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The provider of the Pornhub website asked the Conseil d'Etat (Council of State) to annul the formal notice addressed to it on 13 December 2021 by the president of the Conseil supérieur de l’audiovisuel (the previous French audiovisual regulator – CSA), which has since been replaced by ARCOM, on the grounds that the CSA had acted outside its remit. Alleging that the company was allowing minors to access pornographic content, the formal notice ordered it to take all necessary measures to comply with Article 227-24 of the Penal Code. According to Article 23 of the Law of 30...

On 7 November 2022, the Kommission für Jugendmedienschutz (Commission for the Protection of Minors in the Media – KJM) announced that it had approved another age verification system, which means there are now 102 KJM-approved age verification systems on the market. The latest system to be approved, known as “FaceAssure”, was devised by Privately SA. Machine learning was used to train it to estimate a person’s age based on their biometric features. In order to mitigate the fact that some young people look older than they really are, the KJM requires the system to...

On 23 September 2022, the House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) Committee, which is responsible for scrutinising the work of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport and its associated public bodies (including the BBC), published the government response to its report Influencer Culture: Lights, camera, inaction? (previously reported on IRIS 2022-7/18). The Committee had found low rates of compliance with advertising regulation and concluded that employment protection had failed to keep up with the growth of online influencer culture, leaving those working in...

In a decision of 8 August 2022 (case no. OVG 11 N 64.18), the Berlin-Brandenburg Oberverwaltungsgericht (Higher Administrative Court – OVG) ruled that reasons must be provided for a decision restricting the time a programme could be broadcast on account of youth protection infringements. The dispute followed an objection by the Medienanstalt Berlin-Brandenburg (Berlin-Brandenburg media authority – mabb) against the television broadcaster ProSieben. ProSieben appealed to the courts against the objection and won. In the latest decision, the OVG Berlin-Brandenburg upheld the first-instance...

On 7 September 2022 (case nos. 13 B 1911/21, 13 B 1912/21 and 13 B 1913/21), the North-Rhine Westphalia Oberverwaltungsgericht (Higher Administrative Court) prohibited the distribution of pornographic content by two Cypriot website providers. It therefore confirmed first-instance rulings issued by the Verwaltungsgericht Düsseldorf (Düsseldorf Administrative Court) on 30 November 2021 (case no. 27 L 1414/20). The importance of protecting minors was the main factor behind the court’s decision. According to the first-instance rulings, the Landesanstalt für Medien Nordrhein-Westfalen...