A Spanish court has ruled that celebrities exposed by the country's tabloid press must accept that they're a legitimate news target for the cameras, whether they happen to be wearing a bikini top or not.

According to El Mundo, the Civil Division of the High Court has overturned a 2003 decision in favour of former Miss España María Reyes, whose assets were flashed across the cover of magazine Interviú.

At the time the publication was ordered to pay Reyes €30,000 for the Ibiza exposé, but its appeal successfully argued that the photographs were of public interest and newsworthy for those media belonging to the tabloid, entertainment or showbusiness genres.

The court noted that enjoying the beach without a bikini top is an accepted social custom and that consequently a photographic image of someone captured in this state without their permission cannot be illegal, nor would it be if they were captured otherwise dressed on the beach or photographed in everyday clothing.

In summary, the court declared that the legality or illegality of press photographs does not depend on whether the subject is wearing a bikini top or not.

This landmark ruling is a severe blow for Spain's enormous population of celebs who live off nothing more than their media exposure, but believe they have the right to decide when it suits them to avail themselves of popular press coverage.

Germany's highest court has upheld a ban on three words appearing in sequence because of their link to the Horst Wessel song, a former anthem of the Nazi party.

The court in Karlsruhe rejected an appeal by a member of a far-right party who was fined €1,750 for wearing a T-shirt carrying the words die Fahnen hoch or the flags on high.

A Greek quiz show that encouraged contestants to divulge intimate details of their private lives in return for prizes has been ordered off the air on taste and decency grounds.

The Moment of Truth, made by Rupert Murdoch's daughter Elisabeth's production company, has been banned completely by the Greek regulator after a series of excruciating on-screen confessions. Antenna, the commercial channel that screens it, is considering taking the case to the European commission, accusing the regulator of extreme censorship.

The format has been sold to 24 countries, and it is currently in production in Spain and France. It ran on Sky for two series in the UK. On the show, contestants can win six-figure sums for giving truthful answers to a series of embarrassing questions while hooked up to a lie detector.

The show debuted in October and has become one of Greece's most popular series, winning a 30% audience share in its 11pm slot.

The Greek National Council for Radio and Television had repeatedly warned Antenna, the country's largest commercial broadcaster, about the contents of the show and has twice imposed fines totalling $230,000 (£195,000).

The ban followed three episodes featuring risqué exchanges between contestants and quizmaster. In the first, broadcast in February, a mother was asked – in the presence of her daughter and son-in-law – if she wished her daughter had married a richer man. In March, another episode featured a female guest who was asked if she had ever had sex for money, or slept with a man and a woman at the same time. The following month, a male player admitted he had fantasised about his sister's partner.

That proved too much for the TV censor, which chastised Antenna for encouraging members of the public to humiliate themselves for a reward, with no regard for the players' decency and the effects on the social lives of their families.

The show was promptly terminated and the final episode aired earlier this month, provoking a furious response from Antenna, which said the regulator was guilty of extreme censorship.

An Italian court has delayed a case against search giant Google, which could have major ramifications for content providers around the globe.

At the heart of the case is a debate about how much responsibility providers have for the content on their sites.

It centres around a video, posted on Google Italy, which showed a teenager with Down's Syndrome being bullied.

The case was delayed because an interpreter was ill and will now be resumed in September.

Four Google executives are accused of defamation and violating privacy, under Italian law, for allowing the video to be posted online.

Prosecutors argue that Google did not have adequate content filters or enough staff to monitor content.

A German court has ruled that schoolchildren may rate their teachers online, rejecting the case of a woman who argued that her rights had been infringed by pupils who gave her bad grades on a popular website.

The rights of the woman, a teacher of German and religion, had not been compromised by the ratings and pupils had a right to offer an opinion as long as they did not hinder her professionally, the German Federal Court of Justice found.

The opinions expressed are neither abusive nor insulting, the court said in a statement: The plaintiff did not show that she had been harmed in any specific way.

Collection, storage, and transmission of ratings by online portal spickmich.de was therefore permissible without the assent of the plaintiff, the court ruled.

The ruling will boost controversial websites such as Rate My Teacher in the UK, which operates a similar system.

This year more than one in ten teachers said that they were bullied by pupils and colleagues through text messages, e-mails and social networking sites.

