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On 7 July 1998, the Federal Minister of Justice issued the preliminary draft of a fifth amending act on the Copyright Act, the aim being to bring the latter into line with developments in the field of information and communication technology. The primary purpose of the draft is to implement two treaties adopted by the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) - the WIPO Copyright Treaty and the WIPO Performances and Phonogram Treaty - as rapidly as possible ( see IRIS 1997-1:5). One important innovation in the draft is a new transmission right - the "right to make available". This covers...

On 30 June 1998, the television companies in the Association of Private Broadcasting and Telecommunication Operators (VPRT) and the Voluntary Self-Monitoring Agency for Television (FSF) together adopted guidelines on talkshows, with a view to ensuring their social acceptability, particularly where young people and children were concerned. Talkshows are an important part of several TV stations' daytime programmes. They have recently come under fire, partly because of the themes selected, and partly because of the way in which those themes are presented. Another complaint is that they go out at...

The German Parliament, after years of heated debate, gave its approval in April to an amendment to the Regulation Governing the Constitutional Court ( Bundesverfassungsgerichtsgesetz), which will in future make it possible to view the proceedings of the German Supreme Court on television. The change in the law will make it possible to make sound and film recordings as well as broadcast them on radio and television. Whereas in the past the Constitutional Court already permitted recordings of the announcement of the operative part of a judgement to be made, now the hearings, the pronouncement of...

By judgements on 1 September 1998 and 7 September 1998 the District Courts in Mainz and Cologne respectively decided on the admissibility of a party political broadcast by 'The Republicans" a party authorised to take part in the parliamentary elections. The same issue also arose before the District Court of Munich IThe background was the refusal by private broadcasters SAT 1, RTL, PRO 7 and Kabel 1 to broadcast the programme. In it, photos of the former German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer (German Christian Democratic Party) and the then opposition leader, Kurt Schumacher (German Social Democratic...

In its judgment of 29 April 1998, the Düsseldorf District Court dismissed an action by the owner of a page on the World Wide Web. The plaintiff complained that, when a link on the defendant's page was called up, its own page was displayed in such a way that the defendant's navigation elements continued to be visible (inlinelinking) and petitioned for a restraining order on the display of its own page in a frame of the defendant's page. A copy of the plaintiff's pages submitted to the Court portrayed various gluepots and a stylised, coloured shower cubicle. As to the facts of the case, the plaintiff...