Plans for a £2bn Home Office surveillance project to track details of everyone’s email, mobile phone, text and internet use have been put on hold after a consultation raised concerns over its technical feasibility, costs and privacy safeguards.

The Home Office has confirmed that legislation for the project, known in Whitehall as the “interception modernisation programme”, will not be included in next week’s Queen’s Speech and is unlikely before a general election. The fresh delay follows concerns raised by internet service providers and mobile phone operators over the project’s feasibility, and anxieties over who would foot the bill.

An ambitious website that will open up government data to the public will launch in beta, or pilot, form in December.

Reams of anonymous data about schools, crime and health could all be included.

Data.gov.uk has been developed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the web, and Professor Nigel Shadbolt at the University of Southampton.

It is designed to be similar to the Obama administration’s data.gov project, run by Vivek Kundra.

Web portal Google Books’ initiative to create a digital library by scanning printed publications has triggered alarm bells in India, forcing the Centre to take up the matter with the US government. In a meeting held in the last week of October here, senior Indian officials told their US counterparts that the portal would encroach upon the copyrights of Indian authors and publishers.

After months of often bitter debate, European Union lawmakers reached agreement on how to preserve citizen’s rights to Internet access in a meeting that ended in the early hours of Thursday morning.

The issue, which pits citizens’ civil liberties against the rights of content owners such as record and movie companies to protect creative works on the Internet, has blocked the passage of a wide range of laws collectively dubbed the telecoms package. . .

. . . The text of the telecoms package now contains a new Internet freedom provision that states that access to the Internet is a human right of every E.U. citizen, and that if authorities take away that right people must have the opportunity to defend themselves; citizens also have an automatic right to mount a legal challenge.

However, the text does not demand that authorities in the 27 countries of the E.U. obtain a court order before cutting off someone’s Internet connection, as the European Parliament demanded when it last voted on the issue in early summer.

Canadian officials are taking part in negotiations for a top-secret copyright treaty that could see families barred from the Internet for a year if someone in the household is suspected of illegal downloads.

Under the worldwide rules of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), Internet service providers such as Bell and Rogers in Canada would be required to become copyright police and filter out pirated material from their networks, hand over the identities of customers believed to be infringing copyrights and restrict the use of identity-blocking software.

ACTA would employ a three-strikes policy. People believed to be regularly downloading copy-protected material, such as movie and music files, could have their Internet connection severed for up to 12 months and be forced to pay a fine.

The Harper government has quietly nixed recommendations to expand and modernize Canada’s access-to-information and privacy laws.

Justice Minister Rob Nicholson’s rejection of reforms to the 26-year-old laws sparked accusations Thursday that the Tories have reneged on campaign promises to bring openness and transparency to the federal government.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Saturday criticised the efforts of Google Inc to build a massive digital library, saying the Internet should not be exempt from copyright laws.

In her weekly video podcast, before Tuesday’s opening of the Frankfurt Book Fair, Merkel appealed for more international cooperation on copyright protection and said her government opposed Google’s drive to scan libraries full of books.

A text transcript of Merkel’s remarks is available (PDF) in German.

View the video podcast (in German).

. . . Digital literature, online scientific research and internet journalism that should have been saved in the nation’s main libraries over the past five years may have been lost because ministers have failed to give them the legal power to copy and archive websites, the Guardian has learned.

Senior executives at the British Library and the National Library of Scotland (NLS) are dismayed that legislation giving them the right to collect online and digital material is still not in force, more than six years after it was passed by parliament.

The omission has meant the libraries – which are legally required to archive books, newspapers and journals – have failed to record online coverage of major events such as the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the release of the Lockerbie bomber and the MPs’ expenses scandal.

While the Australian government looks at introducing a new Internet filtering system, a new political force is set to start making waves down under.

The Pirate Party, lobbying on a platform of copyright reform, is seeking to register as an official political party here and plans to contest the next federal election.

Germany’s elections have seen one small special-interest party notch up an impressive performance. The Pirate Party proved popular with first-time male voters — to the tune of 13 percent — and won 2 percent of the overall vote. Party members are already dreaming of a bigger, brighter future.