Consultation on European copyright rules June 15, 2007
Posted by grhomeboy in Media Radio & TV.add a comment
Authors and composers have until July 9 to comment on proposed new EU rules loosening restrictive territorial contracts for copyright registration on the Internet, satellite and cable retransmission of music.
The European Commission charged the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (CISAC) in February 2006 with imposing anti-competitive territorial restrictions on authors and composers. The restrictions concerned only material sent by the Internet, satellite or cable, the EU executive said.
CISAC offers a model contract used by 18 collecting societies in the 30-member European Economic Area (EEA), including the 27 European Union countries, the Commission said. CISAC has proposed changing the contract, which covers 95 percent of copyright licensing in the EEA, to respond to the Commission’s charges.
“The new contract lifts the membership restrictions and the exclusivity clause, according to which reciprocal representation is done on an exclusive basis for the respective territory of the collecting societies,” the Commission said.
CISAC has proposed permitting authors and composers to transfer their rights to any collecting society, not just the one in their own country. The confederation also said new wording would lift territorial restrictions which require commercial users to buy licenses for use only in the area covered by their local collecting society.
The Commission said those interested should comment on the proposals by July 9 so it could decide whether to accept them.
Euro customs in cash crackdown June 15, 2007
Posted by grhomeboy in Tourism.add a comment
People leaving or entering the European Union will have to declare cash totaling 10,000 euros or more under new rules from today aimed at cracking down on money laundering.
Up to now, national border authorities among the 27 EU members enforce their own restrictions on the amounts they allow individuals to bring into their countries.
The new rules will introduce a common EU-wide approach and customs officials will be empowered to seize cash in excess of 10,000 euros until a valid reason is given by a traveler for carrying such large sums.
“The customs will hold the money if they find it has not been declared,” said Maria Assimakopoulou, spokeswoman for EU Tax and Customs Commissioner Lazslo Kovacs.
Travelers have found ingenious ways of carrying large sums around the EU. Germany last year confiscated 60 million euros from people entering from non-EU member Switzerland alone. “We had one woman who had rolls of cash stuffed inside her walking stick,” an EU Commission official told reporters.
The new rules complement separate EU regulations that monitor transactions made through credit and financial institutions. The requirement from today applies to all currencies for sums worth 10,000 euros or more.
The Commission official said customs authorities would also question people whom they find regularly carrying in and out of the EU large sums of money, despite coming under the 10,000 threshold each time.
EU countries will continue to have their own different, nationally imposed thresholds on how much cash travelers can carry between member states.
Gothenburg, York win city tourism awards in Athens June 15, 2007
Posted by grhomeboy in Tourism.add a comment
The first awards ceremony of the European Cities Marketing (ECM) network took place this week in Athens, in the framework of the ECM conference, with the cities of York and Gothenburg landing the main prizes.
Sweden’s Gothenburg emerged as the “European City Tourism Destination of the Year”, while York in the UK won the “European City Tourism Organization of the Year” award.
The ceremony at Ethnikos Cine Kerameikos on Wednesday evening was attended by representatives from leading tourism corporations in Europe, including Frank Magee, President of ECM, and Paul Dubrule, co-founder of the Accord Group and Member of the Board of Maison de France.
The event formed part of the annual ECM conference held every year in a different city along with “City Break Expo,” which this year was held at the Faliron Sports Hall from Monday to Wednesday this week. The conference, organized by the Tourism Development Ministry and the City of Athens, began on Wednesday and will conclude tomorrow.
The ECM awards are intended to highlight and reward good performance and strengthen the image of European cities as tourism destinations, as well as to promote creativity and facilitate the exchange of experience among the members of the network.
ECM is primarily a network for exchanging know-how among tourism promotion and development corporations. It is the most important city-marketing organization in Europe, with 130 members in 30 countries, including Paris, Berlin, Dublin, Lisbon, Madrid and Vienna. The network was created by the merger of European Cities Tourism and the European Federation of Conference Towns.
