Search results : 237

On 12 November 2015, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) delivered its judgment in Hewlett-Packard Belgium v. Reprobel, which was a preliminary ruling on the interpretation of “fair compensation” under Articles 5(2)(a) and 5(2)(b) of Directive 2001/29/EU (the “InfoSoc Directive”). The case arose in Belgium, when a collective rights management organisation, Reprobel, requested that Hewlett-Packard pay a EUR 49.20 levy for every “multifunction printer” it sold. The dispute reached the Brussels Court of Appeal (Cour d’appel de Bruxelles), which referred a number of question to the CJEU. Article...

The Flemish public broadcaster did not respect the conditions required to include product placement in television programmes, according to the Flemish Media Regulator. These conditions are laid down in the Flemish Media Decree, which contains a specific subsection on product placement (Productplaatsing, Articles 98 to 101). According to Article 100, paragraph 1 of this decree, programmes which contain product placement must adhere to the following requirements: 1) the content of the programme must not be influenced to such an extent as to affect the editorial independence of the broadcaster, 2)...

In February and March 2015, the Flemish Media Regulator issued five decisions with regard to infringements of Article 69 of the Flemish Media Decree. This article requires that commercial communication for sugary confectionary shows an image of a toothbrush in a clear and contrasting manner during the full length of the commercial message, at one tenth of the height of the television picture. This requirement is not imposed by the Audiovisual Media Services Directive, but is a stricter provision adopted by the Flemish legislator. Following the monitoring of several commercial television broadcasting...

During the past months the Flemish Media Regulator has closely supervised compliance with the requirements regarding the broadcasting of sponsoring messages laid down in Articles 90-97 of the Flemish Media Decree. In a series of decisions published at the end of March 2015, the Regulator imposed a fine of EUR 1500 on four regional broadcasters (TV Limburg, Focus TV, ATV, WTV) for infringing Article 96, paragraph 1, which states that newscasts and political information programmes cannot be sponsored. In all cases, the newscasts were accompanied by a message mentioning the clothing sponsor of the...

Having established during its monitoring of Flemish television broadcasts that very short “bumpers” have been increasingly used to indicate advertising breaks, the Flemish Media Regulator issued an opinion on the implementation of the principle related to the distinction between editorial and commercial content. This principle is laid down in Article 79 of the Flemish Media Decree, which implements Article 19 of the Audiovisual Media Services Directive. According to Article 79, television advertising must be readily recognisable and distinguishable from editorial content. After consulting with...