Search results : 1348

According to media reports, the Oberlandesgericht München (Munich District Appeal Court - OLG) decided on 30 June 2011 that hotel operators and cable companies are obliged to pay reasonable compensation to broadcasters for the use of their television and radio programmes. In the proceedings, a hotel operator and a private news broadcaster had argued over whether compensation was due for the use of television programmes in hotel rooms. According to the reports, the OLG found that using the hotel’s own distribution equipment to retransmit programme signals to television and radio sets installed in...

On 22 September 2011, the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) published its judgment in the joined cases C-244/10 and C-245/10 following references for a preliminary ruling from the German Bundesverwaltungsgericht (Federal Administrative Court - BVerwG) concerning the interpretation of the ban on the broadcast of programmes that incite hatred, enshrined in Article 22a of the Television Without Frontiers Directive 89/552/EEC (now: Article 6 of the Audiovisual Media Services Directive 2010/13/EU). The related national procedure concerned an order issued by the Bundesministerium des Innern...

In a judgment of 15 September 2011 following an appeal procedure, the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) confirmed a ruling of the Court of First Instance of 6 October 2009 (T-21/06), dismissing an action brought by the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) against a decision of the European Commission (see IRIS 2006-3/5). In November 2005, the Commission had prohibited the granting of subsidies to support the transition from analogue to digital terrestrial television (DVB-T) in Berlin-Brandenburg by the Medienanstalt Berlin-Brandenburg (Berlin-Brandenburg Media Authority) because it infringed...

On 7 July 2011, the Kommission für Zulassung und Aufsicht der Landesmedienanstalten (Licensing and Monitoring Commission of the State Media Authorities - ZAK) announced that the special interest television broadcaster Sport 1 and the Landesmedienanstalten (State media authorities - LMA) had agreed to settle their disputes concerning consumer protection in game shows (see IRIS 2011-1/23). Under the settlement, the broadcaster Sport 1 recognised the media authorities’ interpretation of the rules on competitions adopted in 2009 (see IRIS 2009-3/12) as binding, withdrew its appeals and objections against...

On 28 June 2011, the Kommission für Zulassung und Aufsicht der Medienanstalten (Licensing and Monitoring Commission of the State Media Authorities - ZAK) complained that several RTL and Sat.1 programmes had infringed the rules on the separation of advertising and programme content set out in Article 7(3) of the Rundfunkstaatsvertrag (Inter-State Broadcasting Agreement). Both TV companies had, in a total of three cases, used so-called move-splits, a form of split-screen advertising in which a particular advertisement appears as part of a scene somewhere on the screen and the camera then zooms in...