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Contents of today's ICOMP newsletter: 
On 3 June, at the association's annual international Congress held in Dresden this year, CEPIC announced a new committee. CEPIC's new President is Christina Vaughan, CEO of Image Source (UK). Christina Vaughan succeeds Alan Smith, who acted as CEPIC President between 1997 and 2009. The ICOMP Secretariat would also like to welcome Michael Lato, Founder and CEO of HazelMail as a new member. HazelMail is a website that allows people anywhere to easily create and mail physical postcards online using their own photos. By sending cards locally, the company also reduces the carbon footprint of sending postcards.
5th Meeting of the ICOMP Council in Vienna, 2nd-3rd June
ICOMP Dinner with Guests
The Council Meeting
ICOMP-sponsored VÖZ Symposium The White House Anniversary Event
Two ICOMP members embark on international joint business venture
This year's CEPIC Congress in Dresden was one of the largest events of its kind bringing together about 600 delegates and nearly 400 companies and organizations from across the world. The annuel Congress is both a forum and a marketplace for representatives from the images industry, featuring a programme that examines issues pertinent to the industry. A key feature of the Congress was the EU-funded Metadata Image Library Exploitation (MILE) Conference entitled "Know Your Rights" on June 3, which focused on image piracy and the practical application of copyright metadata. The Third International Photo Metadata Conference on June 4 discussed and demonstrated a path to the future for cross-media metadata. Auke Haagsma, ICOMP's director, spoke at a seminar entitled "Creative Industries: Getting our message across anti-copyright waters". The European Commission held an open consultation on the necessity for developing personal data protection The European Commission hosted a two-day conference entitled "Personal data - more use, more protection?" at the end of May as part of an open consultation on how the fundamental right to protection of personal data can be further developed and effectively respected, in particular in the area of freedom, justice and security. Speakers from the Commission, the European Privacy Officers Forum and several data protection officers from member states, the European Digital Rights association, and representatives from major companies including Google, Microsoft and Intel addressed far-reaching questions such as
Westminster eForum on Behavioural Targeting sought to provide impartial advice to UK Parliament On 19th May Lord Watson, ICOMP Chairman, chaired and moderated a session at the Westminster eForum's seminar on Behavioural Targeting, Social Networking and the Challenges of Online Privacy, held in London on 19th May. His session featured a keynote speech from Jonathan Bamford, Assistant Commissioner at the UK Information Commissioner's Office and a panel discussion including speakers from Sun Microsystems, Tribal DDB, Edentity, Cloudmark, Comment Technologies and Lewis Silkin. Bamford focused on the dynamic yet risky nature of the online environment in which the public often put their personal data and the need to increase public trust and confidence in that environment. He highlighted the Information Commissioner's Office's Privacy by Design initiative as one way in which companies improve their part in this. In his closing remarks Lord Watson focused on how achieving "the right balance and actually between consent and need and indeed people's desire to share more and more information is one of the biggest challenges we face." For more information on Westminster eForum click here Privacy concerns about Street View in Poland Street View, the Google project which allows users to see three-dimensional photographs of any street in surveyed areas, now covers much of the urban regions of the US and Japan, and the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Greece and Poland in the EU. Big privacy debates around the service, with arguments ranging from the product being invasive to facilitating robbery, have been sparked in particular in the UK and Greece, where the service has been temporarily banned. An official investigation into the privacy concerns associated with Street View has now also been ordered in Poland by the Inspector General for Personal Data Protection Ochrony Danych Osobowych, who is also a member of the Art.29 Data Protection Working Party which examines privacy matters on a European level. The Polish Inspector General's own position is that Google should have to inform individuals who are about to be captured by its mobile camera devices that this is the case, so that people are given a chance to avoid being photographed - even if Google blurs their faces for anonymisation before posting the images. The outcome of the Polish investigation will be of interest to other markets in which Street View is active.
We have a new member spotlight profile, featuring the views of Manuel Cerqueira, President of ASSOFT. He offers his thoughts on piracy, the creative industry and the online marketplace here. If you are a member and would like to have your company featured, please let us know. The issues and policy pages now have links to the latest news, events, and more detailed 'subpages' of information on our key areas of interest, as you will see on the privacy subpage here. Going forward we shall also relevant documents of interest uploaded to these pages. Members' area: Members can see a full newsletter archive by logging in here, enabling you to catch up on matters discussed in the past. Information on upcoming council meetings can also be found on this part of the site. Regarding further updates, we also have an interesting new range of industry events for the coming months, and photos of our last ICOMP-hosted event, the Privacy and Competition Conference.
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In the afternoon, ICOMP participated in a Symposium hosted by the Austrian Newspapers Association, VÖZ, entitled "Intellectual property and copyright - new times, new media and new challenges" at the newly opened headquarters of the Raiffeisen Zentralbank Vienna. ICOMP Director Auke Haagsma offered an assessment of the options for a regulatory framework on copyright in the digital age as part of a panel that also included Dr Dietrich von Klaeden, Head of Government Relations at Axel Springer AG, and VÖZ President and Chairman of the major Austrian publishing group Styria Medien AG, Horst Pirker. Austria's Federal Attorney General, Claudia Bandion-Ortner, gave the keynote speech at this event, reiterating her ministry's commitment to defending existing copyright law and to amending these laws as and when necessary in the future.
ICOMP Voices: David Wood and Brendan Tansey have written two insightful blog posts about 
