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The Czech Parliament has approved an amendment to the VAT Act. This amendment clearly defines the rules for the calculation of a deduction coefficient for VAT in the public media and finally brings to an end a long period of legal uncertainty and conflicting interpretations of the law. At the same time, it opens the door to an important development for television and radio broadcasting. Czech Television and Czech Radio welcome the parliament’s decision to support the amendments to the law on VAT. In the past, the interpretation of the law on VAT was exclusively in the hands of the financial authorities....

The Parliament of the Czech Republic approved an amendment to the Copyright Act (Act no. 121/2000 Coll., On copyright, rights related to copyright and amending some laws, as amended) The amendment to the Copyright Act has two main reasons. The first is the obligation to implement Directive 2014/26/EU on the collective management of copyright and related rights and the granting of multi-territorial licenses for the rights to musical works online in the Internal Market and in the framework of the Czech legal order to better regulate collecting societies. The second reason is the intention of legislators...

In a ruling of 16 January 2017, the Prague Regional Court found that the operator of a website was not liable for embedded hyperlinks if it did not operate the site commercially (case no. 33 T 54/201). The case at hand concerned a website created by the Czech Pirate Party in protest against previous court decisions concerning website operators’ liability for embedded hyperlinks. Visitors to the website, sledujuserialy.cz, could post their own links to episodes of various TV programmes. At the request of the rightsholders concerned, the Prague Regional Court examined whether the website was lawful. As...

On 1 January 2017, the newly created Centre Against Terrorism and Hybrid Threats started operating. On 1 December 2016, the Prime Minister, together with the Interior Minister, presented the conclusions of the national security audit. The audit verified two basic capabilities of the State: the ability to identify specific security threats and to take preventive measures against them, and the ability to respond to crises which need to be addressed. Each chapter provides answers to questions such as: is the current legislation sufficient? Does the State have sufficient capacity? Does it have the...

The Czech Broadcasting Law stipulates that a broadcaster shall provide objective and balanced information necessary for opinions to be formed freely; any opinions or evaluating commentaries shall be separated from the news. In its session on 10 January 2017, the Broadcasting Council of the Czech Republic issued a warning to the operator Czech Television following a violation of this provision of the Broadcasting law. The alleged violation was committed on 9 November 2016, in a programme called “US election night”, which was characterized as a news programme. According to the Broadcasting Council,...