City tourism is the most rapidly developing tourism sector in Europe. After the decline in the global tourism industry due to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001 and the SARS epidemic in 2002, city tourism soared across Europe.
Growth in arrivals across the whole of Europe has remained low (4 percent annually) relative to other continents, given the saturation of the market since Europe is the top destination in terms of number of arrivals. Crucially, while sea-and-sun tourism has risen by 6.3 percent, city tourism has grown by 16.3 percent.
Seafront encroachment began in 1968 June 15, 2007
Posted by grhomeboy in Architecture Infrastructure.add a comment
How the tourism minister of the time selected four of the most picturesque beaches on the Saronic Gulf for development
During the colonels’ junta in Greece (1967-1974), trips in a helicopter were not unusual for the tourism minister, Michalis Balopoulos. He would point out the beaches that he liked to his young secretary so that they could be designated for “tourist development.”
In November 1968 the junta gave the Greek National Tourist Organization (GNTO) the right to develop 12 areas in the country. Four of these were beaches in the Saronic Gulf. For this purpose, an act was passed which stipulated the areas where the GNTO had certain rights. The lease was valid for a period of 75 years. The only area excluded from the act was Glyfada, due to the close relationship between the mayor at the time and the junta leadership. In the Glyfada municipality, the area between the coastal avenue and the shoreline was reclaimed and filled in with debris.
Five months after the fall of the junta in November 1974, the legal validity of the above act was recognized by the Court of Appeal. The act remained in force until the government of Costas Simitis decided to hand over the commercial exploitation of tourism properties along the seafront to private enterprises.
A few weeks ago, Deputy Finance Minister Petros Doukas met representatives of the Hellenic Public Real Estate Corporation (KED), a team of researchers and Glyfada Municipality officials to discuss the eventual restoration of a section of the seafront in Glyfada, about 2.2 kilometers long. The contracts signed between KED and various users will expire in 2008. Most, if not all, the private enterprises have illegally extended the areas allocated to them.
The government has decided to put an end to the current situation in Glyfada, a Municipality that receives as much as 1 million euros a year from marinas alone. Development on the Glyfada seafront over the past 15 years has led to a fall in property values, in particular beaches and private properties. Some shipowners in the area have tried for many years to curb infringements and illegal building along the seafront.
To conduct the study, KED has appointed the Digenis architectural office, which had undertaken a study of the seafront prior to the Olympic Games in 2004. The study was never completed as the PASOK government then withdrew its plan to upgrade the coastal strip from Piraeus to Varkiza. In the study, Sakis and Andreas Digenis recommended that “the small marinas situated at the level of central Glyfada Square be removed from the seafront, which is currently built up and without public access.”
KED believes that the study will enable it to control land use. Various forms of illegal and irregular use which expired were given a five-year extension on March 3, 2004, by virtue of a presidential decree issued shortly before elections, but the initial contracts signed by the private enterprises with KED expire in 2008. One nightclub owner, Stelios Gidopoulos, has a permit for 300 square meters but the club actually covers nearly 2,000 square meters.
KED plans to include a clause that will nullify new contracts if barriers are built that hinder public access to the seafront. Areas will be paved in such a way that it will be possible to see whether private entrepreneurs are making illegal use of the seafront by adding more chairs and tables then provided for in the lease and contract with the Municipality.
Aghios Cosmas go-cart course at center of dispute June 15, 2007
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The beginning of the Aghios Cosmas Bay with a club much larger than the provisions stipulated in the permit > Legal status of Aghios Cosmas go-cart course at center of dispute
The Council of State has ruled that some of the land use contracts contravene a constitutional directive on coastal protection. Twenty-six residents of the Hellenikon Municipality have brought charges against former PASOK public works minister Costas Laliotis for the contract granted to the Aghios Cosmas Sports Center to open a go-cart center. One of the residents who brought charges against the minister was Yiannis Kalantides, a PASOK party official who was a close friend of then Athens Mayor Antonis Tritsis and the former head of the company that unified the archaeological sites of Athens.
