Rich Fiscus
2 Dec 2007 1:12
On Thursday the European Parliament passed the Audiovisual Directive, which addresses issues of regulating video transmissions in a way that's consistent throughout the European Union.
Besides standardizing laws across national borders, the "Audiovisual Media Services Without Frontiers Directive" is intended to establish a unified set of rules that will apply whether video is being transmitted as a traditional over the air (OTA) signal, an IPTV stream across the internet, or anything in between the two extremes.
Several advertising issues are covered by the directive, which mandates that it must be clear when product placement is taking place, but as with the previous rules product placement in children's programming is completely off limits. Hourly advertising limits remain unchanged at 12 minutes, but daily limts are now gone.
One item that wasn't changed is the method to determine what copyright laws in the case of broadcasts from one country to another. In this case the laws in the country the broadcast originates in would apply. This provision may be particularly important as webcasting becomes more popular.
Source: The Register