.
Computer Law & Security Report Vol. 16 no. 2 2000 ISSN 0267 3649/00/$20.00 © 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved
Eurim Report
Electronic commerce
Financial services
This Working Party has appeared in many different changing forms during the life of EURIM, starting out looking at Smartcards and has now evolved into its present form to look at the all important area of Electronic Commerce. The Working Party has now issued a Status Report on Communications Costs as a barrier to electronic commerce and is drafting briefs on Electronic Money and Consumer Protection. The ‘Secure Electronic Commerce’ sub-group has been running workshops with the DTI and the Home Office to find ways of resolving the differences between industry and the security agencies with regard to updating the law on the Interception of Communications. These have demonstrated a clear consensus across Corporate and Associate members which is summarized in the formal response to the Draft Bill now being sent to all members for approval as a EURIM (not just working party) position. The ‘Electronic Crime’ sub-group ran a workshop with the Law Commission and is now working on the means of improving law enforcement co-operation for both mass-market E-crime; for example transactions of £10 over the Internet, and high value E-assisted fraud, such as £100 million assault on financial dealing systems.
A sub-group of the Network Governance Working Party is addressing the draft Directive on the Distance Marketing of Personal Financial Services. The draft is a highly ambitious document raising many issues of principle and of practicality that will require fundamental legal and business changes in almost every Member State. It, therefore, needs to be looked at in the context of the liabilities of communications carriers and other intermediaries, as well as of financial regulation and of consumer protection in general.
Consultation processes The EURIM Guide to EU Decision Making after the Treaty of Amsterdam (1998) was a revision of the previous one, also written by Bryan Cassidy. This year a Briefing was agreed on the changes needed to EU and UK consultation processes to improve the inputs from those most affected by proposed initiatives. The next task on the agenda is to promote the recommendations and to ensure earlier and better publicity for proposals so that both suppliers and users submit their views in a timely and effective way. This is expected to be progressed in co-operation with the possible NCC initiative to produce a map of issues and players to help plan user consultations and responses.
Intellectual property rights This Working Party replaced the one looking at the Database Directive. Its initial aim was to produce a guide putting the issues into context and focusing on the need for policing IP rights on a worldwide and not simply a European framework. The current objective is to focus on the EU Directive on principles and matters agreed within the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Other current issues include Internet naming, European Patents and the need to harmonize the use of terms, definitions and interpretations across Directives which deal differently with overlapping Intellectual Property Right issues, such as software, database or copyright. The Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) has announced an Anti-Piracy Forum to bring together industry and enforcement groups and a legislative consultation exercise. Internet related piracy is identified as one of the problem areas. In this New Year, the Intellectual Property Rights Working Party will discuss its response to this development.
Public procurement The Working Party’s stated objective in this area is to campaign to ensure that any revision to the Directives will genuinely lead to more effective and open public sector procurement. After responding to the Commission Green Paper on reform in 1997, their current tasks are to expedite the action subsequently announced in principle by the Commission and to achieve value for money within the existing rules. This will require improving the availability of guidance and training which place the need for public accountability of taxpayers’ money into the context of the mix of disciplines and the flexibility necessary for the successful implementation and management of IS projects and services.
Fair dealing This new Working Party will be addressing the need for codes of practice and cost-effective ways of handling changes that weren’t envisaged when the contract was agreed. The need for this was identified during the course of work on the contractual issues related to Y2K. Over 40% of large UK users feel that they have been badly treated by suppliers over the past year. The importance of this is becoming ever more apparent, and the Working Party aims to be ready to review a draft Brief and Action Plan in February 2000.
