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The Honourable Mr Justice Warby of the High Court of Justice upheld a summary judgment application against Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL), according to which the publisher of the Mail on Sunday newspaper, had misused HRH The Duchess of Sussex (Meghan Markle) private information by publishing a private letter addressed to her father. HRH applied to the court under rules 3.4(2)(a) and 24.2 of the Civil Procedure Rules to have ANL’s defence struck out. Rule 3.4(2(a) allows the court to strike out a defence or part of it “if it appears to the court … that the statement of...

The UK Parliament’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee (DCMS) is undertaking five enquiries. One enquiry concerns the economic impact music streaming is having on artists, record labels and the sustainability of the wider music industry, as previously reported in IRIS 2021-2/22. DCMS is also enquiring into Broadband, including the introduction of 5G; it is examining how realistic the government’s pledge to ensure that every home and business in the United Kingdom has gigabit-capable broadband by 2025 is, and what is needed to achieve it. The DCMS Committee will consider...

The Broadcasting and Communications Acts provide that entities responsible for broadcasting should have the appropriate licence; failure to have such a licence when required is a criminal offence (s 13(1) Broadcasting Act 1990). Conversely, only the persons who have "general control over which programmes and other services are comprised in the service" are the persons deemed to be providing the service for the purposes of the Act. A licensee cannot sub-let its licence, nor can it be the puppet of another body.  Ofcom has provided guidance as to what this means in practice. There...

On 3 February 2021, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), the United Kingdom’s regulator of advertising across all media, banned Ryanair’s “jab and go” TV campaign on the grounds that it encouraged the public to act irresponsibly once they had received a coronavirus vaccination shot. The ban came just days after the Ryanair chief executive, Michael O’Leary, stated in a BBC Radio 4 interview that he expected a revival of European beach holidays in the summer of 2021. The two controversial television advertisements were launched on Boxing Day and were seen between...

In late January 2021, the Government of the United Kingdom (UK) published its draft Audiovisual Media Services (Amendment) Regulations 2021 (referred to as the “2021 AV Regulations” for ease in this note). The objective of these new 2021 AV Regulations is to address the deficiencies that were not earlier addressed during the run-up to the UK's full withdrawal from the European Union. When enacted, the UK’s 2021 AV Regulations will update certain technical elements of the existing framework established by the European Union’s Audiovisual Media Services Directive (the...