A quarter of UK teachers said that they had had offensive messages posted about them on social networking sites such as Facebook or Rate My Teacher, according to the survey by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers and the Teacher Support Network.

The lawyers of the German teacher, who had been given a rating of 4.3 for her German teaching, argued that the site was unfair and inaccurate because users rate subjects anonymously. This could lead to multiple ratings by the same person, as well as ratings by people with no connection to the school or teacher in question, they argued.

But the court said that in this case, the right of the individual to express an opinion outweighed these concerns.

Bus drivers with religious convictions, who are employed by Helsingin Bussiliikenne, which operates public bus lines in Helsinki will not be taking any action against an international advertising campaign by the non-religious.

Last week, the prospect that they would have to drive buses with advertisements proclaiming There probably is no god. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life, caused a stir among religious drivers, some of whom had threatened to refuse to drive vehicles with the slogan.

The campaign, sponsored by the Freethinkers Association, and the Finnish Humanist Association is part of the international atheist bus campaign.

The leader of resistance by religious bus drivers, Tapani Mäkinen, said that there were few legal ways for Christian and Muslim drivers to refuse to drive buses with the offending ads and still keep their jobs. The drivers asked their shop steward if it was possible to refuse to drive a certain vehicle out of religious conviction. We hit a dead end. Something like that would be seen as a refusal to work, Mäkinen said.

The atheist ads will be on the buses for two weeks. The advertising campaign will also take place in Turku and Tampere, although the wording of the slogan was toned down a bit.

Christian groups are also planning to take a public stand on the question of the existence of God. Two Lutheran congregations in Helsinki, as well as the Finnish Bible Institute are planning a summer event in August with a slogan: God exists. Don’t worry, enjoy life.
Timo Junkkaala, the executive director of the Finnish Bible Institute insists, however, that organisers came up with name before the international atheist bus campaign was launched.

A Earlier this month GamePolitics reported that German Interior Ministers were seeking a complete ban on the production and sale of violent video games within Germany.

Although the Bundestag has not yet acted on the ministers' ban request, an online video game retailer based in Austria claims that the German state of Bavaria has moved to blocked access by German customers.

VideoGamesZone.de reports that the Bavarian Commission for the Protection of Children Against Media Abuse filed a lawsuit to shut down Austrian online retailer Gameware.at. [GamePolitics suggest that this is being done by the newly created internet blocking law but it sounds more like the 'indexing' method that bans German companies from marketing or advertising the product].

Company spokesman Chris Veber told VGZ: We've called our lawyer and are appealing, of course... this is violating the freedom of expression and wrong specifications from the [German ratings body], since we are not sending our products out to minors and do not have videos showing violence at [our site]. We are not breaking any Austrian laws...

The economic consequence of the indexing of Gameware.at is that no one would be able to find us on Google, the advertisements would be gone, no magazine would be allowed to mention our name...

Veber conceded that violent games are big sellers for his company and that 80% of his customers live in Germany.

A German MP from the ruling Social Democrats (SDP) has resigned from the party and joined the Pirate Party in response to new censorship laws in the country.

Jörg Tauss was one of only four members of the Bundestag to vote against the censorship legislation. The German laws, unlike those from other totalitarian regimes like Iran, China and Australia, are focused strictly on child pornography, however there are deep concerns in Germany that once implemented the laws could easily be extended to other areas.

While Tauss has become the first member of the Pirate Party in the German Parliament, he has indicated that he won’t be standing for re-election in September. Germany’s election system makes it difficult for stand alone candidates to be elected or re-elected.

A portion of the Italian secret internet censorship list has been posted on wikileaks.org.

This list presents 287 internet sites currently censored by Italy. This quasi-voluntary system, which was introduced under the banner of fighting child pornography relies on a secret, unaccountable list of site names. Because of this lack of transparency, and the power of the censorship system, the blacklist is of intense interest.

The majority of sites on the Italian list seem to be unrelated to child pornography. While some do appear to relate to the images of teenagers, the vast majority of sites are related to what appears to be legal young-adult pornography. Some sites are unrelated to any type of pornography.

These include businesses or institutes outside of Italy, and discussion forums, used by tens of thousands for all purposes. While it is possible these sites had an unauthorized user briefly upload an underage image or link to such an image, the continued presence of the sites on this list likely reflects the lack of any censorship notification or appeal mechanism.