Education and training Sir Leon Brittan has identified life-long learning as one of the most important challenges of the information age as we move rapidly into the 21st Century. Life-long distance learning will become all the more important in future years, as it’s been recently predicted that people who reach adulthood who are born after the year 2010 will have a life expectancy of 120. This will necessitate many of those people having up to three careers and continuing education becoming a fact of life well beyond the present age of retirement for many of us today. This Working Party reported in 1997 on the political actions necessary to re-skill the UK and EU workforces and make a reality of life-long learning at affordable costs. It is now working to secure action on the recommendations. The Working Party has held workshops on the Millennium Skills Centres, the need for better co-ordination across HMG and Commission programmes and the Teacher Training Agency’s IT training programme. A sub-group is looking at E-commerce skills. The aim is practical progress towards overcoming the fragmentation and inflexibility of funding which prevents so many UK providers from sustaining world-class delivery other than to the privileged few.
119
Eurim Report
The Working Party is also concerned that the organization and funding of the National Grid for Learning and the University for Industry are becoming as fragmented as those initiatives that they replaced. This is an issue that will be focused on very strongly by the Working Party in the coming year.
Electronic commerce directive The Commission workshop on applicable law indicated a stand-off between those wanting adjudication in the country of the consumer and those in that of the supplier. Given the problem of identifying either, particularly if those doing business wish to avoid tax or regulation, we are currently organizing a workshop ourselves to explore some of the alternative ways forward.
Year 2000 and EMU This particular Working Party was given the task of identifying the political actions necessary for the handling of the consequences of the conjunction of EMU and the Year 2000 Date Problem and to enable those responsible to share concerns with UK and Commission officials in private before agreeing material for public use.
Other EURIM activities Workshops have also been held on the impact of changes to the regulation of financial services, critical infrastructure
issues and approaches to risk reduction. The current focus is the likely scale and impact of stockpiling. A separate Working Party on the actions needed to reduce the effort of transition to the Euro and to enable UK organizations to derive full benefit, whether or whenever the UK actually ever joins is planned for launch early in 2000. Hopefully we will be in the position this time next year to report on the success of this Working Party and keep up our already excellent record of close and effective co-operation at the heart of European policy and law making.
CONCLUSION As always, the strength of EURIM and at the core of its success is the wide involvement, at all levels, of companies, reflecting their own and their industry’s concerns. Membership to EURIM allows high-level access to the key legislative decisionmakers and, through contribution to Working Parties, reflects an unparalleled opportunity to have input at an early stage. For further information on EURIM and how to join please contact Emma Fryer at 17/17 Hanson Street, London W1P 7LN, [email protected] or Philip Virgo at EURIM Secretary General, 15 Chestnut Road, London SE27 9EZ, [email protected]. Stephen Digby, Report Correspondent Stephen Digby, is a partner and Head of Davenport Lyons Intellectual Property Group, as well as EURIM’s Company Secretary.
BOOK REVIEW Software Law Software Copyright Law, 4th Edition, by David Bainbridge, 1999, soft-cover, Butterworths, 389 pp., £29.99, ISBN 0 406 92184 9. As the title of this book suggests, this text is about the law governing copyright in computer software. Its origins lie in the author’s longstanding interest in software copyright law ever since he was involved in the development of computer programs and databases. Since that time, software copyright law had no longer remained the province of a handful of technically minded lawyers.Today:“Computer software is all-embracing. Everything is software now.The law protecting it and constraining its use is of importance to us all. No lawyer can afford to ignore software copyright law, either in terms of providing advice or services to clients or in terms of being a user of computer software.”The aim of this book, therefore, is to describe and provide insight into the practicalities of the subject. Its aim is to provide practical information rather an academic analysis of the subject.The author notes that many of the examples used are modelled on real-life situations and he hopes that the book will therefore prove useful to lawyers and computer professionals alike.The latest text has updated material on the protection of databases and copyright in the context of electronic publishing.This includes multimedia and the Internet. It also contains in the appendices the full set of European directives on the legal protection of computer programs and of databases.There are also some annotated extracts from the 1988 Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act and the Copyright and Rights in Databases Regulations 1997.There is a ‘navigator’s guide’ to the 1988 Act. Available from Butterworths, Halsbury House, 35 Chancery Lane, London, WC2A 1EL, Tel: +44 (0)171 400 2500.
120