Search results : 1507

On 16 October 2013, the General Court of the European Union validated the funding mechanism for France Télévisions set up by 2009 legislation reforming the public-sector audiovisual scene to compensate for the abolition of advertising on the public-sector group’s channels after 8 pm. The compensation took the form of an annual budget subsidy and two taxes, one on advertising spots, and the other on electronic communications. In a decision on 20 July 2010, the European Commission found that the State aid in the form of a budget subsidy for France Télévisions was compatible with the requirements...

On 24 June 2013, the consumer protection staff of the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) updated guidelines, which it established for search engine companies (“Companies”) to ensure that consumers can easily distinguish paid search results from natural search results. The FTC issued its initial guidelines in 2002 in order to explain that “failing to clearly and prominently distinguish advertising from natural search results could be a deceptive practice” in violation of Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, which defines a deceptive act as “a material practice that misleads a significant...

Ofcom, the UK communications regulator, rejected on 20 June 2013 a complaint of undue discrimination made by British Telecommunications (BT) about the refusal of British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB) to carry an advertisement for BT’s new sports channels on Sky Sports. The Communications Act 2003, s.319, requires Ofcom to secure that there is no undue discrimination between advertisers, and this is implemented through its Code on the Prevention of Undue Discrimination between Broadcast Advertisers. BSB had refused to carry the advertisement because it does not itself retail the BT channels. It claimed...

In a ruling of 14 August 2013, the Landgericht Köln (Cologne District Court - LG) decided that advertising using a double of a famous person can be inadmissible even if there is no similarity between the facial features and external appearance of the double and the famous person. The famous person may be recognisable thanks to other details that characterise the person concerned. The complaint concerned a TV commercial for the defendant, a furniture store, which included a scene from a TV quiz show in which a presenter wearing glasses and a dark suit had asked a contestant the “all-important question”...

In its decision of 17 July 2013, the Bundesgerichtshof (Federal Supreme Court - BGH) ruled that the copyright protection afforded under the Urheberrechtsgesetz (Copyright Act - UrhG) to books and stories, for example, also applied to literary characters. In the case at hand, the court decided that the children’s character “Pippi Longstocking” created by Astrid Lindgren was copyright protected as a “work of language” in the sense of Article 2(1)(1) UrhG. The combination of external features and specific personality traits justified the protection of a fictional character. The decision was based...