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On 28th June 2012 the Italian Government adopted Legislative Decree no. 120/2012 amending the Italian AVMS Code (Legislative Decree no. 177/2005, already amended in 2010, when the AVMS Directive was implemented into Italian legislation: see IRIS 2010-2/25 and IRIS 2010-4/31). This Decree has been adopted with the aim of amending some provisions on the protection of minors and trailers of cinematographic works adopted in 2010 at the time of the implementation of the AVMS Directive and which led to some remarks by the European Commission (see IRIS 2011-5/5). With regard to trailers of cinematographic...

The TAR Lazio, Italian administrative court in Rome, has ruled that the broadcaster RAI violates its public service charter by encrypting its free-to-air (FTA) channels and denying “Sky Italia” the ability to carry the RAI channels. The satellite provider had filed a suit with the TAR administrative court challenging a 2009 decision by the Italian communications regulator AGCOM that permitted RAI to encrypt some programming. Rai encrypted some of its content on the sky platform, including football matches. When RAI began encrypting its FTA broadcasts, Sky Italia launched its Digital Key DVB-T decoder...

On 23 March 2012, the Council of State handed down its judgment in the case AGCOM v. Sky Italia. On 13 July 2011, the Lazio Regional Administrative Court (TAR Lazio) annulled AGCOM’s rules on short news reports set out in decision 667/10/CONS insofar as they set at three minutes the maximum duration for such reports, but confirmed the applicability of those rules both to internal and cross-border situations (see IRIS 2012-1/31). AGCOM and the broadcaster Sky Italia appealed the TAR Lazio ruling before the Council of State. Its judgment clarifies the territorial scope of the provisions on short...

On 7 March 2012 the Second Chamber of the Regional Administrative Court of Latium referred to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) for a preliminary ruling on the question as to whether Directive 2010/13/EU (the AVMS Directive) and EU primary law should be interpreted as precluding the asymmetric hourly advertising limits for pay-tv operators provided by Italian law. The so-called Romani Decree, adopted by the Italian Government to implement the AVMS Directive (see IRIS 2010-4/31), includes a number of provisions having no exact match in the AVMS Directive. In particular, Article 38, para. 5, of...

In 2009 Centro Europa 7 complained in Strasbourg that for a period of almost ten years the Italian Government had not allocated it any frequencies for analogue terrestrial television broadcasting, while the company had already obtained a licence for TV broadcasting in 1999. The company submitted that the failure to apply the broadcasting law of 1997, the refusal to enforce the Constitutional Court’s judgments imposing the effective allocation of frequencies for new private TV stations and the duopoly existing in the Italian television market (RAI and Mediaset) were in breach of Article 10...