Only a couple of days after the Commission announced its Roadmap and Inception Impact Assessment for the modernisation of the EU copyright framework, the draft Communication of the Commission was leaked. What was supposed to be a full legislative proposal, became…

As had been announced in the Digital Single Market Strategy, the Commission has recently launched a public consultation on “the regulatory environment for platforms, online intermediaries, data and cloud computing and the collaborative economy”….

We have closely monitored the debates around the EP’s own initiative report on the review of the EU copyright rules between its draft release last January and the final vote in July. And it was often heard that without stricter copyright, creators will not be able…

This week, the Dutch Government hosted the 11th ODF Plugfest in The Hague. Nothing remarkable about that, you might say, but what it illustrated was just how strong the ‘community effect’ can be within IT, and how, if channelled effectively, can boost the long term opportunity and success. Professor Henry…

A strong trend that has marked the software industry in recent years has been the move away from selling software licences, in favour of subscription-based integrated services delivered through the Internet (aka Software as a Service aka SaaS). A notable characteristic of this…

On August 20, the European Commission published a call for tender (DIGIT/R3/PO/2015/019 LSP). This call is worth an extra look. The Inter-Institutional Licensing Agreement The purpose of this tender is to select a service provider that can assist the European Institutions with “the acquisition of Microsoft software…

In April 2014, a major security bug was discovered in the OpenSSL cryptography library, which is widely used across the Internet (chances are that if you’ve been on a secure site with an URL starting with https, you’ve used OpenSSL). The bug itself was…

The latest data from Eurostat indicates that only one out of every five EU enterprises makes use of cloud computing services, despite the benefits of such services being widely underlined and the untapped potential of cloud computing being universally agreed. Source: ETSI…

Admittedly, the situation has changed significantly since 2009 and the browser ballot screen is now largely unnecessary, as the usage share of Internet Explorer has dropped rapidly in the last few years, having stabilised at around around 10%. The role of the ballot screen in this downfall was arguably…

Disclaimer: Google, which is mentioned in this blog post, is a member of OFE The Higher Regional Court in Hamburg in Germany revisited the topic of liability of online intermediaries in its ruling of 1 July, opposing Google YouTube and…

A huge amount of data is generated daily by public procurement authorities throughout the EU. This is of course immensely useful as that data can be mined to identify interesting trends and produce analysis (such as our very own Procurement Monitoring Reports which aim to document the practice and…

As advocates of openness, we at OFE try to live by our own principles as much as possible. We like to think that openness is not just a vague concept, but a guiding principle that inspires not just the positions we take, but also the way that we work. And this includes the tools we use…