Search results : 342

The Council of Ministers approved on 11 November 2011 a Royal Decree clearing the Regulation developing the Spanish General Law on Audiovisual Communications (see IRIS 2010-4/21) regarding television advertising and the provision of legal certainty to the sector. The new Regulation develops some elements of the abovementioned Spanish Law on TV advertising that were not sufficiently clear in the General Law, such as those related to the calculation of the 12 minutes of permitted advertising per hour or the maximum number of advertising breaks per programme. The new Regulation clearly defines the...

On 27 September 2011, the Provincial Court of Vizcaya sentenced the website managers of the web pages Fenixp2p and MP3-es to imprisonment and payment of a fine for the infringement of intellectual property rights. It is the first case that has convicted administrators of websites that actively link to content protected under copyright law in Spain. In common with many similar sites, FenixP2P.com and MP3-es.com carried no content of their own, but instead linked to other locations where content was hosted. Breaking a long run of operators being acquitted for similar activities, the Spanish court...

On 22 July 2009 the European Commission submitted a request to the Court of Justice to declare Spain to be in violation of the Television without Frontiers Directive (Directive 89/552/EEC). The Commission argued that the Kingdom of Spain has failed to fulfill its obligation under Article 3(2) of the TWF Directive to ensure within the framework of its legislation that television broadcasters under their jurisdiction comply with the provisions of the Directive. The Commission referred in particular to the incorrect and overly narrow interpretation by the Spanish authorities of the concept of ‘advertising...

A new Catalan Cinema Law was approved by the Catalonian Government on January 2010 and came into force on 7 July 2010 (see IRIS 2009-5/21) This new Cinema Law has been particularly controversial, as its main innovation is the obligation to dub and subtitle foreign movies into the Catalan language (a co-official language in the Autonomous Community of Catalonia alongside Spanish). By virtue of Article 18, when more than one copy of a dubbed or subtitled movie is released in Catalonia, distribution companies are obliged to distribute fifty per cent of the analogue copies in the Catalan version. The...

On 5 October 2011, the Commercial Court No. 7 in Barcelona ruled in favour of a Valencian regional television channel in a lawsuit filed against Mediapro, the company that owes Spanish football broadcasting rights, for breaching several contracts signed between the two parties. The decision states that Mediapro is responsible for the damages caused by its breach of contract. As a result, Televisión Valenciana (TVV) is entitled to compensation. Under the relevant contracts, TVV owned the right to broadcast, until the end of the 2010-2011 season, a football game for each date of the Liga, two Spanish...