Search results : 978

After a complaint filed on 10 December 2013, California authorities arrested a California resident for running a “revenge porn” website, charging him with 31 felony counts that include conspiracy, identity theft, and extortion. According to the complaint, the website, which is no longer operational, let people anonymously post explicit pictures of others and charged $350 to remove pictures. While the arrest comes on the heels of a first-in-the-nation law that California enacted to combat “revenge porn” websites the defendant was not charged under the newly-enacted law because it is geared towards...

On 22 April 2014 the state Duma (parliament) adopted the amendments to the law “On information, information technologies and on protection of information” (see also IRIS 2014-3/40). They were signed into law on 5 May 2014. The new legislation forces owners of open access websites and web pages (now labeled as “bloggers”) visited by more than 3,000 users daily to register with the public authorities. It also imposes additional responsibility on them for verifying the accuracy and reliability of posted information, following election law, respecting reputation and privacy, restraint from using curse...

On 16 May 2014, the Preliminary Court of Midden-Nederland ruled that RTL, a Dutch broadcaster, was prohibited from broadcasting images recorded by means of a hidden camera in the television programme ‘Project P’. The images were recorded at a secondary school in order to bring attention to the bullying of a schoolchild. The Court held that the interest of RTL in informing the public about abuses in society, such as bullying, did not outweigh the right to privacy of the fellow schoolchildren and the teachers of the school. RTL produces a television programme called ‘Project P’. In this programme...

In a decision of 8 April 2014, the Oberlandesgericht Köln (Cologne Appeal Court - OLG) ruled that Google can be obliged to delete content in the form of “autocomplete” suggestions that breach personality rights (case no. 15 U 199/11). In the proceedings, a public limited company and its chairman had lodged a claim against the search engine operator after Google had suggested the terms “Scientology” and “Betrug” (the German word for “fraud”) when the chairman’s name was entered. The chairman claimed that this infringed his personality rights, while his company believed that it damaged its commercial...

On 17 April 2014, the wife of a former prime minister failed at the Constitutional Court with a complaint about a cartoon published in the magazine Reflex. The wife of the former prime minister demanded an apology for the illustration in the comic book Green Raoul, which she deemed inappropriate. The Constitutional Court rejected the request with reference to freedom of expression. The wife of the former prime minister previously announced that she is ready to go to the European Court of Human Rights. According to the constitutional complaint, justice failed to protect the rights of pregnant women...