Search results : 76

In two press releases on 23 March 2011 and 20 April 2011, the European Commission reported on its recent decisions approving Danish financing measures. The first decision concerns the approval of funding for the new public radio channel FM4 using financial resources from the license fee. According to the Commission, this could constitute State aid since the amount of DKK 800,000 is paid out of the budget of the Danish State and favours a single undertaking. However, when the four criteria from the Altmark judgment are met, State measures compensating public service costs do not qualify as State...

The European Commission has finished the preliminary analysis of the measures implementing the Audiovisual Media Services (AVMS) Directive into national law notified by 16 Member States: Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Malta, the Netherlands, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Slovakia and the United Kingdom. Subsequently, the European Commission has sent fact-finding letters to these states inquiring about these implementing measures. The Commission is thus seeking to ensure that all provisions of the AVMS Directive have been correctly transposed into...

On 26 May 2010, an agreement focused on quality and diversity in radio and television was reached between the Danish Government and the political parties Dansk Folkeparti (Danish popular party) and Liberal Alliance on the media policy for the coming four years. The radio and TV legislation shall be amended correspondingly during the parliamentary session 2010/2011. The agreement shall come into force for the period from 1 January 2011 to 31 December 2014. The main features of the agreement are as follows: - The agreement intends to expose the public service radio channel DR (Danmarks Radio) to...

The Swedish website The Pirate Bay offers a service with which users can find and download so-called ‘torrent files’. When using appropriate file-sharing software, these files can be used to download music, films, software, etc., from other users of the same file-sharing software (the so-called ‘peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing’). In April 2009, the four persons behind the operation of The Pirate Bay website were found guilty by a Swedish court of contributory copyright infringement and were sentenced to one year in prison, as well as ordered to pay damages of SEK 30 million. The website has also...

On 24 June 2010, the European Commission issued a set of reasoned opinions to 12 member states (Austria, Cyprus, Estonia, Greece, Finland, Hungary, Lithuania, Luxemburg, Latvia, Poland, Portugal, and Slovenia) requesting that they proceed with updating their national broadcasting legislation in order to bring it into compliance with the Audiovisual Media Service (AVMS) Directive. The Directive, which replaced the Television without Frontiers Directive of 1989 (as amended), was adopted in December 1997 with the intention of bringing the EU’s broadcasting rules up to speed with the digital age. The...