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The European Commission has requested Belgium and the UK to implement outstanding provisions of the EU’s Audiovisual Media Services (AVMS) Directive. The AVMS Directive aims at ensuring a single market and legal certainty for Europe’s TV and audiovisual industry. This is done through the creation of a level playing -field for both broadcast and on-demand audiovisual media services across borders, while ensuring cultural diversity, the protection of children and consumers, the safeguarding of media pluralism and combating racial and religious hatred. This Directive is based on the principle of the...

On 19 August 2011, the UK’s Competition Commission (CC) published its provisional findings on the competition situation with regard to the marketing of films in the British pay-TV sector. In its report, the CC establishes that the dominance of BSkyB in the area of pay-TV film rights limits competition between the pay-TV retailers, thus leading to higher prices and less choice for subscribers. An important element for this assessment by the authority is that, owing to its long-standing exclusive arrangements with the six biggest Hollywood studios, BSkyB has a dominant market position with regard...

On 27 July 2011, the UK Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) ruled that two cosmetic advertisements were “misleading”. L’Oreal’s brands, Lancôme and Maybelline, were the object of adverse adjudications because “they could not demonstrate that images of Julia Roberts and Christy Turlington, which had been digitally enhanced, were an accurate representation of the results the products could achieve. As such we judged the ads were misleading.” Whilst the specific matter concerned magazine advertisements, misleading advertising is prohibited likewise under UK advertising rules applying to broadcasts,...

On 28 July 2011, the English High Court ordered BT, the UK’s largest internet service provider, to block access to a site which aggregates a large amount of illegally copied material found on Usenet discussion forums. BT has decided not to appeal the decision, which is likely to provide the basis for a number of other claims in the future. It also supplements the provisions in the Digital Economy Act 2010, which survived a recent legal challenge (see IRIS 2011-6/20). The case was brought by six major film studios and production companies, all members of the Motion Picture Association of America...

The purpose of the international tax credit instituted by the 2009 Budget and embodied in Art. 220 quaterdecies of the General Tax Code is to make it easier to shoot and manufacture in France cinematographic and audiovisual works originated by a non-French producer and containing elements that attach it to the culture, heritage or territory of France. Thus the tax credit is granted to a company that carries out the executive production of a work in France, subject to the company being approved by the national cinematographic centre (Centre National de la Cinématographie - CNC). The credit represents...