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In a judgment of 17 November 2000, the Hasselt Criminal Court convicted a person who was found in possession of pictures and software containing images of sexual behaviour of a pornographic character featuring minors aged under 16. He was convicted under Article 383bis of the Criminal Code. Two Internet Service Providers (ISPs) whose infrastructure and services had been used to distribute and receive the illegal content on the Internet were not convicted. The Court referred to the basic rules of the Belgian Collaboration Protocol to Help Stamp Out Illegal Acts on the Internet (see IRIS 1999-7:...

A judgment of 13 February 2001 of the Brussels Court of Appeal has overruled a judgment of the Commercial Court of 2 November 2000 ordering the Internet Service Provider Belgacom/Skynet, at the request of IFPI/NV Universal, to remove hyperlinks pointing to illegal MP3 files from its server. The Court of Appeal was of the opinion that the refusal to remove hyperlinks to files allegedly in breach of copyright and neighbouring rights at the demand of the rightsholders may be considered an act of unfair competition. However, removal is only obligatory under certain conditions that were developed in...

Public opinion in Belgium has been ruffled recently by the latest advertising spot for the temporary employment company Adecco. This shows a rather unattractive and overweight employer in his fifties doing a striptease in front of a girl, ending up wearing nothing but a contract, which she then signs. Although private television channels were continuing to broadcast the spot regularly, RTBF had withdrawn it in December after there had been considerable indignant reaction on the part of viewers to its first showing. Adecco was not pleased with this, and had applied to the district court of Brussels...

The court of cassation in Brussels had just put an end to a long-standing dispute between RTL-TVI, the main French-language private channel, and RTBF, the public sector French-language broadcaster. In December 1997 the private channel had obtained an order by the presiding judge of the commercial court of Brussels banning the public channel from continuing to insert advertising breaks in the American series "Beverley Hills" and "The Streets of San Francisco". In doing so, the judge had based his argument on a provision of the audiovisual decree of 17 July 1987 which prohibited RTBF from interrupting...

The Flemish public broadcasting organisation VRT has refused to obey a decision of the President of the Brussels Court of First Instance ordering it not to broadcast a scheduled programme containing a political debate (Decision of 4 October 2000, Auteurs & Media, 2000/4, 470; see IRIS 2000-10: 4). The VRT argued that the ban imposed by the ex parte decision was a form of censorship in breach of the constitutional guarantees of freedom of expression. In a new decision of 16 March 2001, this time after the VRT had been given the opportunity to defend itself ("tierce opposition/derden verzet"), the...