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Since the beginning of 2009, the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers (CM) has adopted five country-specific Recommendations concerning the application of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages: Serbia (first monitoring cycle); Armenia, Austria and Cyprus (second monitoring cycle) and Sweden (third monitoring cycle). The Charter contains a number of provisions of relevance for the (audiovisual) media, the most detailed of which are to be found in Article 11. Of the latest batch of Recommendations on the application of the Charter, the most specific references to the audiovisual...

On 8 October 2009, the European Commission decided to close an infringement procedure against Germany relating to European “must-carry” provisions, as set out in the Universal Services Directive. The Directive forms part of the EU’s Telecoms Package, which is currently under revision. Under the Directive, Member States are obliged to ensure a minimum level of availability and affordability of basic services, as well as a basic set of rights for the benefit of European consumers. According to Article 31, proportionate and transparent “must-carry” rules can be set for clearly defined general interest...

The Pirate Bay saga continues. On 21 August 2009, Stockholms tingsrätt (the District Court of Stockholm) issued an order, subject to a conditional fine, enjoining an Internet Service Provider, Black Internet AB, from contributing to the making-available of certain films and music albums to the public by means of supplying Internet capacity to the file-sharing site The Pirate Bay. The court held that Black Internet AB was well aware that users of The Pirate Bay are considered to be engaging in illegal file sharing and that the people behind The Pirate Bay have been found guilty of complicity in...

In the aftermath of the Pirate Bay court decision, the head judge of the Stockholms tingsrätt (the District Court of Stockholm) was accused of conflict of interest in that case (see IRIS 2009-6: 17). Accordingly, a formal complaint was lodged on several grounds by the defendants’ counsel, in which they argued that the District Court of Stockholm should declare a mistrial. Svea Hovrätt (the Svea Court of Appeal) has now delivered its judgment on this issue. The head judge as well as the president of the District Court of Stockholm disputed that there were any conflicts of interests present. The...

On 17 April 2009, Stockholms tingsrätt (the District Court of Stockholm) delivered its judgment regarding four people behind the well-known file-sharing site “The Pirate Bay”, hereinafter jointly referred to as the accused. The case concerns the question of criminal liability for acting as an accessory to and for the preparation of a crime against the Copyright Act. The Pirate Bay uses so-called BitTorrent technology, which makes it possible for people to share data files with each other. Through The Pirate Bay it is possible for internet users to upload and store so-called torrent files on The...