Cukurova Holding’s owner Mehmet Emin Karamehmet has received an additional 500 million Turkish Lira tax fine for his cable and satellite TV broadcasting company DigiTurk. This latest event in a long-running saga brings his total tax obligations in Turkey to 2.2 billion liras, say local reports. The latest claim covers a period from 2005-2009 and […]
Teléfonos de México’s (Telmex) request for a licence to offer pay-TV service has been rejected by the Mexican government, which cited deficiencies in the quality of the company’s connections with rivals’ networks. The Secretaría de Comunicaciones y Transportes (Communications and Transportation Ministry) said that Telmex hadn’t provided required information to the government. The ministry will […]
French President Nicolas Sarkozy opened the first e-G8 forum in Paris declaring that “[the Internet] you represent is not a parallel universe where legal and moral rules and more generally all the basic rules that govern society in democratic countries do not apply.” France has been in the vanguard of trying to protect rights holder […]
David Abraham, the chief executive of Channel 4, has called on Ofcom to investigate the control of audience data after warning that valuable information is being “controlled and commercially exploited” by others. Abraham said that audience data is the “new oil, or soil, of television” and that as viewing behaviour becomes increasingly measurable through interactivity […]
As part of a drive to boost creativity and innovation, the European Commission (EC) has adopted a comprehensive strategy to revamp the legal framework in which IPR operate. Its objective is to enable inventors, creators, users and consumers to adapt to the new circumstances and to enhance new business opportunities. The new rules aim to […]
Sky Italia says Current isn’t being singled out – it is requesting that all channels whose deals are up for renewal settle for lower fees, its chief executive said, as he rejected claims that Sky had dropped Current TV for political reasons. “Every deal we are going into, we are trying to cut rates. The […]
The National Association of Broadcasters has come out in support of legislation aimed specifically at controlling ‘pirate’ and ‘rogue’ websites, especially those registered outside the US, which traffic in unauthorised distribution of licensed content or counterfeit goods. The legislation from Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy and his committee would allow the Justice Department to file […]
Jeremy Hunt, the UK Culture Secretary, whose Department for Culture, Media, Olympics and Sport is assessing the News Corp bid for the 61 per cent of BSkyB it doesn’t already own, has admitted that the process is taking longer than anticipated to conclude. He told the Broadcasting Press Guild that the Department was going to […]
Former US Vice President Al Gore’s Current TV cable network has claimed Rupert Murdoch’s Italian satellite TV company dropped the network in Italy because it hired liberal politics news anchor Keith Olbermann. News Corp, which controls Sky Italia, has said its dispute with Current Italy had nothing to with politics and is purely about money. […]
Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, has said that proposals from the US and British governments to block Internet access to file-sharing websites would endanger freedom of speech and push both countries toward being more like China. “I would be very, very careful if I were a government about arbitrarily [implementing] simple solutions to complex problems,” […]