Search results : 234

A judgment of the Antwerp Court of Appeal of 9 June 2022 offers strong support for investigative journalism on issues of public interest, while at the same time acknowledging the detrimental impact of SLAPPs (Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation). The case concerned a complaint by project developer Erik Van der Paal against a journalist of the news site Apache and its chief editor. The chief editor, Karl van den Broeck, and Apache journalist Stef Arends were accused of having stalked Erik Van der Paal of the NV Land Invest Group (Section 422bis Criminal Code) and of violating the...

Every three to six years, the Belgian French-language public broadcasting body (RTBF) negotiates a so-called “management contract” (equivalent to the “contracts of aims and means” in France) with the government of the French-speaking community of Belgium. This contract lays down, on the one hand, RTBF’s public service obligations and, on the other, the financial resources and frequencies allocated to it by the government for the duration of the contract. The next management contract, which will cover the period from 2023 until 2027, is currently being negotiated....

On 17 June 2021, the CJEU delivered its judgment on Case C‑597/19. The request was made in proceedings between Mircom International Content Management Consulting (M.I.C.M.) Limited, referred to as "Mircom", the holder of certain rights over a large number of pornographic films produced by eight undertakings established in the United States and Canada, and the Internet access provider Telenet BVBA. It concerned the latter’s refusal to provide information enabling its customers to be identified on the basis of several thousand IP addresses collected from a peer-to-peer network, where...

The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) found that a court order to anonymise an article in a newspaper’s electronic archive did not violate the publisher’s right to freedom of expression under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). The judgment relates to the “right to be forgotten” as part of the right to privacy under Article 8 ECHR, in particular in respect of media archives (see also Iris 2013-9/1 and Iris 2018-8/1). The ECtHR held that the order to anonymise the name of a driver who had caused a fatal accident in the online archived version...

On 15 December 2020, the Belgian Conseil supérieur de l’audiovisuel (regulatory authority for the audiovisual sector of the French-speaking Community of Belgium – CSA) published a new study entitled Médias: Attitudes et Perceptions (Media: Attitudes and Perceptions – MAP). The study analyses the different ways in which audiovisual media services are used in French-speaking Belgium. More specifically, it aims to discover how the emergence of new forms of audiovisual consumption is changing television usage. It is the first study of this magnitude to be conducted in...