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The Office of Communications (Ofcom), the UK communications regulator, has now made its final decisions in its long-running investigation into the pay-TV market (see IRIS 2009-1: 13/22 and IRIS 2009-8: 14/21). It has made a number of far-reaching decisions. The most important decision is that Sky must offer wholesale standard definition versions of Sky Sports 1 and 2 to other retailers, for example cable, terrestrial and IPTV, in order to secure fair and effective competition. The price for this ‘wholesale must-offer’ is set by Ofcom; Ofcom has set a price of GBP 10.63 for each of the channels,...

The Advertising Standards Authority, the self-regulatory body to which regulation of advertising content is delegated by the UK communications regulator Ofcom, has not upheld 939 complaints about a government advertisement on the effects of climate change. It did not consider the question of whether the advertisement broke the rules prohibiting political advertising, as this is a matter for Ofcom itself, and did uphold in part complaints about associated newspaper advertisements. The television advertisement for the Government’s ‘Act on Co2’ campaign showed a young girl being read a bedtime story...

In 1984 the UK Parliament passed the Video Recordings Act. This statute covered not only videos, but also DVDs and some video games. It provided for them to be classified and age-rated by the British Board of Film Classification and also created a number of criminal offences related to the act of supplying this material without classification or in breach of the classification. Since 1984 this system has been a well-established feature of the UK media landscape. During the preparatory work for the Digital Economy Bill currently before Parliament it was discovered that the classification and labelling...

In October 2007, TV Links, a website, was raided and closed down and its administrator arrested. The site had been set up to offer links to other sites hosting films, TV programmes and music videos. It itself was funded by advertising income. During October 2007, Gloucestershire County Council trading standards raided the premises of the administrator, acting in conjunction with investigators from FACT (The Federation against Copyright Theft) and the Gloucestershire Police. It was alleged that the site facilitated or induced copyright infringement by providing links to illegal material hosted by...

On 2 March 2010, the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) made public its latest reports on Albania, Austria, Estonia and the United Kingdom, adopted in the fourth round of its monitoring of the laws, policies and practices to combat racism in the Member States of the Council of Europe (for commentary on earlier reports, see IRIS 2009-10: 0/109, IRIS 2009-8: 5, IRIS 2009-5: 4, IRIS 2008-4: 6, IRIS 2006-6: 4 and IRIS 2005-7: 3). A number of key recommendations dealing with the (audiovisual) media and/or the Internet can be distilled from relevant sections of these reports. The...