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At the beginning of June the Broadcasting Standards Commission published a revised Code of Guidance on Taste and Decency. Production of a code on standards of taste and decency is a statutory requirement placed upon the Commission by Parliament under sections 107 and 108 of the Broadcasting Act 1996. The first code on standards was published by the former Broadcasting Standards Council in 1989. The Commission has now re-written its code on taste and decency because it believes some current warnings are not straightforward enough. The code points out that programmes can cause particular offence...

A new Telecommunications law has been passed recently in Spain, replacing the 1987 Ley de Ordenación de las Telecomunicaciones (LOT). As expected, it deals only with telecommunication matters, but it nevertheless affects broadcasting to some degree. The LOT defines telecommunications as general interest services, so they are no longer considered to be a public service: only national defence and civil protection services; universal and compulsory telecommunications services (and cable and terrestrial TV) remain within this category. The LOT also deals with competition in this sector; the granting...

To protect individuals against revelation of their identity in certain cases, Section 7a of the Austrian Media Act (Mediengesetzes) provides for compensation as follows: if names, pictures or other information are made public in the media in a way which enables people with no direct knowledge of the background to identify a person who has been the victim of a crime, or who is suspected or has been convicted of a crime, and if this violates that person's legitimate interests, and the public has no overriding interest in publication of the information, then that person is in principle entitled to...

On appeal, Princess Caroline of Monaco has again failed in her action against Burda, the publishers of Bunte, which had published photographs of her without her permission. On 11 March 1998, the Hamburg Court of Appeal (Oberlandesgericht - OLG) dismissed as unfounded an appeal against a judgment given at first instance by the Regional Court (Landesgericht - LG), which declared publication lawful and refused to grant an injunction. The case concerned 23 photographs taken of the princess in her leisure-time, including six with Prince Ernst August of Hannover at a horse show. The Appeal Court found...

On 4 March 1998 the German Federal Parliament (Bundestag) adopted the Victims Compensation Act (Opferanspruchssicherungsgesetz - OASG) in order to provide civil-law compensation for victims of crime (for report on Bill, see IRIS 1997-3: 12). The Act gives legal entitlement to receive damages from a perpetrator of or participant in a crime in respect of sums received from third parties for portrayal in the media. The purpose of the Act is to prevent perpetrators of crimes deriving immoral profits from the commercialisation of their crime in the media, for example in the form of income from film...