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The Amtsgericht Potsdam (Potsdam District Court) has ruled in a recently published judgment of 16 April 2015 (Case 37 C 454/13) that flying a drone equipped with a camera over a neighbour’s property violates the neighbour’s privacy rights. This therefore justifies a claim for injunctive relief under Article 1004(1), 2nd sentence of the Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch (Civil Code -BGB) in conjunction with Article 823(1) BGB, and Article 1(1), 1st sentence, in conjunction with Article 2(1) of the Grundgesetz (Basic Law - GG). The plaintiff is the sole owner of a property protected by high hedges, the main...

On 13 April 2016, the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers adopted its Recommendation CM/Rec(2016)4 on the protection of journalism and safety of journalists and other media actors. This is a continuation of the Committee of Ministers’ engagement with the topic, following its adoption of an identically-titled Declaration in 2014 (see IRIS 2014-7/4). The Recommendation’s opening paragraph describes the contemporary reality of attacks, threats and harassment targeting journalists and other media actors across Europe as both “alarming and unacceptable”. This strong language has been prompted...

On 13 April 2016, the Committee of Ministers adopted a Recommendation to its 47 member states encouraging them to periodically prepare national reports evaluating their level of respect for human rights with regard to the Internet, and to share their findings with the Council of Europe. The recommendation aims to help member states to create an enabling environment for Internet freedom and to promote increased compliance with their obligation to respect, protect, and promote human rights on the Internet. The recommendation contains a list of indicators that can be used for measuring the level of...

In a judgment of 29 March 2016, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in Bédat v. Switzerland found that a criminal conviction of a journalist, Arnaud Bédat, for having published documents covered by investigative secrecy in a criminal case is no violation of Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR). The Grand Chamber is of the opinion that the Swiss authorities acted within their margin of appreciation and that recourse to criminal proceedings and the penalty imposed on the journalist did not amount to a disproportionate interference in the exercise...

On 17 February 2016, the 9th Circuit US Court of Appeals ruled that the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which, inter alia, governs freedom of speech, protects the filming of the life story of even an unknown person. The appellant was an Iraq war veteran. The case concerned the film “The Hurt Locker”, which is a war movie that shows the work of a bomb disposal squad in the Iraq war. The appellant claimed that the film’s main protagonist was based on him and sued its director and screenwriter, stating that the film was defamatory and breached his personality rights (“right of publicity”),...