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Excessive demands may not be made of a journalist who requests temporary legal protection in order to obtain information under German press law, according to a decision issued by the Bundesverfassungsgericht (Federal Constitutional Court - BVerfG) on 8 September 2014 (case no. 1 BvR 23/14). The BVerfG based its decision on the fundamental right to effective legal protection, enshrined in Article 19(4) of the Grundgesetz (Basic Law - GG). It ruled that the press can be granted temporary legal protection if the level of public interest and topical relevance of the reporting are high. Limiting temporary...

On 21 October 2014, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) issued a decision in Case C-348/13 (BestWater v. Mebes), following a request for a preliminary ruling from the German Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof). The case arose when a water filtering company’s marketing video was made available on YouTube and a competitor decided to embed this video on their own website. The filtering company brought an action for damages in the German courts over the embedding of their video. The question referred to the CJEU was whether “embedding, within one’s own website, of another person’s...

On 19 September 2014, the Conference of Chairpersons of the Decision-Taking Councils (the Gremienvorsitzendenkonferenz - GVK) of the Land media authorities (Landesmedienanstalten) and the Private Broadcasting and Telemedia Association (Verband Privater Rundfunk und Telemedien e.V - VPRT) announced that, following joint discussions, they had agreed on a set of guidelines on the clear labelling of own-produced scripted reality formats. The purpose of these guidelines is to give viewers a standard level of transparency and information across all broadcasters and formats. Broadcasters are required...

In mid-September 2014, the Federal Government submitted a “report on the measures taken in 2013 to remove telemedia services containing child pornography” in accordance with Article 184b of the Strafgesetzbuch (Criminal Code - StGB) to the German lower House of Parliament (Bundestag)”. In the digital world, images of sexual abuse of children are distributed to a high but unknown number of users worldwide. There is therefore an urgent need to effectively protect the victims of this abuse. With this aim in mind, the Federal Criminal Police Authority (Bundeskriminalamt - BKA), the national body jugendschutz.net,...

In a ruling of 22 September 2014 (case no. 13 K 4674/13), the Verwaltungsgericht Köln (Cologne Administrative Court - VG) upheld a private collector’s right to a copy of a pornographic film. The plaintiff had initially asked the Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien (Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young People - BPjM) for a copy of the classified video film, which was no longer available to buy, “for his own use”. His request was rejected by the BPjM on the grounds that, firstly, the request had not been made within the scope, and for the purposes of the Freedom of Information...