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In its groundbreaking judgment of 4 October 2011 the Court of Justice of the European Union has essentially legalized the import, sale and use of foreign satellite television decoder cards. The judgment, which was given in two joined (originally British) cases, concerned decoder cards that provide access to encrypted satellite transmissions from Greece of British Premier League football matches. Foreign decoder cards such as these are widely sold and used in the United Kingdom, both for private viewing and in public houses, because they provide access to televised Premier League football at substantial...

The long-running story of the bid by News Corporation to purchase the whole of BSkyB (see IRIS 2011-2/4, IRIS 2011-3/22 and IRIS 2011-5/25) has reached a surprising conclusion with the withdrawal of the bid as a result of the effect of the UK phone-hacking scandal on the reputation of News International. In March, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport had announced that he intended to accept undertakings from News Corporation as an alternative to referring the bid to the Competition Commission for a full investigation on plurality grounds. The undertakings would have involved Sky...

The Communications Act 2003 prohibits political advertising on television or radio; this includes advertising which attempts to influence public opinion on a matter of public controversy or to promote the interests of a party or a group organised for political ends. An advertisement had been placed on seven radio stations by the Office of the First Minister and the Deputy First Minister in Northern Ireland relating to the Hillsborough Castle Agreement. The Agreement allowed the devolution of policing and justice functions to the Northern Ireland Executive. The advertisement featured the First Minister...

On 13 May 2011, the first-ever decisions on appeals against determinations of The Authority for Television On Demand (ATVOD) to Ofcom were made. The two cases at hand concerned the question of whether two “adult websites” fall within the scope of the Audiovisual Media Services Regulations 2009, as being on-demand programmes (ODPs) comparable to a television programme. ATVOD concluded that both services met the statutory criteria, including that their “principal purpose is the provision of programmes, the form and content of which are comparable to the form and content of programmes normally included...

In the case Mosley v. the United Kingdom the European Court of Human Rights decided that the right of privacy guaranteed by Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights does not require the media to give prior notice of intended publications to those who feature in them. The applicant in this case is Max Rufus Mosley, the former president of the International Automobile Federation. In 2008, the Sunday newspaper News of the World published on its front page an article entitled “F1 Boss Has Sick Nazi Orgy with 5 Hookers”, while several pages inside the newspaper were also devoted...