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On 30 June 2020, as part of its supervisory activities, the Austrian regulator for broadcasting and audiovisual media, Kommunikationsbehörde Austria (KommAustria), ruled that Austrian public service broadcaster ORF had committed several breaches of the ban on surreptitious advertising and two breaches of the requirement to distinguish between advertising and editorial content, enshrined in the ORF-Gesetz (ORF Act – ORF-G). KommAustria is responsible for checking compliance with the ORF-G’s provisions on commercial communication. It therefore regularly evaluates programmes that...

On 30 March 2020, Austria’s Oberster Gerichtshof (Supreme Court – OGH) decided in preliminary proceedings that cease and desist orders against hosting providers could apply to content with identical words or meaning, but only within Austria (Case no. 4Ob36/20b). A politician from the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (Freedom Party of Austria – FPÖ) had published on his Facebook page an edited photo of a well-known ORF newsreader, the rights to which were owned by the ORF. The following text had been added to the image in clearly visible lettering: “There’s...

Measures taken to contain the coronavirus are having a huge impact on the audiovisual sector, forcing filming to be suspended and cinemas to close. This is creating considerable financial difficulties for the audiovisual industry. In Austria, various support measures have been taken by several organisations in order to minimise the effects of the crisis. Some have been specifically introduced for the audiovisual sector, some are aimed at creative artists outside the audiovisual sector, while others are more general in nature. The Verwertungsgesellschaft für audiovisuelle Medien GmbH (Collecting...

On 23 January 2020, the Österreichische Oberste Gerichtshof (Austrian Supreme Court) decided in a preliminary procedure that, although the secret filming of the so-called ‘Ibiza video’ had been unlawful, the act of sharing and publishing it had been justified (cCase no. 6 Ob 236/19b). In July 2017, two Austrian politicians from the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (Austrian Freedom Party – FPÖ), Heinz-Christian Strache and Johann Gudenus, were secretly filmed at a meeting in Ibiza. An actress pretending to be the niece of a Russian oligarch, and her companion...

With two judgments delivered days apart in November 2019, the Moscow Arbitrazh Court (first instance for commercial disputes) sided with the former distributor of a Fashion TV channel in Russia in the dispute with the owner of the global brand and its local representative over the distribution rights of a worldwide television channel. This is a new chapter in the longstanding dispute, but the matter appears still far from being resolved.  Austrian Fashion TV Programmgesellschaft mbH and Russian Fashion TV LLC, its former official distributor, have been in active conflict since the brandowner...