The German parliament passed a bill Thursday imposing censorship of pornographic websites justified by the need to protect children.

The legislation was proposed by a coalition of German social democratic and conservative parties. It requires the country's federal criminal investigators to maintain a list of websites accused of containing child pornography and to distribute it to German ISPs, which will then be required to block queries to those websites with a stop sign.

In its present form, the bill requires only that ISPs display the warning sign. Users will still be able to access the flagged websites, but they will be advised that viewing child pornography is illegal. German legislators also bowed to criticism by adding a sunset clause that will see the law expire in three years.

There's almost certainly no God. [reported as Close to certainty, there is no God] With this slogan on the side of their bus, German atheists have been touring through Germany for three weeks, on a trip that has stirred up controversy and debate.

On Thursday, the atheist bus stopped off in Berlin, bringing the promotional tour throughout the country to a close.

In the German capital, the atheist bus tour fell on fertile ground. The London-style red double-decker was crammed full on Thursday, which was perhaps not surprising as approximately two-thirds of Berliners say they are not religious in any way.

Campaign spokesman Peder Ibelher explained why the campaign slogan, Close to certainty, there is no God, lacked a fiery anti-religious sting: This reflects the scientific approach that Germans have to the question of God. You can never say there is no God because there's no evidence for a God and no evidence against it.

A second bus, emblazoned with the slogan, And what if there is God? was right behind the atheist bus at every stop it made.

Among the anti-demonstrators was Axel Nehlsen, a protestant pastor who fundamentally disagrees with the atheists: All ideologies have been thrown away in the last decades and even capitalism is in a crisis now. So I think the Christian faith and the relationship to God and Jesus Christ can give everybody a foundation which is not depending on the current mainstream. And we want to challenge them to find out whether God exists.

Official church leaders in Germany have reacted calmly to the atheist bus, arguing that the activists would actually do the Christian faith a service, by enlivening the public debate about God.

Public transport authorities were less comfortable. In contrast to London, where the slogan appeared on city buses and in the Underground (tube) network, German cities banned the slogan from being advertised. They claimed it would inflame religious feelings.

Peder Ibelher, however, said the campaign was a huge success despite the public advertisement ban: The campaign went really well. We've heard that up to a quarter of the German population noticed our slogan. Maybe it's come out even better in the end with no public advertisement - with the bus just going around from city to city in Germany.

Ireland’s new Broadcasting Bill is expected to be passed by the Irish parliament, the Dáil, later today.

A new super-regulator established along the lines of the UK’s Ofcom and known as The Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI) will replace the RTÉ Authority, and the governing body of TG4, as well as the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland (BCI) and the Broadcasting Complaints Commission (BCC).

There will also be a tightening of broadcasting codes, including the advertising of food stuffs to children.

Last week, Sweden announced that it will disband its Statens Biografbyra censorship board altogether in 2011, 100 years after it was founded. From then on, there will be no restrictions on films released in the country unless they break laws governing such areas as child pornography, although the current age-related rating system will remain.

John Beyer of Mediawatch, the successor to Mary Whitehouse's National Viewers' and Listeners' Association, suggested the BBFC's increasingly light touch in recent years made it not so very different from the new Swedish organisation.

The BBFC no longer 'cuts bits out of films' but provides information about films so that members of the public can make up their own minds about what films they want to see or avoid. The Swedish government evidently want to do just what the BBFC has been doing for some years.

In our opinion the BBFC has become far too lax in what it permits for public exhibition and there has been a gradual shift in what they regard as acceptable so that what would have been regarded as 18 a few years ago is now thought suitable for 15. Their 12A certificate allows very young children, accompanied by an adult, to see some very unsuitable material. The board is pretty much unaccountable and for this reason we supported Julian Brazier's private member's bill last year to make the board accountable to parliament through the select committee system.

Comment: Letting the public make up their own minds

From Dan

"The BBFC no longer 'cuts bits out of films' but provides information about films so that members of the public can make up their own minds about what films they want to see or avoid."

Oh how disgraceful and disgusting! How dare the BBFC let members of the public make up their own minds about films they want to see?

Instead they should have John Beyer and Mediawatch UK making up the public's minds for them.

"Their 12A certificate allows very young children, accompanied by an adult, to see some very unsuitable material."

