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On 21 January 2019, the Bayerische Landeszentrale für neue Medien (Bavarian New Media Authority - BLM), one of 14 German regional media authorities that monitor radio, television and telemedia services, announced that it had prohibited Amazon Instant Video Germany GmbH from broadcasting an episode from a German series with immediate effect because it infringed the ban on surreptitious advertising. The case concerns the German-produced sitcom “Pastewka”, which depicts the day-to-day struggles of the protagonist, Bastian Pastewka. The first seven series were broadcast by German TV channel Sat.1 until...

In a ruling of 8 January 2019, the Kammergericht Berlin (Berlin Court of Appeal - KG Berlin) addressed the question of when influencers should label social media posts as advertising. It decided that posts containing links to product providers do not generally need to be labelled as advertising. Rather, the question of whether the content of a post is functionally linked to the promotion of the company concerned should be checked on a case-by-case basis. The judgment is the first to set out principles for distinguishing between advertising and the editorial content of influencers and is relevant...

In a ruling of 31 August 2018 (Case no. 6 U 4/18), the Oberlandesgericht Köln (Cologne Regional Court of Appeal - OLG Köln) decided that domain registrars are liable for copyright infringements on filesharing platforms if they fail to shut down a domain reported by a copyright holder. The case concerned copyright breaches committed on the filesharing platform “The Pirate Bay”. The Court of Justice of the European Union had previously examined this platform in 2017 (Case no. 610/15, see IRIS 2017-7:1/4), when it had decided that the making available and management of an online filesharing platform...

The Bayerische Landeszentrale für neue Medien (Bavarian New Media Authority - BLM), one of 14 German regional media authorities which licenses and monitors private radio and television services in Bavaria, has lodged a constitutional complaint against two Bavarian court rulings in which its decision to ban the broadcast of various Ultimate Fighting programmes on German television had been declared unlawful. The case concerns various broadcasting formats featuring the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), a well-known US mixed martial arts organisation owned by the Las Vegas-based American sports...

On 11 December 2018, the Kommission zur Ermittlung der Konzentration im Medienbereich (Commission on Concentration in the Media - KEK) published its sixth report on the development of concentration and measures to protect diversity of opinion in the German private broadcasting sector, entitled “Protecting Diversity of Opinion in the Digital Age”. The report, published every three years in accordance with Article 26(6) of the Rundfunkstaatsvertrag (Inter-State Broadcasting Agreement - RStV), is designed to identify concentration trends at an early stage in order to prevent television companies,...