Germany

[DE] Premiere Introduces New Youth Protection Measure for Pornographic Films

IRIS 2003-8:1/17

Stephanie Homburger

Institute of European Media Law (EMR), Saarbrücken/Brussels

Under an agreement between pay-TV broadcaster Premiere and the Hamburgische Anstalt für neue Medien (Hamburg New Media Authority - HAM), the supervisory body, Premiere will introduce a new measure to protect minors from the pornographic films it shows after 1 August 2003. In view of the constant availability of films on demand (through the pay-per-view system), the regional media authorities had decided that additional precautions were necessary under the terms of Art. 9.2 of the Jugendmedienschutz-Staatsvertrag (Inter-State Agreement on Protection of Minors in the Media - JMStV) (Art. 3.5 of the old RStV - Inter-State Agreement on Broadcasting) to prevent children and teenagers from watching these programmes. Under the new system, not only will the subscriber's PIN number be required at the booking stage, but a code will also have to be typed in on the screen before a pornographic film can be viewed. Once access is granted, the programme can be watched for 90 minutes. If the decoder is switched off or a different channel is selected for more than 15 minutes, the code has to be re-entered. In connection with the report published on 28 February 2002 by the Institut für Medienpädagogik in Forschung und Praxis (Institute for Media Education in Research and Practice - JFF), entitled " Jugendmedienschutz und Akzeptanz " (youth media protection and acceptance), which formed part of the first report on the implementation of youth protection provisions in broadcasting, it had already been stressed that, if two PIN numbers were required, parents were less likely to give the second number to their children if they had to pay extra for programmes selected by their children.