Content Rating and Mobile Internet Safety Conference in Prague, December 2008 Inspired by the successful international conference CEE SIC 2007 (November 2007) and the professional conference Internet & Law (June 2008), their organisers decided to hold the second annual conference SIC 2008 on 15 December 2008 in the Nostic Palace in Prague. This time the conference focused on the internet and mobile communication.

The Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic is now working on a new Media and Audio-visual law. Content rating is focusing more and more on the internet. That is the reason why the Saferinternet.Cz project is pushing ahead this aspect and co-organised the Content Rating and Mobile Internet Safety Conference (SIC 2008).

The event was launched under the auspices of Mr. Kasal, the Vice-Chairman of the Chamber of Deputies of the Czech Parliament who initiated the Safe Internet for children campaign. He pointed to the importance of the event in his opening speech and expressed the interest of the Czech Parliament and its professional bodies in assisting the legislative process should it be required.

The demand from internet users to get sufficient information related to the content which they are going to access became one of the central points of the conference. The demand is real and comes from the growth of text, visual and audio-visual resources on the web, which include elements which are inappropriate for minors or offend some groups of people (based on their ethnicity, faith, sexual orientation, etc.).

The issue has been addressed by Patrick Chazerand from the European Federation of Interactive Software (ISFE), who introduced the PEGI system. He said: “the Interactive software industry realising its social responsibility initiated the self-regulation based on the PEGI content rating system, which makes it easier for parents to take decisions related to suitable content for their children”. The classification system was developed by the Netherlands Institute for the Classification of Audiovisual Media (NICAM). The system is used in the Netherlands as well as in some other European countries for rating and the production of TV programmes. Professor Jan Jirak of the Centre of Media Studies CEMES of the Charles University in Prague, who leads the project “conception of a unified system for the classification of audio-visual products unacceptable for children and youth” (AV klasifikace) is recommending the implementation of the PEGI rating system in the Czech Republic.

Questions of internet safety for children were addressed by Jan Mühlfeit, Chairman Microsoft Europe (Microsoft). Mr.Petr Soukup of theInstitute of sociological studies FSV of Charles University followed with concrete data from recent studies including from the just-released Eurobarometer which focused on the use of the internet and communication technologies by children.

The next part of the Conference in the afternoon dealt with cyber crime oriented on children and safer use of mobile phones by youngsters. It was opened by Jonny Shipp ofTelefónica O2 UK, who pointed out a need for educating both children and adults in using ICT. The European network of hotlines INHOPE was introduced by Adrian Dwyer. The main mission of the network is the fight against the spread of child pornography on the internet, against the abuse of children as well as other forms of cyber crime which involves children - in cooperation with national and international law enforcement agencies. Concrete forms of such crime in the Czech Republic and how the Czech police deal with it were explained by Mr. Karel Kucharik of the Czech Police Presidium.

These speeches served to introduce the themes of the next interesting panel discussions. The first of these was dedicated to regulation, self-regulation, and censorship. The panellists – representatives of the Czech key internet content providers (O.Svihalek/Centrum Holding, J.Kabele/iDnes, J. Hajek/Microsoft) discussed different aspects of the issue whereas legal aspects of the responsibilities for published content were analysed by JUDr. Tomas Grivna of the Law Faculty of the Charles University.

The next panel focused on the state-of-the-art implementation of the European Framework for Safer Mobile Use by Youth, Teenagers and Children (Dohoda o implementaci národní samoregulace vČR). The panellists were representatives of the Czech mobile operators (J.Chocova/T-Mobile, V.Recnikova/Teléfonica O2, P.Piskula/Vodafone).

The last panel dealt with cyber crime, law and children’s safety. The panellists A.Dwyer/INHOPE, V.Jirovsky/MFF UK, K.Kucharik/Policie ČR a K.Kopecky/PF UP Olomouc) agreed on the fact that the fight against cyber crime is a very sophisticated long-term issue, which requires the extraordinary cooperation and collaboration of law enforcement bodies with the system of educational institutions.

At the end of the conference the Declaration of the good practice principles of empowering users to make informed decisions concerning audio-visual content was announced. The goal of the Declaration is to start a discussion to form the principles based on best practises, so that they are transparent and clear to enable customers to make informed choice about safe and appropriate content offered by commercial content providers. The Declaration was inspired by the similar UK initiative.

The conference was supported by Microsoft, Teléfonica O2, T-Mobile and Vodafone.

Organisers:

Saferinternet.Cz is the EC supported project in the framework of the Safer Internet programme. Its goal is to increase safer internet awareness whereas the helpline provides assistance to children as victims of cyber crime and the hotline, which cooperates with the Czech Police to fight cyber crime, first of all child pornography.

Safer Internet Institute is a platform which studies safer internet issues. The goal of the Institute is to establish a best practise repository of documents and resources to assist the Saferinternet.Cz project and contribute to the methodology of a safer use of the Internet.