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The Oberlandesgericht Cologne (Regional Court of Appeal - OLG) has granted a temporary injunction against the transmission of electronic press reviews via E-Mail on the grounds that it is incompatible with copyright law. The defendant collecting society "Wort" had concluded an agreement with a company using an electronic press review on its in-house communication system for the payment of copyright dues. The collecting society was prohibited from concluding agreements with third parties providing for the scanning and storage of press reviews and their dissemination via E-Mail as it was deemed...

In a judgment of 4 November 1999, the Hamburg Regional Court of Appeal (Oberlandesgericht - OLG) ordered an Internet service provider (ISP) to desist from further co-operation in the unlawful competition activities of a website operator. Acting on behalf of the website operator, the ISP arranged registration of a ".com" domain, registering itself under "tech-c", "zone-c" and "billing-c", and citing the website operator as an administrative contact under "admin-c". As is normal practice in respect of a domain name registration, the ISP also provided one of the two nameservers required for incorporation...

The provisions on the protection of minors contained in Article 22 of the EC "Television without Frontiers" Directive (97/36/EC) are to be transposed into German law through the corresponding regulations of §3 of the Rundfunkstaatsvertrag (Agreement between the Federal States on BroadcastingRfStV) as set out in the 4. Rundfunkänderungsstaatsvertrag (4th Agreement to Amend the Agreement between the Federal States on Broadcasting), due to enter into force on 1 April 2000 (see IRIS 1999-5: 11). Paragraph 3.4 of the Agreement states that programmes which, in accordance with sub-paragraphs 1-3, may...

In a judgement of 15 September 1999, the 1st Chamber of the Federal Supreme Court (BundesgerichtshofBGH) ruled that translations of dialogue in comics are protected by copyright law as original pieces of work. The Court therefore upheld the complaint of a translator who, on behalf of a publishing company, translated seventy volumes of Walt Disney comic Lustige Taschenbücher from Italian into German between 1976 and 1994. The reason for her complaint was the fact that the publishing company had reprinted the works translated by the applicant up to twelve times without her express agreement. Moreover,...

In two judgements of 1 December 1999, the Federal Supreme Court (Bundesgerichtshof - BGH) decided to award the heirs of deceased prominent figures the right to an injunction and, for the first time, compensation for unauthorised commercial use of images of the deceased. In the first case, the producer of the musical "Marlene" had allowed a car manufacturer to bring out a "Marlene" model and had given permission for a cosmetics producer to advertise the so-called "Marlene-Look" using a portrait of Marlene Dietrich. He also arranged the production and sale of merchandise bearing a picture of Marlene...