Search results : 238

On 22 June 2011 the Conseil de déontologie journalistique (Council for Journalism Ethics of the French Community) pronounced its decision regarding a complaint filed against the public broadcaster RTBF because of a report covering the funeral of M.-R. Morel. The latter was attached to the extreme right political party Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest) and she eventually died of cancer, after her illness had been widely publicised with her consent. The report was part of the public broadcaster’s news bulletin. In this report an explicit link was drawn between the illness of M.-R. Morel and her commitment...

On 19 July 2011 the European Commission sent requests for information in the form of letters of formal notice, the first step in the process of an EU infringement procedure, to 20 EU member states. The member states in question, namely Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and Spain, have not yet notified to the Commission measures to implement the new EU Telecoms Package, formally adopted after two years of heated negotiations at the end of 2009...

According to Art. 1 of the Directive 2006/115/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 12 December 2006 on rental right and lending right and on certain rights related to copyright in the field of intellectual property, authors have an exclusive right to authorise or prohibit the rental and lending of originals and copies of their copyright-protected works. Article 6(1), however, provides member states with the possibility of introducing a derogation from this principle in the case of public lending, provided that the authors at least obtain remuneration for such lending. The correct...

On 14 April 2011, ECJ Advocate General Cruz Villalón delivered his opinion on case C-70/10, involving a reference for a preliminary ruling from the Cour d’ appel de Bruxelles in Scarlet Extended SA v Société Belge des auteurs, compositeurs et éditeurs (SABAM). The referred question concerns whether or not EU law permits member states to authorise national courts to issue injunctions against Internet Service Providers (ISPs) obliging them to introduce, for all their customers, in abstracto and as a preventive measure, at the cost of the ISP and for an unlimited period of time, a filtering system...

In a judgment of 29 March 2011 the European Court found a violation of Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights in the case Radio-télévision belge de la communauté française (RTBF) v Belgium. The case concerned an interim injunction ordered by an urgent-applications judge against the RTBF, preventing the broadcasting of a programme on medical errors and patients’ rights. The injunction prohibited the broadcasting of the programme until a final court decision in a dispute between a doctor named in the programme and the RTBF. As the injunction constituted...