Search results : 978

On 8 October 2010, the Landgericht Hamburg (Hamburg regional court - LG), in a legal dispute over the distribution of two music tracks via an Internet file-sharing network, ordered the defendant to pay two music publishers EUR 15 per track in compensation. The court decided that the defendant had culpably and illegally infringed the music publishers’ copyright (reproduction right and right to make available to the public) by copying the music tracks without permission and uploading them to a file-sharing network. The court’s assessment of the level of compensation due is particularly significant....

On 15 November 2010 the participants in the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) negotiations announced that they had resolved the few issues that remained outstanding after the final round of negotiations in Tokyo and had finalised the text of the Agreement. A “legal scrub” of the text is planned for a technical meeting held in Sydney from 30 November to the 3 or 4 December 2010. Following this, the proposed Agreement will be ready for submission to the participants’ respective authorities to undergo the necessary domestic processes. In the meantime, the European Parliament has reversed...

The European Court of Human Rights has delivered a judgment in an interesting case with a peculiar mix of issues related to freedom of expression, academic research, medical data, privacy protection and access to official documents. The defendant state is Sweden, a country very familiar with the principle and practice of access to official documents. The right of access to official documents has a history of more than two hundred years in Sweden and is considered one of the cornerstones of Swedish democracy. The case shows how access to official documents, including research documents containing...

The Slovenian Ministry of Culture has prepared the new Zakon o medijih (Media Law) and released it for public discussion on 28 July 2010. The discussion, which ended on 20 September 2010, was quite challenging and caused a mass movement of Slovenian musicians and journalists. Slovenian journalists raised their voices in spring this year because they were not satisfied with the current regulation of Slovenian media because, in their view, it does not protect the freedom and autonomy of journalists to a satisfactory extent. They noticed that the interests of profit and the market would no longer...

The Consiliul Naţional al Audiovizualului (National Council for Electronic Media - CNA) on 16 and 21 September 2010 fined two commercial Romanian TV stations and issued a public warning to a third one due to breaches of the audiovisual law when covering the preventive arrest of the Romanian tycoon Sorin Ovidiu Vîntu, who was accused of several illegal financial operations and who was arrested in September 2010. A fine of RON 10,000 (EUR 2,350) was imposed on Realitatea TV, a fine of RON 5,000 (EUR 1,175) on Antena 3, and B1 TV received a public warning because the broadcasters did not ensure impartiality...