Oh yeah very young children, accompanied by an adult are being allowed to see explicit violence and hardcore porn! Yeah right!

"The board is pretty much unaccountable."

Pretty much unaccountable to Mediawatch UK and Tory middle middle England who believe they know what is and is not good for the public to see. Let's keep it that way!

Politicians from the nation's two major parties agreed on a final version of Germany's internet filtering bill Monday night, reports Gigaom. The bill could now be approved as soon as Thursday.

Free-speech advocates, Internet activists and Internet service providers have opposed the bill and suggest denial-of-service blocking does not work, with concerns this will take the government into areas of greater Internet censorship.

Under the measure, German federal police would compile a block list containing the domain names and IP addresses of websites hosting and linking to child porn. ISPs would be required to block the sites and redirect all traffic to a site or sites hosting a warning message in the form of a red Stop sign.

An official online petition against the bill has received more than 130,000 signatures and counting, plus the number of citizens trying to sign the petition has reportedly brought down the parliament’s Web infrastructure several times.

ISPs had voiced opposition to provisions in the measure that would mandate that they log each attempt to access a blocked site and share the information with law enforcement organizations. This would include anyone who might accidentally click on the wrong link, even if it was placed by a hacker. In turn, an innocent person could be labeled a pedophile, and with that possibility in mind, lawmakers removed that portion of the bill requiring ISP logs.

After nearly 100 years, Sweden may finally be poised to shutter the agency charged with censoring films deemed unsuitable for adult audiences.

The planned dissolution of Sweden’s film censorship agency, Statens biografbyrå (SBB), means that Swedish filmgoers aged 15 and older will no longer have to wonder whether or not a particular film has been censored by the state.

The proposal comes as a part of the findings of a government-mandated inquiry into how to update laws governing how films are reviewed, including how to protect young people from media featuring content seen as harmful to minors.

Since 1911, SBB has been charged with reviewing and, when necessary, censoring films. But technological changes as well as a proliferation of other outlets through which films can be viewed means that the agency only reviews a small portion of the content viewed by Swedish cinephiles.

According to current regulations, SBB can censor any film which depicts events in such a manner and in such a context as to have a brutalizing effect and is judged to have explicit or protracted scenes of severe violence to people or animals or depicts sexual violence or coercion or presents children in pornographic situations.

But the agency rarely exercises its power to cut scenes from films, or orders a film banned altogether.

The Local reported in 2007 that the board last cut scenes from a non-pornographic film in 1996, when three scenes were removed from Martin Scorcese's gangster movie Casino, despite protests from the director.

As an alternative, the inquiry proposed that a new media agency be created to replace both the SBB and the Swedish Media Council (Mediarådet), another state agency aimed at reducing the risk of harmful effects on children and young people of certain media content.

The new agency won’t be so judicial, but rather a contact body with information; to help children learn to understand the media, to have a more critical eye, said inquiry head Marianne Eliason to the Dagens Nyheter (DN) newspaper.

The new agency will also assume SBB’s current duties of managing the four levels of age restrictions for films in Sweden (all ages, 7+, 11+, 15+). Moreover, the new agency will no longer employ censors, but instead will include a team of film examiners tasked with determining the appropriate age restriction for a given film, rather than censoring it.

The inquiry also proposes that film companies be allowed to submit their films for review by the new agency voluntarily. However, films not reviewed by the new agency would automatically be classified as only appropriate for viewers 15 years and older.

Since implementation of the inquiry’s findings will likely require a change to Sweden’s constitution, Eliason doesn’t expect the new system to be in place before 2011.

Comment: But...

On the surface this might sound good but...

This is what they'll scrap:

Compulsory examination

The content of films or pre-recorded video recordings (videograms) shall be examined and approved by the National Board of Film Censors prior to showing at a public gathering or entertainment.

This will remain:

Swedish Code of Statutes (SFS): SFS 1990:894, Published on September 4, 1990
Chapter 16: On Crimes against Public Order

Section 10 b Any person who in a still picture or in a film, in a video recording, a television programme or other moving pictures depicts sexual violence or coercion with the intention that the picture or pictures be spread or spreads such depiction, shall be convicted, except that the criminal act in view of the circumstances be defensible, and sentenced for unlawful depiction of violence to a fine or imprisonment for a maximum period of two years. And the same shall apply to any person who in moving pictures explicitly or extensively depicts extreme violence towards humans or animals with the intention that the pictures be spread or spreads such depiction.
A person who negligently distributes material as referred to in subsection (1) shall, if such distribution takes place in the course of business or otherwise for gain, be liable to the penalty laid down in subsection (1)

Artist's impression of censorial gallery managers

Posters depicting the stylised genitals of 100 artists have been deemed unsuitable by the Venice Biennale gallery authorities.

