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The 5th Rundfunkänderungsstaatsvertrag (Agreement to the Amend the Agreement between Federal States on Broadcasting), agreed by the Minister-Presidents of the Länder and signed between 6 July and 7 August 2000, entered into force on 1 January this year. The main subject of debate before the agreement was ratified by the various Land parliaments was a rise in public service broadcasting licence fees. The Landtag (Land parliament) of Saxony referred in the preamble to its Zustimmungsgesetz (Act of Consent) to the desire shared by many of the parliaments for closer involvement in deciding future...

The Bundesverfassungsgericht (Federal Constitutional Court - BVerfG) has again given the press greater freedom through its decision of 28 August 2000. A finance magazine publisher asked the land registry - initially without explaining her reasons for doing soto grant an editor access to certain pages of the land register. The request was rejected on the grounds that the registered landowner should be consulted first. Furthermore, the land registry thought that the journalist should explain her reasons for consulting the register in order to weigh up the public interest, as asserted by the press,...

In a ruling of 22 August 2000, the Bundesverfassungsgericht (Federal Constitutional Court - BVerfG) rejected a complaint by daily newspaper TAZ that the Constitution had been infringed. The newspaper had appealed against rulings concerning the seizure and confiscation from its editorial offices of an original letter of confession that it had published, as well as the application of Article 97.5.2 in comparison with Article 97.2.3 of the Strafprozessordnung (Code of Criminal Procedure - StPO). In September 1995, TAZ had published an abridged version of a letter it had received from the group "Das...

The dispute between the Sächsische Landesanstalt für privaten Rundfunk und neue Medien (Saxony Land Authority for Independent Broadcasting and New Media - SLM) and cable network operator PrimaCom over cable allocations in Leipzig is, for the time being, being kept out of court. Targeting several hundred households in Leipzig on an experimental basis, PrimaCom had moved several freely-available independent channels such as ProSieben, RTL 2 and VOX from its analogue package to its digital subscription service. This had aroused fierce protests from the selected households and broadcasters. The SLM...

Following a joint complaint by ARD and ZDF, the Bundeskartellamt (Federal Monopolies Commission) is investigating whether Deutsche Telekom AG is abusing its dominant market position with respect to contracts governing the feeding of programmes into the cable network. The complaint centres on the fact that Telekom has an agreement with broadcasters exempting it from paying any copyright on the programmes carried on its network. In addition, Telekom demands a fee for public service channels to be included on the cable network. The Regulierungsbehörde für Telekommunikation und Post (Regulatory Authority...