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The Supreme Administrative Court of the Republic of Bulgaria has set aside the decision of the Competition Commission (Pешение № 898 от 10.07.2014 г.) and the decision of the Director-General of Bulgarian National Television (BNT) in favour of issuing a public invitation to tender for the establishment of BNT’s audience share (Решение № ЗОП-01-10/20.05.2014 г.). After its Director-General had taken his decision, BNT issued the public invitation to tender for the following: “Establishment of audience shares and monitoring of television advertising, as well as the initialisation and maintenance of...

On 31 October 2014, the Bulgarian regulator, the Council for Electronic Media, published the report on its activities for the first half of 2014. During the period in question, the Council for Electronic Media reported 69 infringements, ten more than in the second half of 2013. In 68 of these cases, the Bulgarian Broadcasting Act had been infringed. Fines were imposed against 24 audiovisual media service providers, 42 companies that only distribute audiovisual content and three radio stations. The cases essentially involved four types of infringement. Some of the cases concerned breaches of provisions...

On 21 October 2014, the Council for Electronic Media (“CEM“) presented its report on the 2014 National Parliament elections. In its report, the CEM concluded that, in more significant television programmes on a variety of audiovisual media service providers (like bTV, Nova, TV 7 and News 7) paid political advertising dominated in comparison to the non-paid agitation forms. According to the CEM report, the dominating broadcast presence of the little parties, coalitions and initiative committees during the election period was stimulated by media packages, which were paid by the government. With regard...

Following the early termination of the digital broadcasting licences of two television channels - bTV Lady+1 and RING.BG+1 - in May 2014 (see IRIS 2014-6/8), the Council for Electronic Media received a similar request to cancel the licence of another channel in September. The two media services withdrawn earlier in the year were both provided by the bTV Media Group and are now only available via cable and satellite. The third channel that now wants to stop broadcasting digitally, Diema Family+1, is owned by Bulgaria’s second largest TV group, the Nova Broadcasting Group. Following the early termination...

In an unexpected judgment, the European Court of Human Rights found a violation of the right to respect for private life, as it considered that the confiscation of computers containing illegal software was not “in accordance with the law”, as required by Article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR). Rumen Trifonov Prezhdarov and Anna Aleksandrovna Prezhdarova had started a business in their garage renting computers to clients, without having the necessary software licence for reproduction and distribution of the software and games that were installed on the computers....