NEWS / BROADCASTING: Revision of the Telemedia Act: shaken, not stirred (GERMANY)

Revision of the Telemedia Act: shaken, not stirred

By April of 2005, the drafts for the new regulation of tele-services and media services in Germany are to be available. The Interstate Media Services Contract is to be done away with completely and replaced by a Telemedia Act. It will include data and privacy protection for providers and e-commerce companies. "The term 'telemedia' has been coined, so we have to deal with it," said Georg Bröhl, director of the subdepartment Information Society and Media at the German Ministry of the Economy and Labor, at the telecommunications conference of the industry association Bitkom this Tuesday in Berlin. By doing away with the separation of tele-services and media services, which was difficult to maintain at any rate and led to disputes about mandates between the federal and state governments, the heavily hyped convergence of media is to be taken into account.

The planned Telemedia Act, which will give the federal government competence, is the second step towards a general restructuring of the legal framework of media policy. In the first step last year, legislators gave the states competence for the protection of young people in radio and tele-media in the Interstate Treaty for the Protection of Young People in Media. The federal and state governments agreed to the trade-off of "youth protection for privacy protection" in the course of the restructuring. However, the states retain responsibility for radio in the strictest sense, and hence also for the enforcement of the new Telemedia Act at the state level, stated Harald Hammann of the Department for Radio and Media Law at the State Prosecutor's Office of Rhineland-Palatinate. Hammann felt that the difficulties in delineating between radio and telemedia, on the one hand, and telemedia and telecommunications, on the other, would probably remain. (Craig Morris) / (jk/c't)

SOURCE: http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/print/54246 (with lots of further links in German)

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Chris Schuepp
Young People's Media Network - Coordinator
c/o ecmc (European Centre for Media Competence)
Bergstrasse 8 / 10th floor
D-45770 Marl
Germany

 

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