From David Del Valle in Madrid The must-carry obligation traditionally imposed on nation wide terrestrial TV channels to open up their signals to cable and satellite platforms for free distribution is coming to an end in Spain. The new overall TV law (Ley General Audiovisual) frees private TV channels from the must-carry obligation and allows […]

James Murdoch has called on governments to get tough on illegal downloading, which he said was no different from shoplifting. He made the call at the Abu Dhabi Media Summit. Stressing that future growth would come from original content production, he said: “We need enforcement mechanisms and we need governments to play ball. The idea […]

European broadcaster RTL is seeking a relaxation of advertising rules to allow innovations such as sponsors' logos to be shown in the top right-hand corner of television screens, its chief executive Gerhard Zeiler said. Zeiler explained that regulators in all the countries in which it operates are increasingly aware of the financial pain caused to […]

The European Parliament has defied the Commission, voting against an agreement between the EU, the US and other major powers on combating online piracy and threatening to take legal action at the European Court of Justice. The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), which began in Geneva two years ago, is a multilateral trade agreement to establish […]

In the first few months following the adoption of the three-strikes anti-piracy legislation in France, online piracy has increased 3 per cent in the period September to December last year. Instead of stopping, file-sharers are seeking alternatives to bypass the new law. The research also reveals that disconnecting file-sharers will actually hurt the revenues of […]

Plans to suspend the Internet accounts of people who download music illegally are unfair, according to BT’s chief executive, Ian Livingston. Livingston says illegal file-sharers should be fined rather than have their Internet accounts cut off. He and other industry figures have written to the Financial Times urging changes to the Digital Economy Bill. Livingston […]

The UK government has been defeated in the upper parliamentary chamber the House of Lords over measures to tackle Internet piracy. Ministers had been seeking powers to amend copyright law and impose conditions or fees where infringements were taking place. But opposition Conservatives and Liberal Democrats succeeded in removing the measures from the Digital Economy […]

Ed Richards, chief executive of Ofcom, has said that net neutrality will come under regulatory scrutiny this year. He said the scale of deployment of next-generation broadband networks would depend on greater clarity on this issue. The battle lines have already been drawn: The BBC and BT clashed last year over the bandwidth consumed by […]

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's government has approved lower advertising ceilings for pay TV that News Corp's Italian unit says will curtail its growth and that of other networks on Rupert Murdoch's satellite platform. New regulations will gradually limit the maximum amount of advertising per hour of pay television programming, to 12 per cent in […]

Studios have lodged an appeal against the controversial Australian Federal Court verdict that ISP iiNet was not responsible for its subscribers illegal downloading. Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) representing the 34 studios said: “The court found large scale copyright infringements, that iiNet knew they were occurring, that iiNet had the contractual and technical capacity […]