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On 21 March 2024, the Bundestag (German federal parliament) adopted the draft Digitale-Dienste-Gesetz (Digital Services Law – DDG) to regulate the single market for digital services and promote fairness and transparency for business users of online intermediation services. The Bundestag vote followed a recommendation by the Ausschuss für Digitales (Committee on Digital Affairs). The DDG aims to bring German legislation into line with the EU Digital Services Act (DSA) and clarify some outstanding questions regarding its implementation. The DSA and DDG are primarily designed to combat...

On 21 March 2024, the Landesanstalt für Medien Nordrhein-Westfalen (North-Rhine Westphalia media authority), one of the 14 German state media regulators, published a study it had commissioned on the acceptance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in journalism. The study concludes that the majority of people who were questioned are, in principle, open to the use of AI to support the work of journalists. However, based on the results of a number of experiments, the study suggests that, in order to increase acceptance and dispel people’s reservations, transparent regulation is required when...

In March 2024, the state media authorities’ Kommission für Zulassung und Aufsicht (Commission on Licensing and Supervision – ZAK), the main German media regulator with responsibility, inter alia, for regulating national media platforms, issued two noteworthy decisions in relation to the distribution of media content by new media stakeholders. The first decision concerns in-car entertainment systems, which are set to be governed by German media regulations, in particular provisions on public value. The second concerns an infringement of anti-discrimination rules by Google’s...

On 9 February 2024, the Landgericht München I (Munich District Court I) decided that the digital platform TikTok had failed to take its legal obligation to negotiate copyright licences seriously. As a result, TikTok can be held liable if users upload copyright-protected films to its platform in contravention of copyright law. Users had uploaded copyright-protected content onto the TikTok platform without holding the necessary exploitation rights, which are managed by the company Nikita Ventures. Nikita Ventures had reported this to TikTok and offered to license the content in return for...

On 12 February 2024, the Federal Government Commissioner for Cultural and Media Affairs (BKM), Claudia Roth, presented a bill on measures to support the German film industry (FFG-E). The bill is designed to reform the German film support system by making it more efficient and transparent while reducing the related administrative burden. The first of the bill’s six sections deals with the structure and organisation of the Filmförderungsanstalt (Federal Film Board – FFA). According to Article 1(1), the FFA, a federal institution established under public law, is a national body...