Search results : 1366

In a ruling of 3 September 2020, the third civil chamber of the Bundesgerichtshof (Federal Supreme Court – BGH), Germany’s highest civil court, decided that the widow of former German chancellor Helmut Kohl was entitled to information about the existence and whereabouts of copies of tape recordings with a view to filing a subsequent surrender claim against the defendant, a well-known journalist. The dispute followed a claim for information about the existence and, in particular, the whereabouts of written, digital and other copies of tape recordings of interviews that the defendant...

On 24 June 2020, the German Bundesministerium der Justiz und für Verbraucherschutz (Federal Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection – BMJV) published a discussion draft for a “Second Act to adapt copyright law to the requirements of the Digital Single Market”. The draft contains proposals for the implementation of several provisions of the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (EU) 2019/790 (DSM Directive), which entered into force last year. Among other things, it introduces two new legal instruments into German copyright law with provisions on the liability...

In a decision of 23 June 2020, the German Bundesgerichtshof (Federal Supreme Court – BGH), the highest civil court in Germany, provisionally upheld the charge that Facebook had abused a dominant market position. The Bundeskartellamt (Federal Cartels Office), which is responsible for competition-related matters in Germany, had previously prohibited social media provider Facebook from processing data captured during Internet use outside the Facebook platform without the users’ specific consent. Under the BGH’s decision, the prohibition notice can now be enforced. The case concerns...

In a ruling of 15 July 2020 (Case no. BVerwG 6 C 25.19), the German Bundesverwaltungsgericht (Federal Administrative Court – BVerwG) ended a longstanding dispute over a change of licence for German TV broadcaster SAT.1 by rejecting a complaint by two German regulators against another German regulator as inadmissible. It ruled that a regional media authority did not have legal standing to revoke a licence granted by another regional media authority to a private broadcaster for a national television channel. The licence granted to Sat.1 was therefore lawful. Private broadcasters in Germany...

The Bundesverfassungsgericht (Federal Constitutional Court – BVerfG) strengthened the freedom of the press in two judgments issued on 23 June 2020. Although the cases dealt with very different issues, in both decisions the BVerfG highlighted the importance of protecting a free press in the context of democratic opinion-forming. In the first case (no. 1 BvR 1716/17), a constitutional complaint had been filed against a criminal conviction imposed after an unpixelated image of a dark-skinned patient in a university hospital waiting room was forwarded to a newspaper. The photographer had ignored...