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In a judgment given on 7 April 1998, the First Criminal Chamber of the Federal Court (Strafsenat des Bundesgerichtshofs - BGH) upheld an earlier judgment by the Traunstein Regional Court (Landesgericht - LG), acquitting two accused persons of conspiring to commit crimes involving kidnap, murder, sexual abuse of children, rape and sexual violence. Using the pseudonyms "Leather Witch" and "Sado-Hangman", the accused operated a so-called "S/M studio", which they advertised on the Internet. Via E-mail, they offered to provide an undercover investigative journalist with a child for use in sadistic...

The agenda for the Conference of Minister Presidents of the Länder held in Berlin mid-March included a number of items concerning broadcasting legislation and the transformation of the broadcasting regulations into a fourth version of the Agreement between the Federal States on Broadcasting (see IRIS 1998-3: 10). The only item on which a consensus was reached was the drafting of a list of important social events which must be shown on television freely accessible to all (see IRIS 1998-2: 12). The Minister Presidents are seeking the transposition of Article 3a of the revised Television without...

The European Commission's DG IV (the Directorate-General concerned with competition) has expressed doubts on the merger of the German pay-TV broadcaster Premiere (Bertelsmann AG/CLT-UFA) and DF1 (Kirch Group) in consultation with Deutsche Telekom (see IRIS 1998-1: 14). The intended alliance for the purposes of digital pay-TV infringes the investigation principle of Council Regulation (EEC) No 4064/89 on the control of concentrations between undertakings in respect of cartel and competition law. It was thought that there was a danger of the market opportunities of private cable network operators...

As early as 1995 the European Commission spoke out against the procedure introduced by the Federal Republic of Germany, as it felt that foreign television organisers were being prevented from retransmitting their channels by the regulations operative in a number of Federal Länder on the occupation of space available on broad-band cable. The Commission held this to be an infringement of the freedom to provide services contained in Article 59 of the EC Treaty in that the reference to specific characteristics constituted camouflaged discrimination. In January 1996 the Federal Government then responded...

On 4 March 1998 the German Federal Parliament (Bundestag) adopted the Victims Compensation Act (Opferanspruchssicherungsgesetz - OASG) in order to provide civil-law compensation for victims of crime (for report on Bill, see IRIS 1997-3: 12). The Act gives legal entitlement to receive damages from a perpetrator of or participant in a crime in respect of sums received from third parties for portrayal in the media. The purpose of the Act is to prevent perpetrators of crimes deriving immoral profits from the commercialisation of their crime in the media, for example in the form of income from film...