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On 13 November 2019, the Austrian media regulator, KommAustria, approved an application from the public service broadcaster ORF to provide an on-demand service offering mainly fictional content (films and box sets). ORF currently operates the commercial online film library Filmmit through several subsidiaries. In order to make Filmmit into a public-service, ad-free, on-demand service, ORF asked KommAustria to carry out a so-called public value test in accordance with Article 6a of the ORF Act. In its application, ORF stated that the on-demand service would mainly provide content that had already...

In a judgment issued on Thursday 3 October 2019, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) decided that EU law does not prevent Facebook from being ordered to monitor and remove, at worldwide level, content that is declared to be illegal in an EU member state, or content that is identical or deemed equivalent. The judgment follows a request for a preliminary ruling from the Austrian Supreme Court concerning the interpretation of Article 15(1) of Directive 2000/31/EC on electronic commerce, which prohibits member states from imposing a general obligation on providers to monitor the information...

In a decision of 23 July 2019 (KOA 1.960/19-197), the Austrian communication regulator KommAustria ruled that a video produced by the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (Freedom Party of Austria – FPÖ) on the theme of “E-Card fraud” was discriminatory and therefore violated Article 31(3)(2) of the Audiovisuelles Mediendienste-Gesetz (Audiovisual Media Services Law - AMD-G). The FPÖ operates the on-demand audiovisual service ‘FPÖ-TV’ and has registered its own YouTube and Facebook channels with KommAustria. Via its on-demand service, it posted a video about measures taken by the government at the...

In a ruling of 29 November 2018 (G 296/2017-10), the Österreichische Verfassungsgericht (Austrian Constitutional Court) stated that a rule on the Austrian storage media tax was unconstitutional because the upper limit of 6% of the typical price level violated the principle of equal treatment. The Austro-Mechana collecting society had submitted a claim against a sole trader who sold blank CDs for payment of the storage media tax provided for in Article 42b of the Copyright Act (UrhG). The storage media tax, which is levied on the initial sale of recordable storage media, is designed to provide copyright...

Over the last 25 years the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has been regularly asked to decide whether specific interferences with certain forms of religion, or specifically worded insults directed at a religion or the spreading of religious enmity were protected under the right to freedom of expression established by Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) (see, inter alia, Otto-Preminger Institut v. Austria, IRIS 1995-1/1; Wingrove v. the United Kingdom, IRIS 1997-1/8; I.A. v. Turkey, IRIS 2005-10/3; Giniewski v. France, IRIS 2006-4/1; Tatlav v. Turkey, IRIS 2006-7/2;...