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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...

On 5 September 2000 the Oberlandesgericht Stuttgart (Stuttgart Appeal Court - OLG) ended the lawsuit between the ARD (Union of German Public Service Broadcasters) and ProSieben Media AG without reaching a verdict (see IRIS 1998-3: 6). The European Court of Justice preliminary ruling, made at the OLG's request, led both parties to declare that their dispute was over (see IRIS 1999-7: 6 and IRIS 1999-10: 5). The Court, which therefore only had to decide what costs were due, concluded that the costs cancelled each other out, since it was not clear which side would have won the case if it had been...