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On 24 March 2004, the Federal government accepted the bill on the amendment to the Deutsche Welle Act. The aim of this Act is to give a modern task profile to the public broadcasting station Deutsche Welle (DW), broadcasting radio programmes abroad. The primary objective is to present Germany abroad in its entire diversity and encourage understanding of and exchange between cultures and nations. The Act forbids any content-related standards in order to reinforce autonomy and journalistic independence. The new bill introduces a self-regulation system to enable DW to transparently discharge its stipulated...

The Oberlandesgericht Düsseldorf (higher regional court of Düsseldorf, OLG) annulled the decision of the Landgericht Düsseldorf (regional court of Düsseldorf) dated February 17 2004 regarding legal requirements to be fulfilled to comply with protection of minors against the distribution of simple pornography on the Internet. The regional court of Düsseldorf decided in 2003 that it was sufficient to comply with requirements of on-line child protection by querying a personal ID number whose conclusiveness was verified by a computer program in connection with an offer subject to costs (see IRIS 20034:...

On 21 April 2004, the European Commission announced its decision to refer to the European Court of Justice the six Member States that had still not fully implemented the new regulatory framework for electronic communications into their national law (i.e. Belgium, Germany, Greece, France, Luxembourg and the Netherlands). The new framework was to be implemented by July 2003, but 8 Member States failed to meet this deadline and in October 2003 the Commission opened infringement proceedings against those States (see IRIS 2003-10: 5 and IRIS 2004-2: 4). Proceedings against two Member States, Spain (see...

Because of a complaint from the Private Broadcasting and Telecommunications Union (VPRT), dated April 2003, on 5 April 2004 the EC Commission (Competition DG) made a request for information from the Federal Republic of Germany. The complaint was directed against the financing of the public broadcasters, ARD and ZDF, in particular, for what were possibly anti-competitive practices in relation to the acquisition of football transmission rights. The complaint reproached ARD and ZDF for allegedly acquiring sports transmission rights without actually broadcasting the relevant sporting events later on....

At the beginning of April, public service TV broadcasters ARD and ZDF reached an agreement with Kabel Deutschland concerning a series of conditions for the digital transmission of their programmes. Kabel Deutschland acquired most of the broadband cable networks previously owned by Deutsche Telekom and is currently preparing to take over additional networks. There had been a dispute over the technical parameters for the cable transmission of the respective programme bundles, ARD Digital and ZDF Vision, which largely cover the whole range of digital public service TV channels. As well as the ARD...