About
Making EU product-compliance clear and actionable.
The Passport Brief exists to turn a fast-moving body of EU regulation into decisions a compliance, sustainability, or product team can take this quarter.
In short
The Passport Brief is a weekly publication on EU product compliance and Digital Product Passports, edited by Y. Lietzke, a former product-compliance lead and Digital Product Passport specialist. Every deadline and obligation is traced to primary sources — the Official Journal, delegated acts, standardisation requests, and named authority guidance — and dated, with uncertainty stated rather than smoothed over. The editor is the founder of ProTag AS, a product-compliance software company; that relationship is disclosed and kept behind an editorial firewall, and sponsored placements are always labelled.
Mission
ESPR, the Battery Regulation, and the Digital Product Passport arrive as hundreds of pages of framework text, delegated acts, and standards work — published across institutions, on different timelines, in language written for legislators rather than for the people who have to ship compliant products.
We read that material each week and publish one brief that answers three questions: what changed, when it binds, and what a manufacturer, importer, or certifier should do about it. No digests of digests, no reprinted press releases.
Editor
Y. Lietzke
Twelve years in product compliance, most recently as compliance lead for a European industrial manufacturer, where the remit covered CE marking, technical documentation, substance declarations, and the first internal DPP data model. Earlier work included conformity assessment on the notified-body side.
Day-to-day work on Digital Product Passport data models, in regular contact with standardisation groups, national market surveillance authorities, and compliance teams across batteries, electronics, textiles, and construction products. Reachable directly at editor@readpassportbrief.com.
Editorial standards
Primary sources first
Every deadline, threshold, and obligation is traced to the Official Journal, delegated acts, standardisation requests, or named authority guidance. Secondary commentary is labelled as such.
Dated and versioned
Regulatory text changes. Each item carries the date of the source version, and material corrections are published in the following issue rather than edited silently.
Uncertainty is stated
Where an act is still in draft or an interpretation is contested, the brief says so and explains the range of plausible outcomes instead of picking one for narrative convenience.
Practitioner review
Implementation notes are checked against practice with compliance leads, notified bodies, and data-model engineers before publication. Contributors are never quoted without consent.
Independence
Disclosed affiliation. Editorial firewall. No vendor influence.
Full disclosure: the editor is the founder of ProTag AS, a product-compliance software company. The Passport Brief is a separate publication, not its content arm: ProTag AS has no editorial input, no review rights, and no advance sight of coverage. Where an item touches ProTag AS or a directly competing product, the affiliation is restated inside that item.
The brief takes no equity and no retainer from the vendors it covers. Revenue comes from reader-purchased resources and clearly labelled sponsorship. Sponsors cannot review or approve editorial copy, and cannot buy inclusion in a tool comparison or a deadline analysis.
Read the brief
One email a week, Tuesday at 07:00 CET. Free, and unsubscribe in one click.