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On 26 January 2012, the German Bundestag (lower house of parliament - BT), thanks to the votes of the ruling parties, adopted a proposal for a “digitisation offensive for our cultural heritage”. The proposal states, firstly, that the digitisation of cultural assets and knowledge is aimed at their long-term protection and accessibility by the public. The Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek (German Digital Library - DDB), which is being developed jointly by federal, regional and district public authorities, is particularly designed to make this possible. Through the wide-ranging digitisation of cultural...

According to media reports, on 9 February 2012 the Amtsgericht Eschweiler (Eschweiler district court - AG) acquitted two Dutch journalists of breaching domestic peace (Art. 123 of the Strafgesetzbuch (Criminal Code - StGB)) and violating the confidentiality of the spoken word (Art. 201 StGB). The two defendants interviewed the joint plaintiff in 2009. The latter, as a member of the SS, had shot dead three civilians in the Netherlands in 1944. The death penalty that was originally ordered for these crimes was subsequently mitigated to life imprisonment, a sentence that he never began because he...

In January 2012, the Landgericht Köln (Cologne District Court - LG) dealt again with the question of whether photographs of a press photographer who wanted to report on a criminal procedure against a weather presenter that had attracted huge media attention, and the publication of the pictures on the Internet by the defendant, were lawful. In the ruling, issued on 11 January 2012, the court granted the photographer an injunction against the distribution of four images in which he appeared, in so far as they were distributed in the manner described in the complaint. In a separate case, the LG had...

On 15 December 2011, the Bundesverfassungsgericht (Federal Constitutional Court - BVerfG) decided that it should not rule on a complaint by several music industry representatives against a judgment issued in a copyright dispute by the Bundesgerichtshof (Federal Supreme Court - BGH) in October 2010. The case concerned an article published in 2005 by the defendant, a publishing house, in its online news service concerning a named piece of software that could be used to decode DVD films and circumvent copy protection software. As well as a warning that such activities were prohibited in Germany and...

In two judgments of 7 February 2012 the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights has balanced the right to freedom of expression by the media (Article 10 of the Convention) with celebrities’ personality rights and their right of privacy (Article. 8 of the Convention). The overall conclusion is that media coverage including pictures of celebrities is acceptable when the media reporting concerns matters of public interest or at least to some degree contributes to a debate of general interest. In the case of Von Hannover v. Germany (no. 2), the Court held unanimously that the publication...