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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...

On 13 February 2024, the Landgericht Berlin II (Berlin District Court II) granted a federal government application for injunctive relief against the publication of an AI-generated video in which Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz appeared to discuss measures to ban the Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany – AfD) political party. The case concerned two essentially identical videos produced by the same organisation but distributed via different social networks. In the AI-generated videos, Olaf Scholz talks about the possible banning of the AfD and urges German citizens to...

On 2 February 2024, the Oberlandesgericht München (Munich Appeal Court) upheld RTL Deutschland’s claim that DVB-C cable retransmission rights for free TV programmes can be licensed separately from IPTV or OTT distribution rights. RTL Deutschland licensed its DVB-C cable retransmission rights separately from IPTV or OTT distribution rights. According to an RTL press release issued on 21 February 2024, NetCologne, a regional telecommunications service provider and cable network operator in the Cologne/Bonn region, had claimed that this practice was unlawful. In a legal dispute dating...