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On 1 March 2010, the Italian Council of Ministers passed an amended draft legislative decree for the implementation of Directive 2007/65/EC on Audiovisual Media Services (AVMSD), to address the recommendations by the relevant Parliamentary Committees on the Government’s earlier version of the bill, presented on 17 December 2009 (see IRIS 2010-2: 1/25). In the context of the consultations on the original bill, several stakeholders had voiced concerns about the purported extension of the rules on audiovisual media services to private blogs and websites publishing user-generated audiovisual content,...

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...

Last Thursday, 18 March 2010, the Spanish Parliament approved the New General Law of Audiovisual Communications. This new Law has been demanded by the audiovisual sector and consumers associations and has been discussed on various occasions in the last six years in the Spanish Parliament before finally being approved. The Law sets out several rules on content and mode of operation for the players in the sector (these rules are already currently applied by broadcasters to a certain extent as, although they were not included in a general law before, they could already be found in several rules and...

On 15 February 2010, the Oberlandesgericht Hamburg (Hamburg Court of Appeal - OLG) decided that looking at Internet sites containing child pornography is a criminal offence under Art. 184b(4) of the Strafgesetzbuch (Criminal Code - StGB). It overturned the first instance ruling and referred the case back to be heard again (case no. 2-27/09 (REV)). In the case concerned, the lower instance court had noted that the defendant had accessed files containing child pornography on the Internet in order to look at them. However, since the defendant had not known that the files would be automatically stored...

Product placement has been authorised in the French-speaking Community of Belgium since 19 December 2009, in compliance with Article 21 of the Coordinated Decree of 26 March 2009 on audiovisual media services. By totally banning product placement in news broadcasts and children’s programmes, the legislator has in fact gone further than is required by the AVMS Directive, but the amendment is significant nonetheless: in all other types of programme, the placement of accessories is authorised, whereas product placement stricto sensu (i.e., in return for payment) is only accepted in cinematographic...