Some things that happened in Slovakia in the last few weeks.

• Four members of the Slovak Parliament introduced a few articles amendment of the Slovak Copyright Act, which aims to reform very old rules on copyright licensing such as a requirement of written form. It would finally enable proper functioning of the Creative Commons or GNU licenses in Slovakia. The proposal itself is here. If you are wondering how could written form requirement survive till today, I shall note that courts would usually find no infringement in case when oral consent was proven and license fees paid (e.g. decision of District Court in Prešov – 11C/88/2006).

• Creative Commons Slovakia is finally getting started. Led by Huťko’s friend Zuzana Adamová CCS launched it’s website and introduced it’s team, which Huťko is part of.

• Slovak Ministry of Finance proposed new bill providing for measures for blockage of unlicensed online gambling websites in order to prevent Slovak consumers from accessing and using these websites to collect more money on the taxes. According to the bill, ‘black list’ of websites will be maintained by the Bratislava tax office. More about the bill here (in English) and comments of EISI here (in Slovak).

• Court of Appeal in Bratislava lifted preliminary injunction against the www.znasichdani.sk and local webhosting provider – the case was reported by Huťko here.

Huťko will hopefully blog soon about Interflora and some recent Slovak and Czech cases.