The Council of State, in its decision (1790/99), deemed that “the installation and operation of a center for go-cart races on the Aghios Cosmas site were activities that were incompatible with the nature of the seafront as a fragile ecosystem and in opposition to the main use of the area for swimming and natural enjoyment and were therefore in violation of Article 24, Paragraph 1 of the Constitution and the current land use of the area.”
Claims by entrepreneurs that the airport and the coastal avenue had already damaged the seafront and therefore the go-cart center did not seriously affect the area were rejected. Indeed, the Council of State considered that such claims created an urgent need for other uses that violated regulations to be re-examined and for legal land use to be restored.
The state neither applied the decision of the Council of State nor the ruling of the Supreme Court for land use to be compatible with the seafront as an area for swimming and recreation. PASOK ministers continued to maintain that the use of the 4 hectares as a go-cart facility was in compliance with the provisions of the law. Deputy Sports Minister Giorgos Orfanos was of the same opinion, even though a few months after the elections the Organization of Athens responsible for overseeing the Athens Metropolitan Plan considered the lease to be an infringement of the permissible land use terms in the area.
In December 2004, the organization pointed out that, according to the law, the Aghios Cosmas area “is a free space with greenery and slight development for recreational and walking purposes,” as the area that has been illegal exploited “is the only public land that links the Aghios Cosmas seafront with the metropolitan park at Hellenikon.” A few months later, the Environment, Physical Planning Public Works Ministry ordered the local urban-planning offices to implement the court rulings. Naturally, the urban planning offices are not in any hurry.
Despite the government’s pledge to open “Athens to the coast,” even if the plan for Glyfada is implemented, only 1.5 percent of the coast stretching from the Peace and Friendship Stadium to Varkiza will be saved.
Climate change to hurt Greece June 15, 2007
Posted by grhomeboy in Environment.add a comment
Unless the advance of global warming is halted, the average temperature for July in Athens will be 8 degrees Celsius warmer by the end of the century and some 56,000 hectares of coastal land around Greece will be flooded, according to a report presented yesterday.
The study was conducted by researchers at the Athens Observatory and unveiled during a conference on the environment in Southeastern Europe organized by the Harokopeio University in Athens.
“When we talk about climate change, we are now in a position to talk about certainties,” said professor Dimitris Lalas.
The impact of global warming and the knock-on effect it is expected to have will seriously affect Greece, according to the report. The current average temperature for Athens in July is 33 Celsius. This is expected to rise to 41 Celsius between 2071 and 2100. This will have an effect on the demand for electricity, which is predicted to rise by 20 percent as people turn to air conditioning to keep cool.
Average rainfall is expected to lessen dramatically but the rising sea level will mean that parts of coastal Greece will be submerged. Some 56,000 hectares or 0.4 percent of Greece’s land mass will be covered by water by the end of the century, according to current rates of global warming. Areas such as the Evros Delta in northeastern Greece and the islands of Lemnos, Corfu, Crete and Rhodes are thought to be in particular danger.
However, due to declining rainfall, other parts of the country, such as Athens, will suffer from a lack of water. Athens currently uses 400 million cubic meters of water a year but by 2100 there could be as little as 125 million cubic meters of water available to Athenians.
Fines to curb Athens trash June 15, 2007
Posted by grhomeboy in Environment.add a comment
Athens Mayor Nikitas Kaklamanis said yesterday that fines of up to 6,000 euros will be slapped on those caught polluting the capital city as the municipality reactivates a regulation that had been previously shelved.
Kaklamanis pointed out that retail stores are responsible for most of the rubbish dumped in the capital’s central area. The central district each day produces about 400 tons of rubbish, while the rest of the city produces 1,100 tons of rubbish daily, added the Mayor.
By September, the Municipality plans to unveil plans to place blue bins for recyclable matter around the city district. Other efforts aimed at cleaning up the city include fining restaurant and cafe owners that illegally place tables and chairs on sidewalks and squares.
“We will not turn Athens into a cemetery, but this does not mean that we will allow anarchy either,” he added.
grhomeboy
