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On 24 November 2009, the European Parliament, at its plenary session in Strasbourg, formally approved the EU’s Telecoms Reform Package, after two years of discussions (see IRIS 2008-10: 4, IRIS 2009-1: 5 and IRIS 2009-6: 5). After the first reading of the legislative proposals failed to lead to adoption, intense negotiations during last spring resulted in an informal political agreement between the Commission, the Parliament and the Council on all three parts of the package: the electronic communications framework directive, the citizen’s rights directive and the establishment of a new Body of...

Can a person filmed using a concealed camera in a television report claim compensation for the prejudice he feels he has suffered because of the infringement of his rights in respect of the use made of his image? That was the question facing the press section of the regional court of Paris. In the case at issue, the spokesperson of a distributor of medicines that was the subject of a documentary on sales of medicines on the Internet, broadcast on France 5, was suing the television channel and the production companies for having infringed his rights in respect of the use made of his image. More...

In a judgment of 2 September 2009, the Landgericht Düsseldorf (Düsseldorf Regional Court) prohibited the television broadcaster RTL from shooting film footage using a hidden camera in the applicant’s doctor’s surgery, thus upholding the injunction issued by the lower court. In the legal dispute concerned, RTL reporters had made sound and picture recordings at a doctor’s surgery, filming a conversation between the doctor and a person whom he assumed to be a patient but who was actually a reporter. They also filmed the reception area and the staircase leading to the surgery. It was claimed that the...

As part of the television programme “Volt”, a report covering the “prescription behaviour” of physicians was transmitted on 22 October 2008 by the Flemish public broadcaster (VRT). For the report, four physicians had been videotaped on a hidden camera during a consultation. The physicians’ faces had been blurred, but their voices had not been changed. The report was also accessible via the website of the television programme. Subsequent to the transmission, the physicians lodged a complaint with the Vlaamse Raad voor de Journalistiek (Flemish Council for Journalism Ethics). First of all, the Council...

On 30 July 2009, the Amsterdam District Court sentenced The Pirate Bay by means of a default judgment to make its websites inaccessible to Internet users in the Netherlands, because The Pirate Bay was found to infringe the intellectual property rights of Dutch rightsholders, represented by the Bescherming Rechten Entertainment Industrie Nederland ((Protection Rights Entertainment Industry Netherlands - BREIN). The Pirate Bay is a website registered in Sweden on which BitTorrents are provided. These torrents enable the exchange of files between computers that are connected to the Internet and which...