Jacques Charlier, a Belgian artist, had wanted to show the visual puns, each with a written clue, inviting viewers to guess who owned what.

The authorities rejected the proposal for fear of offending Venetians and the artists represented.

But Charlier used the rejection as stimulus for a massive publicity drive. A boat emblazoned with the words 100 Sexes D'Artistes has been touring the canals of Venice, docking occasionally to allow the public to board and view correspondence between Charlier, the Biennale director, Daniel Birnbaum, and other authorities.

The French Human Rights League supported the artist, saying he had been censored. But the censorship did not prevent Charlier and his team from handing out booklets containing all 100 drawings, and offering free T-shirts to those who could identify at least 20 artists.

Charlier's posters will tour several European cities this summer.

Gamed Politics is reporting that Germany's 16 Interior Ministers seem to have banded together to ask the Bundestag to ban the production and distribution of violent video games.

Moreover, the ministers hope to see this accomplished before Germany's new elections take place on September 27th.

The move comes during a scheduled conference of interior ministers. School shootings, in particular the March 11th rampage committed by a 17-year-old in Winnenden, were prominently mentioned in relation to the group's demand for a ban on violent games.

If passed, such a move would affect not only German game consumers, but German game developers such as Crytek (Far Cry, Crysis). Under the proposed law, Crytek would apparently need to outsource development of violent games or even relocate its operations to another country.

German Family Minister Ursula von der Leyen is struggling to pass a new law designed to combat online child pornography in the face of widespread concern over censorship and freedom of speech. The law would use blacklists to bar access to specific sites.

Von der Leyen proposes setting up an office in the Federal Office of Criminal Investigation to determine whether or not sites should be blocked. Lists would then be sent to Internet service providers, which would be responsible for blocking the content.

The list would contain an estimated 1,500 sites. Von der Leyen says blocking them could derail 450,000 hits a day. The personal data and ISP addresses of people trying to access blocked sites would not be captured.

The bill would be the first time in the history of post-war Germany that police would be granted the authority to determine what can and cannot be shown by the mass media. Right now, the legislation doesn't call for any supervision of the proposed agency.

Opponents of the bill say the proposal threatens the freedom of the Internet, and that blocks on Web sites and other censorship measures are easily bypassed and ineffective. Thus far, almost 100,000 people have signed a petition against the measure, twice what the law requires to force a discussion in German parliament. One fear is that the list, once established, could be used to censor other sites. Opponents also argue that blocking Web sites is ineffective against child pornographers, who tend to distribute material through e-mail, peer-to-peer systems and chatrooms, all of which are much harder to police.

Social Democratic parliamentarian Gregor Amann said on Wednesday that he doubted the bill would succeed due to concerns over its threats to personal freedoms: Since I know many of my colleagues in the SPD share my opinion on this question, at this point I would say that this bill will either not pass in this legislative period or will be dramatically changed.

The EU is poised to appoint a super-regulatory body that will bring together all 27 national regulators, including Ofcom in the UK, and enforce wide-ranging reforms to the industry.

The establishment of the Body of European Regulators in Electronic Communications (BEREC) would bring national regulators together in an attempt to further integrate the European market and become the main advisory body to the Commission, the body that proposes legislation.

The creation of a European telecoms regulator was pushed by EU commissioner Viviane Reding, who continues to campaign for lower data roaming rates around Europe.

Malcolm Harbour, West Midlands MEP and vice president of the European Parliament’s science and technology unit, was involved in proposals for the package and told Mobile that aside from issues about internet access, the rest of the reforms had already been agreed on in theory.

The Norwegian parliament has voted overwhelmingly to remove the blasphemy paragraph from a raft of new legislation.

It was replaced with an additional paragraph on racism.

Only the Christian People’s Party wanted blasphemy to be formally criminalised, as a symbolic law.